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Biography and Memoir November 2025 |
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Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist
by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
An intimate and captivating exploration of Lin-Manuel Miranda's artistic journey, revealing how the creator of the Broadway musicals Hamilton and In the Heights found his unique voice through bold collaborations, redefining the world of musical theater. How did Lin-Manuel Miranda, the sweet, sensitive son of Puerto Rican parents from an immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, rise to become the preeminent musical storyteller of the 21st century?
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| Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age by Joy HarjoFormer United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s latest book is equal parts memoir and inspirational guide addressed to young Native women. Accordingly, her story is imbued with lyricism, spirituality, and a call to embrace one’s creativity even in the face of the pain, despair, and injustice that many young Indigenous people frequently encounter. For another inspiring memoir that incorporates ethnic identity and creativity, try Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu. |
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| Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth MacyAuthor Beth Macy tells her life story framed within a recent visit to her hardscrabble Midwestern hometown. Although Macy’s childhood was marked by trauma, she remembers Urbana, Ohio, as a place where neighbors had each other’s backs, a situation since compromised by declining opportunities, opioid addiction, and social polarization. Try this next: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild. |
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Last Rites
by Ozzy Osbourne
In 2018, at the age of sixty-nine, Ozzy Osbourne was on a triumphant farewell tour, playing to sold-out arenas and rave reviews all around the world. Then: disaster. In a matter of just a few weeks, he went from being hospitalized with a finger infection to having to abandon his tour - and all public life - as he faced near-total paralysis from the neck down. Last Rites is the shocking, bitterly hilarious, never-before-told story of Ozzy's descent into hell. Along the way, he reflects on his extraordinary life and career, including his marriage to wife Sharon, as well as his reflections on what it took for him to get back onstage for the triumphant Back to the Beginning concert, streamed around the world, where Ozzy reunited with his Black Sabbath bandmates for the final time.
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Focus on: Native American Heritage Month
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| Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie DiazMojave poet Natalie Diaz’s second volume of poetry draws details from her own life as an Indigenous American and spotlights themes and sentiments rooted in the Indigenous experience. Diaz employs sensual images to invoke American imperialism, Indigenous protest, assimilation, and desire, the latter of which she explores in numerous love poems that “buzz with erotic energy” (Booklist). For fans of: the socially aware poetry of Ada Limón. |
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Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land
by Toni Jensen
Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she's had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of Indigenous women, on Indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.
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| Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity by Leah MyersLeah Myers, a Native American writer of mixed ethnicity, writes about embracing her Jamestown S’Klallam heritage as the last member of her family's bloodline using Pacific Northwest Native tradition to create a totem pole of her female ancestors in the form of spirit animals. For another memoir about family history complicated by multiracial identities, read We Take Our Cities with Us by Sorayya Khan. |
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| Soft As Bones by Chyana Marie SageEssayist Chyana Marie Sage relates a harrowing tale of surviving severe poverty and sexual abuse at the hands of her drug-dealing father, a Woodland Cree tribe member from Alberta. As Sage entered adulthood and found therapy and writing, she gradually began to heal from her past and rescue a sense of hope and identity from the Canadian legacy of boarding schools, forced integration, and intergenerational trauma. “Readers will be as inspired as they are horrified” (Publishers Weekly). |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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