Biography and Memoir February 2026 |
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Homeschooled: A New York Times Bestselling Memoir and Read with Jenna Pick
by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were 'stifling his creativity.' Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. [So] when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
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Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
by Belle Burden
It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was--someone nicknamed Belle the Good--gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
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Winter: The Story of a Season
by Val McDermid
In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season's ever-evolving community-based traditions. In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa. Recalling in parallel memories from her own childhood-of skating over frozen lakes and carving a "neep" (rutabaga) for Halloween to being taken to see her first real Christmas tree in the town square-McDermid offers a wise and enchanting meditation on winter and its ever-changing, sometimes ephemeral, traditions. A hygge-filled journey through winter nights, McDermid reminds us that it is a time of rest, retreat and creativity, for scribbling in notebooks and settling in beside the fire. A treat for the hunkering-down, post-holiday reading season, Winter is a charming and cozy celebration of the year's idle months from one of Scotland's best-loved writers.
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Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution
by Amy Coney Barrett
From Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a glimpse of her journey to the Court and an account of her approach to the Constitution. Since her confirmation hearing, Americans have peppered [her] with questions. How has she adjusted to the Court? What is it like to be a Supreme Court justice with school-age children? Do the justices get along? What does her normal day look like? How does the Court get its cases? How does it decide them? How does she decide? In [this book], Justice Barrett answers these questions and more. She lays out her role and daily life as a justice, touching on everything from her deliberation process to dealing with media scrutiny, ... and explains her approach to interpreting its text.
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107 Days
by Kamala Harris
Your Secret Service code name is Pioneer. You are the first woman in history to be elected vice president of the United States. On July 21, 2024, your running mate, Joe Biden, announces that he will not be seeking reelection. The presidential election will occur on November 5, 2024. You have 107 days. Written with candor, a unique perspective, and the pace of a page-turning novel, 107 Days takes you inside the race for the presidency as no one has ever done before.
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Focus on: Black History Month
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Fearless and free : a memoir
by Josephine Baker
This memoir chronicles the life of Josephine Baker, the groundbreaking dancer, singer, spy, and Civil Rights activist, from her rise to fame in 1920s Paris to her daring role in World War II and her activism during the U.S. Civil Rights movement.
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How we fight for our lives : a memoir
by Saeed Jones
The co-host of BuzzFeed’s AM to DM, award-winning poet and author of Prelude to Bruise documents his coming-of-age as a young, gay, black man in an American South at a crossroads of sex, race and power.
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Punch me up to the gods
by Brian Broome
Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in.
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How to Say Babylon
by Safiya Sinclair
Whiting Award-winning poet Safiya Sinclair (Cannibal) recounts her flight from her strict Rastafarian upbringing in this evocative Read with Jenna Book Club Pick. For fans of: Educated by Tara Westover.
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Born Bright: A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America
by C. Nicole Mason
Standing on the stage, I felt exposed and like an intruder. In these professional settings, my personal experiences with hunger, poverty, and episodic homelessness often go undetected. I had worked hard to learn the rules and disguise my beginning in life . . Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful, but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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