Fall 2023: Sarah Jaquette Ray
Lesley University selects Sarah Jaquette Ray's A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet as this year's common read. This book aims to guide younger generations through the uncertainties of climate change, helping them work through feelings of despair while still taking action against climate change and enjoying the planet.
Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray is a professor and chair of environmental studies at California Polytechnic, Humboldt. She has a BA in Religious Studies, an MA in American Studies, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy. Ray is also a certified mindfulness facilitator through the UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center and has published in the LA Times, Scientific American, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Edge Effects, KCET, and Zocalo Public Square.
Members of the Lesley community can access the entire book here.
Past CLAS Reads Authors
Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli delivered a virtual presentation on her book, "Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions," which emphasizes the stark reality faced by children fleeing terror back home in Central America as they attempt to cross the border into the United States (Photo by Diego Berruecos Gatopardo).
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Nicole R. Fleetwood, writer, curator, and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, gave a Zoom presentation at Lesley in the fall of 2021 on "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (Photo by Sara Bennett).
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore, Professor of American History at Harvard University, gave a Zoom presentation at Lesley in the fall of 2020 on her book, that year's CLAS Reads selection, "This America: The Case for the Nation" (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University).
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer, indigenous woman and environmentalist author and professor, visited Lesley in the fall of 2019 to discuss her book, the CLAS Reads selection for that year, "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants."
Why We Write
- Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli, Fall 2022
- Racism in America by Annette Gordon Reed, a collection of essays which includes an excerpt from Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Fall 2021
- This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore, Fall 2020
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Fall 2019
- Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen, Fall 2018
- Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice by Bell Hooks, Fall 2017
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Fall 2016
- Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home by Anita Hill, Fall 2015
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Fall 2014