The National Book Foundation announced the third and final reading list for its Literature for Justice program, with books by Dionne Brand, Assata Shakur, and Albert Woodfox making the cut.
The foundation describes the program as “a nationwide, book-based campaign that seeks to contextualize and humanize the experiences of incarcerated people in the United States.”
This is the third year the foundation is releasing a recommended reading list. The selections include Brand’s Ossuaries, Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography, and Woodfox’s Solitary, co-written with Leslie George. Woodfox’s account of four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Kirkus’ review called it an “astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life.”
The other books on the list are Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration; Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California; Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, and Kelly Lytle Hernández’s City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965.
The books were selected by a committee of authors including Susan Burton, Natalie Diaz, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Mariame Kaba, and Piper Kerman.
The foundation’s executive director, Lisa Lucas, said the program “has been an inspiring addition to the foundation’s work.”
“Sharing the reading lists and the work of thought leaders in the carceral space has expanded the narrative of how books can spark dialogue and contribute to national conversations,” Lucas said. “We are proud to share another year of Literature for Justice reading as the world’s attention turns to mass incarceration and its systemic roots.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
