Every October UCF celebrates Diversity Week. This year’s
dates are October 15 – 19, and the theme is A New Day Dawns. University-wide
departments and groups champion the breadth and culture within the UCF
community, and work to increase acceptance and inclusion for everyone at UCF
and the surrounding communities.
One of the fantastic things about UCF is the wide range of
cultures and ethnicities of our students, staff, and faculty. We come from all
over. We’re just as proud of where we are from as we are of where we are now
and where we will be heading in future.
UCF Libraries will be offering a full slate of Diversity
Week activities. To learn about the upcoming events visit: guides.ucf.edu/diversityweek
Join the UCF Libraries as we celebrate diverse voices and
subjects with these suggestions. Click on the link below to see the full list,
descriptions, and catalog links for the featured UCF Celebrates Diversity
titles suggested by UCF Library employees. These 16 books plus many more are
also on display on the 2nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library next to the
bank of two elevators.
And thank you to every Knight who works to help others feel
accepted and included at UCF!
Before We Visit the Goddess
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Sweeping across the twentieth century, from the countryside of Bengal, India,
to the streets of Houston, Texas, Before We Visit the Goddess takes
readers on an extraordinary journey through the lives of three unforgettable
women: Sabitri, Bela, and Tara. As the young daughter of a poor rural baker,
Sabitri yearns to get an education, but schooling is impossible on the meager
profits from her mother’s sweetshop. When a powerful local woman takes Sabitri
under her wing, her generous offer soon proves dangerous after Sabitri makes a
single, unforgiveable misstep. Years later, Sabitri’s own daughter, Bela,
haunted by her mother’s choices, flees to America with her political refugee
lover—but the world she finds is vastly different from her dreams. As the
marriage crumbles and Bela decides to forge her own path, she unwittingly
teaches her little girl, Tara, indelible lessons about freedom and loyalty that
will take a lifetime to unravel.
Suggested by
Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services
Between the
World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American
history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son,
Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation s
history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of race,
a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black
women and men bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today,
threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to
inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all
honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Beautifully
woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally
charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past,
bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way
forward.
Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research
& Information Services
Black Protest
and the Great Migration: a brief history with documents by Eric Arnesen
During World War I, as many as half a million southern African Americans
permanently left the South to create new homes and lives in the urban North,
and hundreds of thousands more would follow in the 1920s. This dramatic
transformation in the lives of many black Americans involved more than
geography: the increasingly visible “New Negro” and the intensification of
grassroots black activism in the South as well as the North were the
manifestations of a new challenge to racial subordination. Eric Arnesen’s
unique collection of articles from a variety of northern, southern, black, and
white newspapers, magazines, and books explores the “Great Migration,” focusing
on the economic, social, and political conditions of the Jim Crow South, the
meanings of race in general — and on labor in particular — in the urban North,
the grassroots movements of social protest that flourished in the war years,
and the postwar “racial counterrevolution.”
Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research
& Information Services
Call Me American
by Abdi Nor Iftin
The incredible true story of a boy living in war-torn Somalia who escapes to
America–first by way of the movies; years later, through a miraculous green
card.
Suggested by Katie Kirwan, Acquisitions
& Collections
Flesh and Bone and Water:
a novel by Luiza
Sauma
In deeply affecting prose, debut novelist Luiza Sauma transports readers to a
dramatic place where natural wonder and human desire collide. Cutting across
race and class, time and place, from London to Rio to the dense humidity of the
Amazon, Flesh and Bone and Water straddles two worlds with haunting
meditations on race, sex, and power in a deftly plotted coming-of-age story
about the nature of identity, the vicissitudes of memory, and how both can bend
to protect us from the truth.
Suggested by Megan Haught,
Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services
Funny in Farsi
by Firoozeh Dumas
Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s
wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer
who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and
later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never
fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of
American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and
Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered
a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming
part of a one-couple melting pot.
Suggested by Cindy Dancel,
Research & Information Services
Invisible: how
young women with serious health issues navigate work, relationships, and the
pressure to seem just fine by Michele Lent Hirsch
Lent Hirsch weaves her own harrowing experiences together with stories
from other women, perspectives from sociologists on structural inequality, and
insights from neuroscientists on misogyny in health research. She shows how
health issues and disabilities amplify what women in general already confront:
warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and
mistrust of their own bodies. By shining a light on this hidden demographic,
Lent Hirsch explores the challenges that all women face.
Suggested by Megan Haught,
Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services
It All Falls
Down by Sheena Kamal
The brilliant, fearless, deeply flawed Nora Watts—introduced in the atmospheric
thriller The Lost Ones—finds deadly trouble as she searches for the truth
about her late father in this immersive thriller that moves from the hazy
Canadian Pacific Northwest to the gritty, hollowed streets of Detroit.
Suggested
by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections
Lady Cop Makes
Trouble by Amy Stewart
In 1915, lady cops were not expected to chase down fugitives on the
streets of New York City. But Constance Kopp never did what anyone expected. Based
on the Kopp sisters’ real-life adventures, Girl Waits with Gun introduced the
sensational lives of Constance Kopp and her sisters to an army of enthusiastic
readers. This second installment, also ripped from the headlines, takes us
farther into the riveting story of a woman who defied expectations, forged her
own path, and tackled crime along the way.
Suggested by Sara Duff,
Acquisitions & Collections
Not Here by Hieu
Minh Nguyen
Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating
home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma,
family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen’s poems ache
with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope
for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.
Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections
The Art of Being
Normal by Lisa Williamson
An uplifting story about two teenagers set in the modern day in the United
Kingdom. The author was inspired to write this novel after working in England’s
national health service, in a department dedicated to helping teens who are
questioning their gender identity.
Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research
& Information Services
The Diversity
Index: the alarming truth about diversity in corporate America and what can be
done about it by Susan E. Reed
Based on award-winning journalist Susan E. Reed’s groundbreaking study
of Fortune 100 companies, The Diversity Index considers the historical
reasons we went wrong, taking a close look at the “Plans for
Progress” protocol developed in 1961, which defined the steps of
affirmative action. It was initially considered a failure for not providing
immediate results. This book analyzes the long-term, widespread effectiveness
of the plan, and reveals the stories behind the few companies that have made a
difference, breaking down the 10 simple steps you can take at your own
organization to fully develop integration, keep it growing, and empower your
employees to develop new products and markets.
Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research
& Information Services
The Promised
Land: the great black migration and how it changed America by Nicholas
Lemann
A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative
history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban
North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is
also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and
local levels.
Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research
& Information Services
The Way You Make
Me Feel by Maurene Goo
Clara Shin lives for pranks and disruption. When she takes one joke too
far, her dad sentences her to a summer working on his food truck, the KoBra,
alongside her uptight classmate Rose Carver. Not the carefree summer Clara had
imagined. But maybe Rose isn’t so bad. Maybe the boy named Hamlet (yes, Hamlet)
crushing on her is pretty cute. Maybe Clara actually feels invested in her
dad’s business. What if taking this summer seriously means that Clara has to
leave her old self behind? With Maurene Goo’s signature warmth and
humor, The Way You Make Me Feel is a relatable story of falling in
love and finding yourself in the places you’d never thought to look.
Suggested by Sara Duff,
Acquisitions & Collections
When They Call
You a Terrorist: a black lives matter memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and
Asha Bandele
When They Call You a Terrorist is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha
bandele’s reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival,
strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that
declares innocent Black life expendable.
Suggested by Katie Kirwan, Acquisitions
& Collections
White kids: growing up with privilege in
a racially divided America by Margaret
A. Hagerman
Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what
they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White
Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic,
complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches
beyond white parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and
includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer
groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the
kids themselves. By interviewing kids who are growing up in different
racial contexts—from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from
politically progressive to conservative—this important book documents key
differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And
by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to
which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and
reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.
Suggested by
Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services