"You may recognize Diane Guerrero’s name from Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, but her memoir is about the tragedy that struck her in her childhood. When she was just 14 year old, she came home to discover that her parents and brother had been arrested and were being deported back to Columbia. Diane got to stay in the US because she was born here. At a time when immigrants are living in more fear than ever, Guerrero’s book is a must-read."

"You may recognize Diane Guerrero’s name from Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, but her memoir is about the tragedy that struck her in her childhood. When she was just 14 year old, she came home to discover that her parents and brother had been arrested and were being deported back to Columbia. Diane got to stay in the US because she was born here. At a time when immigrants are living in more fear than ever, Guerrero’s book is a must-read."

"I have a few north stars that I point my children toward—shining examples of confident living. Alicia Keys is one of them. For decades I have been lit up, beckoned, awakened by the way she shows up in every part of her life: her womanhood, her artistry, her activism, her motherhood. Alicia’s freeing memoir More Myself is right on time, as more and more of us decide once and for all that we are ready to live our one fleeting life on our own terms."

"Paul Monette’s memoir is a devastating account of his encounter with a disease that would kill him. It is so intimate and personal that I often felt I was reading someone’s diary and was ashamed to be committing such a gross invasion of another person’s privacy. Paul Monette was not a careless man. He wanted us to know and remember what AIDS did to him. He succeeded more than he could ever have realized. Books about what it means to be human have no expiration date."

"Natalie Kusz’s often-overlooked but astonishing memoir follows the story of her family, who jumped in a car in California in 1969 and moved to Alaska to homestead off the land near Fairbanks, where temperatures in the winter regular drop to 40 below. Kusz, who is 6 at the time, is attacked (and almost killed) by a sled dog, but the most compelling parts of the book are her poetic, unflinching reflections on everything from daughterhood to motherhood to what it means to build your own home—literally, out of scrap lumber and visqueen."

"I found this book interesting, uncomfortably informative, addictive and necessary. “Looking for Palestine” is a memoir/coming-of-age by the young Najla Said, an actress, writer and daughter of the brilliant Edward Said (a Columbia professor and prominent advocate of Palestine independence), and Mariam Said (artist, writer and activist). I’ve seen Najla’s play of the same name, but her book took me even further into this young New Yorker’s quest to make some sense of all of her worlds. If your goal is to be immersed and moved, this is it."