I've got a beautiful, important read to share with you today. Agora, by Gretchen Gales, with imagery by Christine Stoddard, is a phenomenological chapbook of poetry that meanders city streets while sharing the lived experience of agoraphobia. 

Over 15 years ago, Dr. Patricia Leavy first published Method Meets Art, the groundbreaking text that propelled arts-based research into legitimacy around the world. She followed up in 2010 by coining the term “social fiction” to denote fiction that is grounded in scholarly research.

It’s hard to be objective about your own writing. Sometimes you hate a chapter simply because it was a struggle to write. Or you fall in love with it because it reminds you of something personal. Or because you’re proud of a joke. Or a single word. 

Once in a great while, you come across a book so compelling, interesting, and important that you want to share it with everyone. Such is the case with the latest book from author Amy Chavez, entitled The Widow, The Priest and The Octopus Hunter: Discovering a Lost Way of Life on a Secluded Japanese Island, published by one of our favorite publishers, Tuttle. 

Celestial Bodies is one of the most important literary works you’ll ever read and the must-read book of the year. It is gorgeous, nuanced, and full of healing. 

It’s a story of courage, chosen family, and how love—in all aspects—can help us heal and grow. It is a testament to the humanity in our lives, the joys of love, friendship, and laughter, as well as the challenges of trauma and life-changing events. 

Leavy writes light in every corner.

We’re so excited for you to study abroad! Whether you’re going for a semester or year through your institution or with an external program, or direct enrolling at a university overseas, chances are that you will need to write an essay to get in. This essay could be for admission or for scholarship opportunities. 

This is one of those magnificent books. You know...a book that you cannot put down, that time travels you back to a specific place and, while you’re reading it, you’re so engrossed that you look up and are surprised to be in the now? 

In Valiente: Courage and Consequences, Chente Jimenez is a popular high school athlete who bravely navigates his road to self-acceptance and boldly confronts homophobia in the locker room. His road to self-discovery is filled with the impulsive innocence of young love and the cruelty of social media gossip.

Oh, this book. I just finished The Part That Burns, an extraordinary, powerful, must-read memoir by Jeannine Ouellette. The Part That Burns epitomizes what Parul Sehgal, in a recent New Yorker article on trauma, wrote: "trauma becomes but one rung of a ladder. Climb it; what else will you see?" In The Part That Burns, Ouellette does, indeed, climb a ladder from trauma to healing.