Real Lit Reads Ordinary Girls! Register now!

Posted on by Johanna Jacobsen Kiciman

Real Lit[erature] reads books about social justice is open to anyone affiliated with UW: students, faculty, staff!

Advertisement for Real Lit book club. All information on the image also available in blog. Images include a book cover with title (Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz), and the photo of the author.SIGN UP HERE!

Build community, reduce isolation and enhance campus education by joining a peer-based book club! The UW Tacoma Library, in collaboration with the Center for Equity and Inclusion, is pleased to announce that its award-winning social justice book club, Real Lit[erature], will meet remotely Spring Quarter 2022!

The goals of Real Lit have always been to create a greater awareness and discussion of the experiences that are being had by our students, staff, and community members. By interacting with narratives that reflect different experiences, it has provided opportunities to dialogue with peers about shared and disparate experiences.

Students, Faculty, and Staff are welcome to join. We strive to be an actively anti-racist space and spend the first session crafting and reviewing community agreements.

We are reading Jaquira Díaz‘ Ordinary Girls!

Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. With a story reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz delivers a memoir that reads as electrically as a novel.-Description from the author’s website.

To register for Spring Quarter 2022: SIGN UP HERE!

Free books are given to UW Tacoma students first, on a first come, first serve basis. Los libros también están disponibles en español.

Real Lit meets Thursdays 12:30-1:30 via Zoom.