2025 NEW SPEAKER BOOKS

A 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist and former Wall Street Journal writer exhaustively examines his family’s legacy of post-enslavement trauma and resilience, in this riveting memoir—a soulful, shocking, and spellbinding read

This dazzling YA cli-fi written in prose and verse will speak to any reader struggling with the state of our world and how to understand their place in it. Told in gripping prose interspersed with poems from Juli’s writing journal, this genre-bending novel explores themes of immigration, climate justice, grief, and the power of communities.

While society often assigns the label “knucklehead” to kids with attitude problems, this brilliant and electric poetry collection by spoken word poet and hip-hop educator Tony Keith Jr. subverts that narrow way of thinking and empathizes with young people who are misunderstood and unheard.

Love, Rita is a brave and beautiful homage that not only celebrates the special, complex bond of sisterhood but also reveals what it is to live, and die, as a Black woman in America.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is a masterpiece of comedic fiction that asks big questions about art and performance, friendship and community, and the importance of timing in jokes and in life.