“Read, read, read. Read everything… and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!
You'll absorb it. Then write. ”
― William Faulkner
Whether a chap-book of poetry or an empowering memoir, Brittany is always in search of new reads to add to the stack of books at her bedside. Keep up with this page for a peek at the texts that she explores throughout the year(s).
* = read partway
2023
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddartha Mukherjee
My Brilliant Friend — Neapolitan Novels Quartet #1, Elena Ferrante
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell
Fundamentals of Qualitative Research by Kakali Bhattacharya
The Understanding by Design Guide to Advanced Concepts in Creating and Reviewing Units, Wiggins & McTighe
The Understanding By Design Guide: Creating High Quality Units, Wiggins & McTighe
Essential Questions, Wiggins & McTighe
Assessing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning, Clark McKown
Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom, Tomlinson & Moon
The Trauma-Sensitive Classroom, Patricia Jennings
Trauma-Sensitive Schools for the Adolescent Years, Susan E. Craig
Multicultural Education: Issues and Practice, Bankes & Banks
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World*, Paris & Alim
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Bruce Perry
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Andrew Solomon
Preventing Bullying in Schools, Catherine Bradshaw
Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, Christie Tate
Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer
Spare, Prince Harry
Black Chalk*, Christopher J. Yates
How It Feels to Float, Helena Fox
How to Do The Work, Dr. Nicole LePara
With the Fire On High, Elizabeth Acevedo
The Fault In Our Stars, John Green
Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
Mindfulness in the Secondary Classroom, Patricia Broderick
Mindfulness in the PreK-5 Classroom, Patricia Jennings
Social-Emotional Learning Every Day, Meena Srinivasan
Social-Emotional Learning From the Start, Sara Rimm-Kaufman
Echo Mountain, Lauren Wolk
All The Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive, Rainesford Stauffer
Ark, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus
Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve, Stanley Rosenberg
X+Y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, Eugenia Chen
Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom, Patricia Jennings
Unmasking Autism, Devon Price
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency, Chen Chen
Letters from Max, Sarah Ruhl
What Doesn't Kill You, Tessa Miller
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Edit Your Life, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
How to Not Hate Your Husband After Kids, Jancee Dunn
Being Heumann, Judy Heumann
Disability Visibility, Alice Wong
The Beauty of Dusk, Frank Bruni
Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy
That's How the Light Gets In, Susan Rako
ACE, Angela Chen
Loveless, Alice Oseman
Galatea, Madeline Miller
In Search of Us, Ava Dellaira
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, Robert Pirsig
2022
Ava, Carole Maso
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot, Mikki Kendall
Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion, Dr. Wendy Suzuki w/ Billie Fitzpatrick
The Paris Library, Janet Skeslien Charles
Dear Memory, Victoria Chen
He Said, She Said, Kwame Alexander
The Four Pivots: Remagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, Shawn Ginwright
Atomic Habits, James Clear
Come As You Are, Emily Nagoski
Piecing Me Together, Renee Watson
An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way in a World That Expects Exceptional, Rainesord Stauffer
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, Meghan O’Rourke
The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski
What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry
Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, Suleika Jaouad
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, Lori Gottlieb
Crying in H-Mart, Michelle Zauner
The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy, Elizabeth Dutro
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma, Stephanie Foo
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Susan Cain
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Awake with Asashoryu, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
The Paper Palace, Miranda Cowley Heller
Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotion…, Marc Brackett, Ph.D.
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment…, Amir Levine, Ph.D., and Rachel S.F. Heller, M.A.
Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma, Galit Atlas, Ph.D.
Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.
Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman, M.D.
Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong
Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong
Circe, Madeline Miller
Love on the Brain, Ali Hazelwood
Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice, Anne Meyer, David H. Rose, and David Gordon
Children’s Understandings of Death, Paul Harris et al.
The Hurting Kind, Ada Limon
Verity, Colleen Hoover,
The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwarts, M.D.
Love Letters to the Dead, Ava Dellaria
Magnolia Flower, Zora Neale Hurston & Ibram X. Kendi
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, Gabor Mate
It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover
The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang
Transform Your Teaching with Universal Design for Learning, Jennifer L. Pusateri
2021
Writing Alone and With Others, Pat Schneider
Analee, In Real Life, Janelle Milanes
The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo
The Door, Magda Szabo
I Found A Poem Under My Pillow, Tanya Montás Paris
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor
Textured Teaching, Lorena Escoto Germán
The Power of Teaching Vulnerably, David Rockower
Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students, Brittany R. Collins
We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Education Freedom, Bettina L. Love
Death is Stupid, Anastasia Higginbotham
Where Do They Go?, Julia Alvarez
Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky
Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings in Chicago’s Southside, Eve Ewing
1919, Eve Ewing
Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, Mahogany L. Browne
The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles
The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Sáenz
What Doesn’t Kill Her: Women’s Stories of Resilience, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta & Kerry Garvin
Apple, James Rich
Grieving While Black, Breeshia Wade
Comprehension & Collaboration, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Stephanie Harvey
Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain, Zaretta Hammond
Equity-Centered, Trauma-Informed Education, Alex Shevrin Venet
Start Here, Start Now: A Guide to Antibias and Antiracist Work in the School Community, Liz Kleinrock
You Are Your Best Thing, Brene Brown and Tarana Burke
Trust Exercise, Susan Choi
We Take Me Apart, Molly Gaudry
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
Working Hard, Hardly Working, Grace Beverley
This Book is Anti-Racist, Tiffany Jewell
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
The Midnight Library, Matt Haig
She Never Told Me About The Ocean, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller
The Book of Two Ways, Jodi Picoult
Deep Work, Cal Newport
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay
No Hard Feeling, Liz Fosslien and Molly West Duffy
Bring Up The Bodies, Hillary Mantel
Thrive, Arianna Huffington
The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker
The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
Sorcery of Thorns*, Margaret Rogerson
A Promised Land*, Barack Obama
2020
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
Protocols in the Classroom: Tools to Help Students Read, Write, Think & Collaborate, David Allen et al.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
Circe, Madeline Miller
Upstanders: How to Engage Middle School Hearts and Minds with Inquiry, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels & Sara K. Ahmed
Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
A Synthesizing Mind, Howard Gardner
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Untamed, Glennon Doyle
Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson
Beach Read, Emily Henry
The Summer Book, Tove Jansson
The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh
When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron
The House Without Windows, Barbara Newhall Follett
The Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women, Otegha Uwagba
Intimations, Zadie Smith
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi
The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki
The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, Nadine Burke Harris
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk
The Colors of Grief, Jana A. Di Ciacco
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse, Charlie Mackesy
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg
The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss, George A. Bonanno
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg
The Book of Delights, Ross Gay
Quiet, Susan Cain
So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo
Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin
American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins
The Overstory, Richer Powers
We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be, Cornelius Minor
Girls, Social Class, and Literacy: What Teachers Can Do To Make a Difference, Stephanie Jones
Doing What Scientists Do: Children Learn to Investigate Their World, Ellen Doris
2019
We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations that Matter, Celeste Headlee
Managing Your Own Learning, Davis et al.
Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why, Paul Tough
Research Strategies, William Badke
#GIRLBOSS, Sophia Amoruso
Everything In Its Place, Oliver Sacks
The Only Grant-Writing Book You'll Ever Need, Karsh et al.
Present Over Perfect, Shauna Niequist
How to Start, Run & Grow a Successful Nonprofit, Aaron Sanders
The Disability Studies Reader, Lennard J Davis
The Last Best Cure*, Donna Jackson Nakazawa
It's Great to Suck at Something, Karen Ronaldi
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World*, Elaine Scarry
On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks
Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman*, Brooke Hauser
Embarrassment: And the Emotional Underside of Learning, Thomas Newkirk
Being the Change: Lessons and Strategies to Teach Social Comprehension, Sara K Ahmed
Fostering Resilient Learners: Strategies for Creating a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom, Souers & Hall
The Daily Stoic, Holiday & Hanselman
Art as Experience*, John Dewey
Before and After Loss: A Neurologist's Perspective on Loss, Grief, and Our Brain, Lisa M. Shulman
Creating Emotionally Safe Schools, Jane Bluestein
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
Hope and Healing in Urban Education, Shawn Ginwright
Girl, Wash Your Face, Rachel Hollis
Devotions, Mary Oliver
Love at First Like, Hannah Orenstein
By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Agatha Christie
The Poisonwood Bible*, Barbara Kingsolver
Respect, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy, Cris Beam
Not That Kind of Girl*, Lena Dunham
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, Charlie Mackesy
Writers on Earth: New Visions for Our Planet, Liza Cochran, Brittany Collins & Clare McFadden
Responding to Student Writers, Nancy Sommers
Stories of the Courage to Teach, Sam Intrator
Dare to Lead, Brene Brown
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley
2018
The Nest, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free, Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot
The Art and Science of Portraiture, Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot
Becoming, Michelle Obama
Educated, Tara Westover
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
Walking to Listen, Andrew Forsthoefel
Dare to Lead, Brené Brown
The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown
Braving the Wilderness, Brené Brown
An American Childhood, Annie Dillard
The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance
The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr
The Business of Being a Writer, Jane Friedman
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Lee Gutkind
The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens
Feedback that Moves Writers Forward, Patty McGee
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette
The Heart Is An Instrument: Portraits in Journalism, Madeleine Blais
In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi
Invisible, Michele Lent Hirsch
This is Me, Chrissy Metz
Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays…, Peggy Orenstein
Feel Free, Zadie Smith
True Story series from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation
2017
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hunger, Roxane Gay
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy
Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in Social Sciences and History, Mary Jo Maynes
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Being Mortal, Atul Gawande
The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee
Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities, David Sobel
The Abundance, Annie Dillard
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
Option B, Sheryl Sandberg
Wait, What?: And Life’s Other Essential Questions, James E. Ryan
My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
My Own Words, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
S/Z: An Essay, Roland Barthes
Bluets, Maggie Nelson
A House of My Own: Stories From My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan, Jenny Nordberg
Upstream: Selected Essays, Mary Oliver
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research, Margaret D. LeCompte
Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake
2016
Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
The Great Spring, Natalie Goldberg
Wired for Story, Lisa Cron
Story Genius, Lisa Cron
Swing Time, Zadie Smith
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi
I am Malala, Malala Yousafzai
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Woman Hollering Creek, Sandra Cisneros
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri
Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies, Floyd Cheung & Lavina Dhingra
Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
This Bridge Called My Back, Cherrie Moraga
Sula, Toni Morrison
Teaching as Storytelling, Kieran Egan
Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, Kendall Haven
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Woolff
Teacher Man, Frank McCourt
The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown
The Mill on the Floss, George Elliot
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates