Staff Book Recommendations: Marianna Stepniak and Kathleen Pulupa
November is National Literacy Month! To celebrate, we asked our staff to recommend their favorite equity books. Here’s what they said…
By Marianna Stepniak and Kathleen Pulupa
MAEC’s Communications team
Marianna: I’m reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson right now and really loving it. Wilkerson’s brilliant nonfiction writing is rooted in telling stories; I love how easy it is to understand and truly sink into the thoughts of each of her characters. If anyone hasn’t read this book, it is about the Great Migration of Black families from the Southern US to the North and Western USA from the early 1900s-1970. Wilkerson’s book follows three characters on their journeys out of the South. Their true stories are interwoven with historical context, which makes the content more accessible and puts the reader in the moment. I highly recommend this book.
Kathleen: Right now, I am listening on Audible to How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I love how he weaves his personal accounts into the book, 
drawing from his background to get his points across. Another book I’m working on was recommended by a friend: Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The excerpt from the back cover drew me in: “Coates shares with his son and the readers his story of the awakening to the truth about his place 
in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder.”
