Mary’s Pence 2022 Reading List
Data Feminism
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, 2020
Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn’t, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed. * MIT Press Note – Several of Mary’s Pence Grantees use data and research to effect social change, this is an important topic.
The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In-betweens to Remake the World
Kara Oaks, 2021
Oakes draws on the wisdom of women mystics and explores how transitional eras or living in marginalized female identities can be both spiritually challenging and wonderfully freeing, ultimately resulting in a reinvented way of seeing the world and changing it. “Change, after all,” Oakes writes, “always comes from the margins. * Broadleaf Books
Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
adrienne maree brown, 2017
This book is a guide to understanding change, especially within movements and organizations. It explores how to create space for answers and next steps to emerge based on ever-changing environments and inclusive and evolving stakeholders. There is much to uncover in this book, written by movement guru adrienne maree brown, for those with an open mind and a feminist perspective.
Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay
Edited by Gina Messina-Dysert, Jennifer Zobair and Amy Levin, 2015
The 45 essays from women across the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity weave together the stories of women within these in patriarchal system, the reasons they chose to stay, and means of coping with the dissonance. You will find similarities and differences in the experience of the women, but you will always faith and love.
Once I Was You
Maria Hinojosa, 2021
Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations. This honest and heartrending memoir paints a vivid portrait of how we got here and what it means to be a survivor, a feminist, a citizen, and a journalist who owns her voice while striving for the truth. * Simon and Schuster
See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
Valarie Kaur, 2020
Valarie Kaur is a renowned Sikh activist, filmmaker, and civil rights lawyer. She grew up and lives in California with her multigenerational family. In this memoir she shares stories of joy and trauma, and she teaches us how to see others, even others that we find despicable as “a part of me I do not yet know.” A manifesto of revolutionary love – a joyful practice focused on others, our opponents and ourselves.
Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle
Shannen Dee Williams, 2022
Most Catholics don’t know the history of Black women in the Church and in Catholic women religious
congregations. Dee Williams did extensive research, including 150 interviews, to bring together this incredible and accessible story. Black women encountered white supremacy yet fought back to change the Church; it is a story of deep courage and faith. This is an important story for Catholics to understand and acknowledge, this as part of Catholic history.
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Heather McGee, 2022
This book shares a historical, economic, and social perspective on the consequences of our racial divisions. It explores how the notion of a zero-sum game hurts us all, and demonstrates what we can accomplish when we work together across the racial divide. McGhee holds a BA in American Studies from Yale University and a JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them
Sudhir Venkatesh, 2022
Venkatesh, a sociology professor, vividly tells the true stories of a community and it’s struggle with poverty and violence. Gun violence isn’t just a matter of too many guns on the street, but the destructive effect of poverty on communities and families, and a culture that makes violence an acceptable, even expected response. A fascinating read.
Voices from Pejuhutazizi: Dakota Stories and Storytellers
Teresa Peterson and Walter Labatte Jr., 2022
As a child Peterson listened and recorded the stories of her elders in her memory. This is a rich collection of stories from her grandfather, great-great-grandmother and her many aunts and uncles. For Peterson stories impart values, transmit traditions, deliver heroes, reconcile, entertain, tell of place, and provide belonging. This collection delivers. It is a gift to future generations, and to those of us seeking an understanding of Dakota and Indigenous experience.
We Were Made for These Times: 10 Lessons in Moving Through Times of Transition and Challenge
Kaira Jewel Lingo, 2021
Change is stressful, even when it is much desired or anticipated – the unknown can feel scary and threatening. In We Were Made for These Times, the extraordinary mindfulness teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo imparts accessible advice on navigating difficult times of transition, drawing on Buddhist teachings on impermanence to help you establish equanimity and resilience. * Penguin Random House Books
Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador
Jocelyn Viterna, 2013
This book explores the dynamic of women participating in guerrilla war in El Salvador – sharing stories of women’s motivations and experience during the armed conflict, and their struggles and achievements after the war in a still-patriarchal system. This story is important to Mary’s Pence work as many of our ESPERA partner organizations are in El Salvador and the many of the women participating experienced the armed conflict during their lifetimes.
Bonus Books
Prairie Lotus
Linda Sue Park, 2020
Young Adult Fiction telling the story of a Chinese girl and her father settling in the American Heartland in 1880.
Amalia’s Mesoamerican Table Ancient Culinary Traditions with Gourmet Infusions
Amalia Moreno-Damgaard, 2021
Many recipes are naturally vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free; vivid photography for every dish.
First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament
Terry M Wildman, 2021
A translation that captures the simplicity, clarity and beauty of Native storytellers, while true to the original.
Abolition. Feminism. Now.
Angela Y Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E Richie, 2022
History and analysis of the long movement to abolish prisons and defund the police – and its link to feminism and feminist values.