Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (on sale 9/8): Rankine brilliantly examines personal interactions, microaggressions, comments between friends, the question of whether friendships can really exist across racial lines, our choice of hair color, what violence really looks like, and so much more. Rankine gives us work to do, personal, public, soul- wrenching work, but reading this book - part memoir, part essays, all poetry - illuminates a path toward honesty and real affirmation. It is an unpaved, thorny, messy, painful, and uncomfortable path, but it is the only way forward. - Linda

Never Look Back by Lilliam Rivera (on sale 9/15): Take the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, place it in the Bronx in 2020, add the post-traumatic stress of having survived two catastrophic hurricanes in Puerto Rico and an imaginary friend/demon who takes toxic love to a whole new level, and you enter the world of Rivera’s new book. Prepare, however, to encounter both the best of literary traditions and the richness of that retelling steeped in the folktales of Afro-Caribbean myth with some solid feminist twists to remind young women who, ultimately, will save them. There is something in this for every young adult! - Linda

Dear Justyce by Nic Stone (on sale 9/29): Read all the non-fiction about the school-to-prison pipeline. But to feel the confusion, self-doubt, crushing anger, and debilitating pain of what it means to be constantly told that you are not enough, read Dear Justyce. We met Quan in Dear Martin, but here we come to know the unrelenting racism that narrows his choices until the thin line he walks leads to incarceration. Hope lives in these pages as well, in believing in people we have been told to discard. Through her beautiful, powerful writing, Stone grants you access to Quan's world; open your heart and destroy this pipeline. - Linda