This season, we’re headlining Testing Education: A Teacher’s Memoir by Kathy Greeley. This book is publishing at a time when Thrive Act legislation to end the high-stakes components of MCAS as a high school requirement is in the Massachusetts state legislature. Testing Education gives us an inside look at the impact of education reform from a teacher’s point of view. Based on a teaching career ranging nearly forty years, Greeley details how schools went from learning communities infused with excitement, intellectual stimulation, and joy to sterile spaces of stress, intimidation, and fear. In this ultimately hopeful memoir, Greeley asks us to learn from the past to reimagine the future of public education.
New Bright Leaf regional titles include Conifers of the New England–Acadian Forest by Steve Keating, which explores how conifers influenced the course of human history and Trail Running Southern Vermont by Ben Kimball, which includes detailed profiles and maps of 51 of the best trail-running sites in the region.
Juniper Prize Winners releasing this season include, Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare by Michelle Ephraim, Fine Dreams, a novel by Linda N. Masi, short story collection The Long Swim by Terese Svoboda, and poetry collections Chamber after Chamber by Saara Myrene Raappana and Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng.
Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer by Cathy Stanton brings us a hybrid memoir and history lesson from an anthropologist who gets involved with saving her local co-op in Western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.
Barry M. Andrews explores the spiritual inner-world of Henry David Thoreau in The Gospel According to This Moment, revealing how an idiosyncratic and unconventional religious faith was central to Thoreau’s many-faceted life—a dimension that has been largely unexamined.
