2025: Bonus: Literary or cultural criticism that is anti-imperialist, anti-carceral, antiracist, and/or decolonial

Book recommendations/suggestions for the Read, Seed, Water, Feed 2025 book challenge. Find your next book!

Digital illustration in cool light gray, black, golden yellow, and warm reddish-brown with white text that reads Read, Reflect, feed imagination, collective action.

read, seed, water, feed book challenge - about prompt support posts

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All prompt support posts can be found at https://water.ghost.io/bookchallenge/. Click on "about prompt support posts" below to learn more about the posts.

about prompt support posts

All of the prompt support posts (those that begin with "2025: Book written by...", for example) are organized similar to each other.

Each of these posts was created to support the Read, Seed, Water Feed book challenge on Storygraph that I am hosting. They were also created to support learning outside of the university, collective educational efforts, finding new authors to read, finding books, and more.

For each book challenge prompt, I will share the following sections:

  • one or more slides with books I have read or am currently reading that I recommend for the prompt
  • a list of additional books from my TBR (to-be-read) list for the prompt
  • a text listing of the books that I shared in the slides

I might share one or more of the following in addition, depending on capacity and other factors:

  • other supportive text as appropriate, such as countries included
  • some quotes, notes, and/or reflections about one or more of the books
  • links to other posts on the site where I discuss the books or prompt in more detail

I did many things to minimize hierarchy within these posts, and there will still be some things that might feel odd, such as split galleries of slides, which was a choice made to address current limitations in how the galleries work.

If interested, find bingo cards, more background on the prompts, and other reflections, on the Reading Challenge page and if on Storygraph, join the challenge.

Mostly, my goal for prompt support posts is to share books for each prompt, as suggestions and as examples. This section will be first on every post and may be skipped.

Thank you for reading.

Books I've read that I recommend for this prompt.

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To open a larger image, click on the image in the gallery/grid to open into a slide show/carousel. Carousel mode is used to magnify the images and provide a different way of interacting with them.
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Low visibility: Alt text is included for each image in the gallery/grid. It is not included when the image is opened in carousel mode.

As a list, books I've read or am currently reading that I recommend for this prompt:

Nonfiction

Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020) by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Belonging: A Culture of Place (2004) by bell hooks

Black Skin, White Masks (1952) by Frantz Fanon

Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1981) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Orientalism (1978) by Edward W. Said

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994) by bell hooks

The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (2021) by Erica R. Edwards


Get any/all of these books wherever you get your books.

Please support libraries however you can. Find out many ways to get involved in supporting libraries at Libraries for the People.

Please consider purchasing books when they are available from Workshops 4 Gaza's bookstore: Colonizing Kashmir (2023) by Hafsa Kanjwal. When I share books that are available for purchase there at the time of posting, I will list them here after the link.

📚🌱 Books I was reading when I completed this post: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) by Omar El Akkad, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) by Malcolm X, Too Soon (2025) by Betty Shamieh, Africa Is Not A Country (2022) by Dipo Faloyin, Colonizing Kashmir (2023) by Hafsa Kanjwal, Angels with Dirty Faces (2016) Walidah Imarisha, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935) by W.E.B. Du Bois, Original Sins (2025) by Eve L. Ewing.

Thank you for reading


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