Collection: Biography & Memoir

Explore the unbelievable true story of America's glowing girls and their fight for justice in the young readers edition of the New York Times and USA Today bestseller The Radium Girls. This enthralling new edition includes all-new material, including a glossary, timeline, and dozens of bonus photos.

Amid the excitement of the early twentieth century, hundreds of young women spend their days hard at work painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The painters consider themselves lucky--until they start suffering from a mysterious illness. As the corporations try to cover up a shocking secret, these shining girls suddenly find themselves at the center of a deadly scandal.

The Radium Girls: Young Readers Edition tells the unbelievable true story of these incredible women, whose determination to fight back saved countless lives.

This new edition of the national bestseller is perfect for:

• Educators looking for history books for kids ages 9 to 12, nonfiction books for kids, biographies for kids, and real stories around the industrial revolution, chemistry, and science
• Parents, educators, and librarians looking for stories about strong women, inspiring books for girls, childrens books about women in history, and famous women books for girls
• Young readers who want to read one of the most inspiring and shocking narratives of the early 20th century

"...a moving personal story and a useful educational examination of persistent discrimination"--Kirkus Reviews

For readers of Caste, the coming-of-age story of a Dalit individual that illuminates systemic injustice in India and its growing impact on US society

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puruskar, 2020

Born into a "formerly untouchable manual-scavenging family in small-town India," Yashica Dutt was taught from a young age to not appear "Dalit looking." Although prejudice against Dalits, who compose 25% of the population, has been illegal since 1950, caste-ism in India is alive and well. Blending her personal history with extensive research and reporting, Dutt provides an incriminating analysis of caste's influence in India over everything from entertainment to judicial systems and how this discrimination has carried over to US institutions.

Dutt traces how colonial British forces exploited and perpetuated a centuries old caste system, how Gandhi could have been more forceful in combatting prejudice, and the role played by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whom Isabel Wilkerson called "the MLK of India's caste issues" in her book Caste. Alongside her analysis, Dutt interweaves personal stories of learning to speak without a regional accent growing up and desperately using medicinal packs to try to lighten her skin.

Published in India in 2019 to acclaim, this expanded edition includes two new chapters covering how the caste system traveled to the US, its history here, and the continuation of bias by South Asian communities in professional sectors. Amid growing conversations about caste discrimination prompting US institutions including Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of California system, and the NAACP to add caste as a protected category to their policies, Dutt's work sheds essential light on the significant influence caste-ism has across many aspects of US society.

Raw and affecting, Coming Out as Dalit brings a new audience of readers into a crucial conversation about embracing Dalit identity, offering a way to change the way people think about caste in their own communities and beyond.

"Feeding Ghosts reminds us how much the personal is political . . . an audacious, awe-inspiring feat. For me, it was an essential read." --Ling Ma, author of Bliss Montage

An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.

In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.

Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school--and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.

Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother's smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns home to face the history that shaped her family.

Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls's homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

Founder and CEO of consulting firm Change Cadet Dr. Akilah Cadet shares a powerful, incisive look at where we are in the fight to dismantle white supremacy--and what we urgently need to do next​.

This is the story of how I became an unapologetic Black disabled woman in a white world. This book is for people who look and live structurally like me to be valued, seen, heard and perhaps some advice on how to navigate life amongst white supremacy. This book is also for white people who have been "doing the work" since the murder of George Floyd to read my story and be able to clearly see systemic oppression, racism, and ableism. There are books sharing the historical context of white supremacy, providing tips on how to be an ally or anti-racist, and firsthand experiences from Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) which are important. I push the conversation that leads to real change through my story. This book is for the Black woman who is looking to been seen and soft in shared lived experience. It is for the white person who is immersing themselves in the community they want to advocate for. It is for anyone who understands that learning and unlearning is lifelong.

White Supremacy Is All Around arrives as the U.S.'s ongoing racial reckoning has left readers searching for voices they can trust. BIPOC, disabled people, and other intentionally ignored Americans want to feel heard and empowered; organization leaders and allies invested in dismantling white supremacy want a framework for how best to contribute. Dr. Akilah Cadet speaks to all these needs, drawing from her life experiences and work helping leading brands build inclusive and equitable cultures to offer an informed perspective that prioritizes belonging. In a series of personal stories told with her trademark candor and wit, Dr. Cadet explores the long-term work required to combat structural oppression from her unique vantage point as a Black disabled woman. She tackles everything: from the 2020 "summer of allyship" and depression caused by workplace discrimination to navigating disability and building a consulting business, all with a little inspo from Beyoncé.

A powerful call for true accompliceship for non-Black people, and a way for Black people to see and celebrate themselves, White Supremacy Is All Around ushers in a new voice that is timely, urgent, and essential--and a vision we all need now.

Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree has been a global phenomenon and perennial bestseller since the first (of four) volumes was published in 2013, spawning multiple printings, fourteen comic books, and the author's wildly popular YouTube comics channel, Cartoonist Kayfabe (with fellow cartoonist Jim Rugg). Yet the series has never been collected under one cover. Until now.

This omnibus collection includes the original 360-page series with over 140 pages of extra material: a cover gallery of every HHFT book and comic book cover and back cover Piskor ever created, pages from the HHFT comic book series that have never been collected, new annotations of the entire series by Piskor, and much more. Plus, it features a foreword by Charlie Ahearn and an afterword by Bill Adler.

Hip Hop Family Tree is the entertaining, encyclopedic history of the formative years of the music genre that changed global culture. Piskor's cartooning crackles like Kirby and takes you from the parks and rec rooms of the South Bronx to the night clubs, recording studios, and radio stations where the scene started to boom, capturing the flavor of late 1970s New York City in panels bursting with obsessively authentic detail. With a vigorous and engaging Ken Burns-meets-Stan Lee approach, the battles and rivalries, the technical innovations, the triumphs and failures are all thoroughly researched and lovingly depicted. Like the acclaimed hip hop documentaries Style Wars and Scratch, Hip Hop Family Tree is an essential cultural chronicle and a must for hip hop fans, pop-culture addicts, and anyone who wants to know how it went down back in the day.

In 1789, George Washington became the first president of the United States. He has been called the father of our country for leading America through its early years. Washington also served in two major wars during his lifetime: the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. With over 100 black-and-white illustrations, Washington's fascinating story comes to life - revealing the real man, not just the face on the dollar bill!

Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life.
"Most moving is Parks's depiction of a queer lineage, her assertion of an ancestry of outcasts, a tapestry of fellow misfits into which the marginalized will always, for better or worse, fit." --The New York Times Book Review

When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks's life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother's youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own.

For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and knocked on strangers' doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy's own diaries, trying to uncover what Roy was like as a person--what he felt; what he thought; and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else's story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.

This compelling and deeply personal memoir from WWE superstar Rebecca Quin--a.k.a. The Man, a.k.a. Becky Lynch--delves into her earliest wrestling days, her scrappy beginnings, and her meteoric rise to fame.

By age seven, Rebecca Quin, now known in the ring as Becky Lynch, was already defying what the world expected of her. Raised in Dublin, Ireland in a devoutly Catholic family, Rebecca constantly invented new ways to make her mother worry--roughhousing with the neighborhood kids, hosting secret parties while her parents were away, enrolling in a warehouse wrestling school, nearly breaking her neck and almost kneecapping a WWE star before her own wrestling career even began--and she was always in search of a thrilling escape from the ordinary.

Rebecca's deep love of wrestling as a child set her on an unlikely path. With few female wrestlers to look to for guidance, Rebecca pursued a wrestling career hoping to change the culture and move away from the antiquated disrespect so often directed at the elite female athletes that grace the ring. Even as a teenager, she knew that she would stop at nothing to earn a space among the greatest wrestlers of our time, and to pave a new path for female fighters.

Culled from decades of journal entries, Rebecca's memoir offers a raw, personal, and honest depiction of the complex woman behind the character Rebecca Quin plays on TV.

Winner of a 2022 ALA Alex Award

Winner of the 2023 Cartoonist Studio Prize for Print Comics

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2022 * One of NYPL's Best Books of 2022 *A Publishers Weekly "Best Book of 2022"

A formative coming-of-age graphic memoir by the creator of Afro-punk: a young man's immersive reckoning with identity, racism, clumsy teen love and belonging in an isolated California desert, and a search for salvation and community through punk.

Apple Valley, California, in the late eighties, a thirsty, miserable desert.

Teenage James Spooner hates that he and his mom are back in town after years away. The one silver lining--new school, new you, right? But the few Black kids at school seem to be gangbanging, and the other kids fall on a spectrum of micro-aggressors to future Neo-Nazis. Mixed race, acutely aware of his Blackness, James doesn't know where he fits until he meets Ty, a young Black punk who introduces him to the school outsiders--skaters, unhappy young rebels, caught up in the punk groundswell sweeping the country.

A haircut, a few Sex Pistols, Misfits and Black Flag records later: suddenly, James has friends, romantic prospects, and knows the difference between a bass and a guitar. But this desolate landscape hides brutal, building undercurrents: a classmate overdoses, a friend must prove himself to his white supremacist brother and the local Aryan brotherhood through a show of violence. Everything and everyone are set to collide at one of the year's biggest shows in town...

Weaving in the Black roots of punk rock and a vivid interlude in the thriving eighties DIY scene in New York's East Village, this is the memoir of a budding punk, artist, and activist.

In this book from the critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the life of David Bowie, the starman who dazzled audiences with his music.

As a child, young David had a head full of songs and ideas. He was inspired by the pop and mod scenes in Britain to pick up the saxophone. After earning his stripes in some of the coolest bands in London, David splashed onto the solo scene. His songwriting talent and musical skill made him one of rock and roll's all-time greatest artists. This moving book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the musician's life.

Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling biography series for kids that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.

This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover and paperback versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the treasuries each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in boxed gift sets. Activity books and a journal provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.

Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!

THE FIRST BOOK BY A CONFIRMED SURVIVOR OF TED BUNDY, AND THE ONLY MEMOIR TO CHALLENGE THE POPULAR NARRATIVE OF BUNDY AS A HANDSOME KILLER WHO CHARMED HIS VICTIMS INTO TRUSTING HIM

In January 1978, I slept in my bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University as Ted Bundy stalked nearby.
He grabbed an oak log from a stack of firewood, slipped through a back door with a broken padlock, and headed upstairs.He began twisting doorknobs. Room 9 was open, and he quietly and quickly killed one of my sleeping sorority sisters. Across the hall, he found another unlocked door and murdered again. Then, he turned the knob to my bedroom and found it was open. I remember the attack vividly. Bundy bashed me once in the head with the log and then attacked my roommate. He heard me moaning and came to finish me off. He never let his victims live. But he stopped suddenly when a bright light filled the room. He fled the sorority house and the light disappeared.

Bundy wasn't my first brush with death, and he wasn't my last. I've long been a survivor. I was born into a Cuban American family in 1957 in Florida. I had a happy childhood until I received my first death sentence at the age of thirteen. Physicians weren't sure why I was always so exhausted and running a low-grade fever. The prognosis was grim after my left kidney started to fail. Then, a physician from Cuba saved my life with a surprise diagnosis--lupus--and treatment plan: chemotherapy. I endured chemotherapy again in my early thirties when I was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer.

This is my story of surviving three death sentences and finding love and happiness along the way. I was saved by a bright light, and I hope my story is one for people who are experiencing their own dark times. I am a victim, but I am also a survivor, and I want to speak up for all the women and girls whom Bundy murdered.

He has become a legend, and our voices have been muted or ignored. It's time we were heard.

The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America's greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals

V. S. Pritchett called her "a genius." Gore Vidal described her as a "beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . ." And Tennessee Williams said, "The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson."

She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she'd been "born a man." At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer ("He was the best-looking man I had ever seen"). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel--The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter--was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time.

While McCullers's literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood--and captured--the heart and longing of the outcast.

Help your little one dream big with a Little Golden Book biography all about the Mexican artist Frida Khalo! The perfect introduction to nonfiction for young readers!

This Little Golden Book captures the essence of Frida Kahlo for the youngest readers. From overcoming illness, to being one of only a handful of girls at her school in Mexico, to having her paintings hanging in museums, this is an inspiring read for future trailblazers and their parents! Features informative text and colorful illustrations inspired by Frida's own artwork.

Look for more Little Golden Book biographies:
- Misty Copeland
- Iris Apfel
- Bob Ross
- Queen Elizabeth II
- Harriet Tubman

Equal parts outlaw, renegade, and legend, Waylon Jennings enjoyed a stellar music career for four decades and this no-holds-barred autobiography reveals the story of a man who infused conservative country music traditions with the energy of rock and roll to rewrite the rules of popular music in America. It chronicles all the chapters of Jennings's incredible life, including his beginnings as a dirt-poor son of a farm laborer; his role as Buddy Holly's protégé; his influential friendships with such luminaries as Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and George Jones; the stunning success ushered in by his platinum 1976 anthology album, Wanted: The Outlaws; the drug habit that nearly destroyed him; and his three failed marriages and the journey that lead him to Jessi Colter, the woman who would become his wife for 25 years. With anecdotes, portraits, and little-known facts about Jennings's fellow country music stars, this book overflows with the honesty, true humor, and down-home charisma of an authentic honky-tonk hero.

A warm, intimate portrait of Jackie Robinson, America's sports icon, told from the unique perspective of a unique insider: his only daughter.

Sharon Robinson shares memories of her famous father in this warm loving biography of the man who broke the color barrier in baseball. Jackie Robinson was an outstanding athlete, a devoted family man and a dedicated civil rights activist. The author explores the fascinating circumstances surrounding Jackie Robinson's breakthrough. She also tells the off-the-field story of Robinson's hard-won victories and the inspiring effect he had on his family, his community. . . his country! Includes never-before-published letters by Jackie Robinson, as well as photos from the Robinson family archives.

An introvert spends a year trying to live like an extrovert with hilarious results and advice for readers along the way.

What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she'd normally avoid at all costs? Writer Jessica Pan intends to find out. With the help of various extrovert mentors, Jessica sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much, much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Chronicling the author's hilarious and painful year of misadventures, this book explores what happens when one introvert fights her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and sometimes fails) to be a little bit braver.