Collection: Biography & Memoir

Get inside the head of one of the most influential musicians of our time, a pop music phenomenon turned titan of industry and cultural icon: Taylor Swift.

This collection of quotes has been carefully curated from Swift's numerous public statements--interviews, op-eds, social media posts, and more, specifically geared toward middle and high school readers. It's a comprehensive picture of her meteoric rise to the top, her ever-savvy business sense, and her increasingly outspoken perspective on the music world and beyond. This edition includes educational materials and resources for lesson plans designed to provoke discussion and thought for readers in grades 7-12 about Taylor Swift's ideas.

Swift's catchy, chart-topping songs have propelled her to become one of the bestselling musicians of all time. But in the nearly 20 years she's been making music, she has also amassed enough power to buck the norms of an industry notorious for controlling the images of its often very young female artists.

Her latest, unprecedented record deal gives her ownership of all her master records, the ability to dictate the terms of her albums' streaming releases in order to maximize her profits, and a requirement that her label share proceeds from the sale of its stake in Spotify with its musicians. She has championed the rights of artists to earn fair royalties, and more recently, she has inspired tens of thousands of fans to register to vote.

Swift's achievements have earned her spots on both Forbes's Most Powerful Women and Time's 100 Most Influential People lists. Now, for the first time, young readers find her most inspirational, thought-provoking quotes in one place.

A powerful memoir by two sisters about transitioning, family, and the path to self-realization.

When Orange Is the New Black and Diary of a Future President star Selenis Leyva was young, her hardworking parents brought a new foster child into their warm, loving family in the Bronx. Selenis was immediately smitten; she doted on the baby, who in turn looked up to Selenis and followed her everywhere. The little boy became part of the family. But later, the siblings realized that the child was struggling with their identity. As Marizol transitioned and fought to define herself, Selenis and the family wanted to help, but didn't always have the language to describe what Marizol was going through or the knowledge to help her thrive.
In My Sister, Selenis and Marizol narrate, in alternating chapters, their shared journey, challenges, and triumphs. They write honestly about the issues of violence, abuse, and discrimination that transgender people and women of color--and especially trans women of color--experience daily. And they are open about the messiness and confusion of fully realizing oneself and being properly affirmed by others, even those who love you.
Profoundly moving and instructive, My Sister offers insight into the lives of two siblings learning to be their authentic selves. Ultimately, theirs is a story of hope, one that will resonate with and affirm those in the process of transitioning, watching a loved one transition, and anyone taking control of their gender or sexual identities.

Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Finalist for the Marfield Prize

For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this "lively, illuminating new biography" (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a "brisk, beautifully crafted life" (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America.

All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others' expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage--a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo's Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about "the towering grandeur of her genius" in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth--supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln's assassin--and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman's work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park's Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was "a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress." Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists' colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows.

Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk's Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman's life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.

In late November of 1858 two enslaved Black women--Celia Grayson, age twenty-two, and Eliza Grayson, age twenty--escaped the Stephen F. Nuckolls household in southeastern Nebraska. John Williamson, a man of African American and Cherokee descent from Iowa, guided them through the dark to the Missouri River, where they boarded a skiff and crossed the icy waters, heading for their first stop on the Underground Railroad at Civil Bend, Iowa.

In Journey to Freedom Gail Shaffer Blankenau provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of these two enslaved Black women from Nebraska City. Poised on the "frontier," the Graysons' escape demonstrated that unique opportunities beckoned at the confluence of Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas, and their actions challenged slavery's tentative expansion into the West and its eventual demise in an era of territorial fluidity. Their escape and the violence that followed prompted considerable debate across the country and led to the Nebraska legislature's move to prohibit slavery. Drawing on multiple collections, records, and slave narratives, Journey to Freedom sheds light on the Graysons' courage and agency as they became high-profile figures in the national debate between proslavery and antislavery factions in the antebellum period.

"He tried to outrun a train," Theodore Blindwoman told David Joseph Charpentier the night they found out about Maurice Prairie Chief's death. When Charpentier was a new teacher at St. Labre Indian School in Ashland, Montana, Prairie Chief was the first student he met and the one with whom he formed the closest bonds.

From the shock of moving from a bucolic Minnesota college to teach at a small, remote reservation school in eastern Montana, Charpentier details the complex and emotional challenges of Indigenous education in the United States. Although he intended his teaching tenure at St. Labre to be short, Charpentier's involvement with the school has extended past thirty years. Unlike many white teachers who came and left the reservation, Charpentier has remained committed to the potentialities of Indigenous education, motivated by the early friendship he formed with Prairie Chief, who taught him lessons far and wide, from dealing with buffalo while riding a horse to coping with student dropouts he would never see again.

Told through episodic experiences, the story takes a journey back in time as Charpentier searches for answers to Prairie Chief's life. As he sits on top of the sledding hill near the cemetery where Prairie Chief is buried, Charpentier finds solace in the memories of their shared (mis)adventures and their mutual respect, hard won through the challenges of educational and cultural mistrust.

Miles McKenna is a queer and trans activist. He transitioned online in front of a million people. Out!: How to Be Your Authentic Self is his survival guide.

When Miles came out on his YouTube channel in 2015--then transitioned online in 2017--his aim was to help other teens navigate their identities and take charge of their own coming-out stories. From that experience comes Out!, the ultimate coming-out survival guide for anyone questioning or queer.

Out! covers questions big and small: how to stay safe when coming out in a toxic environment, what to do if you don't feel comfortable with your birth name, what style haircut best suits your identity, and how to find your chosen family. Miles offers readers coming-out conversation starters ("Can I have the bathroom pass? Also, the correct pronouns?"), a recipe for a very gay cake, and a guide to mastering the masculine haircut. You'll find resources for finding a gender therapist, pointers for being a queer ally, and Miles's Ten Commandments (#5: You are valid in your identity, even if you're the only one who can define it).

If you're a person seeking answers, look no further! This book is for you. And remember: Whoever you are, you are worth fighting for.

"Any teen with questions about gender identity and/or sexuality will find heart, humor, and essential guidance in McKenna's book, and so will the adults looking to support them. An indispensable first purchase." --School Library Journal

Includes color images

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Much has been written about the "Valerie Plame" story, but Valerie herself has been silent, until now. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. And some has been completely false -- distorted characterizations of Valerie and her husband and their shared integrity.

Valerie Wilson retired from the CIA in January 2006, and now, not only as a citizen but as a wife and mother, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and the sister of a U.S. marine, she sets the record straight, providing an extraordinary account of her training and experiences, and answers many questions that have been asked about her covert status, her responsibilities, and her life. As readers will see, the CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. As a service to readers, an afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story.

Fair Game is the historic and unvarnished account of the personal and international consequences of speaking truth to power.

The never-before-told story of the women Egyptologists who paved the way of exploration in Egypt and created the basis for Egyptology.

The history of Egyptology is often told as yet one more grand narrative of powerful men striving to seize the day and the precious artifacts for their competing homelands. But that is only half of the story. During the so-called Golden Age of Exploration, there were women working and exploring before Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Before men even conceived of claiming the story for themselves, women were working in Egypt to lay the groundwork for all future exploration.

In Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, Kathleen Sheppard brings the untold stories of these women back into this narrative. Sheppard begins with some of the earliest European women who ventured to Egypt as travelers: Amelia Edwards, Jenny Lane, and Marianne Brocklehurst. Their travelogues, diaries and maps chronicled a new world for the curious. In the vast desert, Maggie Benson, the first woman granted permission to excavate in Egypt, met Nettie Gourlay, the woman who became her lifelong companion. They battled issues of oppression and exclusion and, ultimately, are credited with excavating the Temple of Mut.

As each woman scored a success in the desert, she set up the women who came later for their own struggles and successes. Emma Andrews' success as a patron and archaeologist helped to pave the way for Margaret Murray to teach. Margaret's work in the university led to the artists Amice Calverley's and Myrtle Broome's ability to work on site at Abydos, creating brilliant reproductions of tomb art, and to Kate Bradbury's and Caroline Ransom's leadership in critical Egyptological institutions. Women in the Valley of the Kings upends the grand male narrative of Egyptian exploration and shows how a group of courageous women charted unknown territory and changed the field of Egyptology forever.

From Dolly Parton to Carrie Underwood, Kenny Rogers to Merle Haggard, Country Legends Alphabet is a toe-tappin', boot scootin' A to Z of the voices that have shaped country music over the years. Written and illustrated with a good dose of Nashville pride, this book is a must-read for every country music loving family.

Help your little one dream big with a Little Golden Book biography about Argentine professional footballer Lionel Messi! Little Golden Book biographies are the perfect introduction to nonfiction for young readers--as well as fans of all ages!

Lionel Messi is widely regarded as one of the greatest soccer players of all time! This Little Golden Book Biography about the record-smashing star forward for Argentina, FC Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, and Inter Miami is an inspiring read-aloud for young readers.

Look for more Little Golden Book biographies:

• Simone Biles
• Jackie Robinson
• Misty Copeland

Help your little one dream big with a Little Golden Book biography about film legend and humanitarian, Audrey Hepburn. Little Golden Book biographies are the perfect introduction to nonfiction for young readers--as well as fans of all ages!

This Little Golden Book about Audrey Hepburn--the Medal of Freedom recipient, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, fashion icon, and star of Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's--is an inspiring read-aloud for young children and fans of any age.

Look for more Little Golden Book biographies:

• Betty White
• Lucille Ball
• Julie Andrews
• Iris Apfel
• Harry Belafonte
• Carol Burnett

A moving memoir by a survivor of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India that delicately weaves political and family histories in a tribute to India's vibrant multiethnic society and the resilience of its women and minorities, especially in the face of growing religious extremism

"A warning, thrown to the world, and a stunning debut-Chowdhary is a much-needed new voice."-Alexander Chee

In 2002, Zara Chowdhary was sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India's fastest-growing metropolises, when a gruesome anti-Muslim pogrom upended her world. Instead of taking her school exams, she was put under a three-month lockdown with thousands of others, fearing for their community and their lives. The chief minister in the state at the time, Narendra Modi, accused of fomenting anti-Muslim violence, would become prime minister of India and lead a government committed to eroding the rights of India's 220 million Muslims.

In The Lucky Ones, Chowdhary weaves the past and the present of her multigenerational Muslim family, juxtaposing the horrific violence of rising fascistic forces on the streets with the more mundane violence of patriarchal Indian joint families at the dinner table. Through the stories of sisters, daughters, and mothers raising each other, Chowdhary shows how women hold this world together with their ability to forgive, find laughter, and offer grace even as the world they know, and their place in it, is falling apart.

With lyrical clarity and intimacy, The Lucky Ones is a poetic remembrance of how a country's promise of a multiethnic secular democracy can so easily dissolve and descend into extremism. Chowdhary's story is a protest against the erasure of India's Muslims, a testimony of a lost girlhood, and a testament to her family and country's entwined lives.

A powerful and redemptive story of how the dazzling world of roller derby helped one young woman transform her fear and self-doubt into gutsy, big-hearted, adventurous living

"A universal story of healing and triumph, made all the more beautiful, wild, and free by Gabe's fierce love for roller derby and her team, who become her family."--ABBY WAMBACH, Olympian, activist, and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Book Riot

Growing up queer in a conservative Midwestern town, Gabe Montesanti never felt comfortable in her own skin. A competitive swimmer, she turned to perfectionism and self-control to create a sense of safety, only to develop an eating disorder and constantly second-guess her instincts. When she enters graduate school in St. Louis, she is determined to put the baggage of her childhood behind her. With no prior experience, she joins Arch Rival, one of the top-ranked roller derby leagues in the world. Gabe instantly falls in love with the sport's roughness, intensity, and open embrace of people who are literally and figuratively scarred. She soon finds community and a sense of belonging, reveling in the tattoos, glitter, and campiness.

But when Gabe suffers a catastrophic injury, she can no longer ignore the parallels between the physicality of roller derby and the unresolved trauma of her upbringing. Rendered inactive, forced to be still, Gabe realizes she needs to heal her emotional wounds as much as her physical ones; she must confront her fear and self-diminishment in order to feel truly alive.

Told with unflinching honesty and a giant dose of wonder, Brace for Impact is a tender, inspiring memoir about the everyday heroism of pursuing a life less ordinary, and the deeply human need to be at peace with who you are.

"James Whiteside is an electrifying performer, an incredible athlete, and an artist, through and through. To know James is to love him; with Center Center, you are about to fall in love." --Jennifer Garner

"A frank examination and celebration of queerness."
--Good Morning America

A daring, joyous, and inspiring memoir-in-essays from the American Ballet Theatre principal dancer-slash-drag queen-slash-pop star who's redefining what it means to be a man in ballet

There's a mark on every stage around the world that signifies the center of its depth and width, called "center center." James Whiteside has dreamed of standing on that very mark as a principal dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre ever since he was a twelve-year-old blown away by watching the company's spring gala. The GLAMOUR. The VIRTUOSITY. The RIPPED MEN IN TIGHTS!

In this absurd and absurdist collection of essays, Whiteside tells us the story of how he got to be a primo ballerino--stopping along the way to muse about the tragically fated childhood pets who taught him how to feel, reminisce on ill-advised partying at summer dance camps, and imagine fantastical run-ins with Jesus on Grindr. Also in these pages are tales of the two alter egos he created to subvert the strict classical rigor of ballet: JbDubs, an out-and-proud pop musician, and Ühu Betch, an over-the-top drag queen named after Yoohoo chocolate milk.

Center Center is an exuberant behind-the-scenes tour of Whiteside's triple life, both on- and offstage--a raunchy, curious, and unapologetic celebration of queerness, self-expression, friendship, sex, creativity, and pushing boundaries that will entertain you, shock you*, inspire you, embolden you . . . and maybe even make you cry.

*THIS IS NOT A BOOK FOR CHILDREN.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist?

A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vulture, Elle, Esquire, Kirkus

"A lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things" --Vanity Fair

"Monsters leaves us with Dederer's passionate commitment to the artists whose work most matters to her, and a framework to address these questions about the artists who matter most to us." --The Washington Post

"[Dederer] breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new." --Ada Calhoun, author of Also a Poet

From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is "part memoir, part treatise, and all treat" (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer's instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?"

Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience's relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?

Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.

Women are an essential part of the history of the piano--but how many women pianists can you name?

Throughout most of the piano's history, women pianists lacked access to formal training and were excluded from male-dominated performance spaces. Even the modern piano's keys were designed without consideration of women's typically smaller hands. Yet despite their music being largely confined to the domestic sphere, women continued to play, perform, and compose on their own terms.

Celebrated pianist and author Susan Tomes traces fifty such women across the piano's history. Including now-famous names such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, Tomes also highlights overlooked women: from Hélène de Montgeroult, whose playing saved her life during the French Revolution, to Leopoldine Wittgenstein, influential Viennese salonnière, and Hazel Scott, the first Black performer in the United States to have a nationally syndicated TV show.

From Maria Szymanowska to Nina Simone, and including interviews with women performing today, this is a much-needed corrective to our understanding of the piano--and a timely testament to women's musical lives.