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Williams Reads aims to foster new connections among students, staff, faculty, and community members by exploring diversity through a common reading experience. Developed by the Committee on Diversity and Community (CDC), Williams Reads is an initiative offered as an opportunity for us to explore a book together that will help us to celebrate and deepen our appreciation of diversity. It is the goal of the CDC to select a book that will stimulate community engagement and challenging conversation.

Get your copy of the 2023-2024 Williams Reads book!

Free copies of the 2023-2024 Williams Reads book are located at Paresky, Schapiro, Hollander, Bascom, the Science Center, Sawyer Library, and Hopkins Hall.

2023-2024 BOOK:

UP HOME: ONE GIRL'S JOURNEY

by RUTH SIMMONS

Dr. Simmons will visit Williams on Claiming Williams Day.
View a recording of the Feb 1 Claiming Williams Keynote with Ruth Simmons

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Simmons’s evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“A riveting work of literature, destined to take its place in the canon of great African American autobiographies.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

I was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroad in North Houston County in East Texas.

Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.

In Up Home, Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are young shape who we become. We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large family with an often empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his youngest daughter’s dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child.

From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity guide her as she creates a place for herself in the world.

Ruth Simmons Biography

Ruth J. Simmons is the former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University, Texas’s oldest HBCU, and the former vice provost of Princeton. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Dillard University and her master’s and doctorate from Harvard in Romance languages and literatures.

After completing her Ph.D. in 1973 in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, she served in various faculty and administrative roles at the University of Southern California, Princeton University, and Spelman College before her appointment in 1999 as President of Smith College, the largest women’s college in the United States. She launched a number of important academic initiatives at Smith, including an engineering program, the first at an American women’s college.

Simmons is the recipient of many honors, including a Fulbright Fellowship to France, the 2001 President’s Award from the United Negro College Fund, the 2002 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, the 2004 Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal, the Foreign Policy Association Medal, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University.   Simmons is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She serves on the boards of FCAU, NV, and Square, as well as a number of non-profit boards, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the Holdsworth Center, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Awarded numerous honorary degrees, in 2011, she received the Brown faculty’s highest honor: the Susan Colver Rosenberger Medal. In 2012, the president of France named her a ‘chevalier’ of the French Legion of Honor.

Previous Williams Reads Books

2022-2023 Book: South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

“An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.” … Continue reading “2022-2023 Book: South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry”

2021-2022 book: Ebony & Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder

2021-2022 Book: Ebony & Ivy – by Craig Steven Wilder Hard copies are available at Sawyer and Schow Libraries. E-Books are available using this link! A groundbreaking exploration of the intertwined histories of … Continue reading “2021-2022 book: Ebony & Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder”

2020-2021 Book: Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation- Edited by H. Melt

Subject to Change is an anthology celebrating the work of five poets who are unapologetically trans: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, beyza ozer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. Featuring poetry … Continue reading “2020-2021 Book: Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation- Edited by H. Melt”

2019-2020 Book: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Called a “breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time” by NPR, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West is an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from … Continue reading “2019-2020 Book: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid”