Books Published by NWU-Boston Members in 2021

B. Amore, Journeys on the Wheel (poems). “B. Amore’s Journeys on the Wheel, as the title suggests, is a veritable carousel of emotions, thoughts, and impulses– all with a piccante Italian accent. As we ride her wheel, we discover rich stores of pathos, humor, irony and intelligence, and all of these parceled out by way of poems that are stirring to the ear and the heart. What an auspicious debut.” – Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate, 2011-15

John Everett Barrett, A Search to Belong: From a Kentucky Orphanage. . .to a Cohousing Community. “I quickly unlocked my neighbor’s door. He looked at me relieved as he said, ‘John, thanks for your help, but how did you learn to unlock doors like that?’  I responded, ‘I was a busy juvenile delinquent as a kid, [I was rehabilitated] but the skills remain!’ I continue to use my past skills and knowledge constructively for my family and community. . . . This is one of several stories about the impact of my orphanage experience on my life.”

Anita Diamant, Period. End of Sentence: A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice (Scribner). The book explores menstrual stigma, from its toxic history to the ways that young activists are challenging the silence and shame that can erode self-esteem and even threaten lives. It includes Indigenous traditions that honor and celebrate this essential element of human life.

William Fleming and Joe Peters, The Third Rail. The Third Rail delves into the ongoing challenge of race relations in Boston. A veteran transit police sergeant must step carefully in trying to identify a rogue cop while also cracking the mysterious disappearance of transportation artifacts and keeping the simmering tensions among the city’s many factions from reaching a boiling point.

Melaine E. Hall, I Wanted to Commit Suicide. Penned during Covid and based on a true story, it chronicles the journey of lifelong depression, deliverance, and healing.

Miles Howard, Moon New England Road Trip (Moon Travel Guides). A guide to New England’s most storied and overlooked regions, linked by an endless spiderweb of scenic roads. Seaside spots, majestic mountains, and fall foliage, by a journalist who believes that wild spaces and urban destinations should be free of economic and social barriers and welcoming to all.

Susan B. Inches, Advocacy for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action (North Atlantic Books/Penguin).

Bill Lichtenstein, WBCN and The American Revolution (Penguin Random House). As San Francisco celebrated a psychedelic Summer of Love in 1967, Boston stayed buttoned up and battened down. But that all changed when Harvard Law School student Ray Riepen founded a radio station that aired the music being listened to by young people, including the hundreds of thousands at area colleges, with announcers who discussed everything from recreational drugs to the war in Vietnam. In this engaging and generously illustrated chronicle, Peabody Award–winning journalist and one-time WBCN announcer Bill Lichtenstein tells the story of how a radio station became part of a revolution in youth culture.

Wendy Sanford, These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class (She Writes Press). “This remarkable book is a moving testimony for all who believe in fairness and racial healing” (Dr. Pamela Brooks, Africana Studies, Oberlin College). “A tender, honest, cringeworthy, and powerful read” (Debby Irving, author of Waking Up White).

Joyce Walsh, The Feather Tree. 

Kristin Waters, Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought (University of Mississippi Press). “In the 1830s, Maria W. Stewart, a Black former indentured servant, argued in Boston’s public halls that African-American “rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.”

Leslie Wheeler, co-editor, Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories (Crime Spell Books). “Whether it’s an elderly woman facing a scam, a shipwrecked researcher trying to survive, a retired robber invited to join in one last fling, or a group of kids in over their heads, with Bloodroot, Crime Spell Books continues the tradition of the annual anthology of Best New England Crime Stories by New England writers.”

Stephen R. Wilk, Sandbows and Black Lights – Reflections on Optics (Oxford U. Press). Wilk’s second collection of Weird Optics includes an explanation of the monocle (why would anybody only correct the vision in ONE eye?), why candle flames are yellow (it’s not why you think), Jean-Paul Marat’s contributions to optics, why vampires dissolve in ultraviolet light, the history of X-ray Spex, and how to make edible optics.