Common Read Program

Faculty within the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Writing oversee SRU’s Common Read Program, and hosts one of the largest academic events on campus. English and Modern Languages committee members annually propose books and authors to teach in the Rock Studies course Critical Reading, and the committee then votes to select a work and invite the author to campus for a keynote presentation. Approximately 1,200 students participate in the program every year, and the Common Read Keynote has seen up to 800 attendees. The goal that energizes this common learning experience is to provide students a pathway that fosters camaraderie and intellectual curiosity with the topics covered.

Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, Spring 2027

Susan southard

On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan’s southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured.

Nagasaki takes readers from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the first-hand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation. Susan Southard has spent years interviewing hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) and researching the physical, emotional, and social challenges of post-atomic life. She weaves together dramatic eyewitness accounts with searing analysis of the policies of censorship and denial that colored much of what was reported about the bombing both in the United States and Japan. – Penguin Press

Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus, Spring 2026

Dashka Slater

The riveting New York Times bestseller and Stonewall Book Award winner that will make you rethink all you know about race, class, gender, crime, and punishment. Artfully, compassionately, and expertly told, Dashka Slater's The 57 Bus is a must-read nonfiction book that chronicles the true story of an agender teen who was set on fire by another teen while riding a bus in Oakland, California.

Two ends of the same line. Two sides of the same crime.

If it weren’t for the 57 bus, Sasha and Richard never would have met. Both were high school students from Oakland, California, one of the most diverse cities in the country, but they inhabited different worlds. Sasha, a white teen, lived in the middle-class foothills and attended a small private school. Richard, a Black teen, lived in the economically challenged flatlands and attended a large public one.

Each day, their paths overlapped for a mere eight minutes. But one afternoon on the bus ride home from school, a single reckless act left Sasha severely burned, and Richard charged with two hate crimes and facing life imprisonment. The case garnered international attention, thrusting both teenagers into the spotlight. But in The 57 Bus, award-winning journalist Dashka Slater shows that what might at first seem like a simple matter of right and wrong, justice and injustice, victim and criminal, is something more complicated—and far more heartbreaking. – Macmillan Press

Brenna Thummler, Sheets, Spring 2025

Brenna Thummler A story of ghosts, family, loneliness, and laundromats.

Marjorie Glatt feels like a ghost. A practical thirteen-year-old in charge of the family laundry business, her daily routine features unforgiving customers, unbearable P.E. classes, and the fastidious Mr. Saubertuck who is committed to destroying everything she's worked for. Wendell is a ghost. A boy who lost his life much too young, his daily routine features ineffective death therapy, a sheet-dependent identity, and a dangerous need to seek purpose in the forbidden human world. When their worlds collide, Marjorie is confronted by unexplainable disasters as Wendell transforms Glatt's Laundry into his midnight playground, appearing as a mere sheet during the day. While Wendell attempts to create a new afterlife for himself, he unknowingly sabotages the life that Marjorie is struggling to maintain.

Sheets illustrates the determination of a young girl to fight, even when all parts of her world seem to be conspiring against her. It proves that second chances are possible whether life feels over or life is over. But above all, it is a story of the forgiveness and unlikely friendship that can only transpire inside a haunted laundromat. – Porchlight Books

Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion, Spring 2024

Jeanne Marie Laskas first met the young forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu in 2009, while reporting a story for GQ—a story that would go on to inspire the major motion picture Concussion.

Omalu told her about a day in September 2002, where, in a dingy morgue in downtown Pittsburgh, he picked up a scalpel and made a discovery that would rattle America in ways he’d never intended. Omalu was new to America, chasing the dream, a deeply spiritual man escaping the wounds of civil war in Nigeria. The body on the slab in front of him belonged to a fifty-year-old named Mike Webster, aka “Iron Mike,” a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the greatest ever to play the game. After retiring in 1990, Webster had suffered a dizzyingly steep decline. Toward the end of his life, he was living out of his van, tasering himself to relieve his chronic pain, and fixing his rotting teeth with Super Glue.

How did this happen?, Omalu asked himself. How did a young man like Mike Webster end up like this? The search for answers would change Omalu’s life forever and put him in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful corporations in America: the National Football League. What Omalu discovered in Mike Webster’s brain—proof that Iron Mike’s mental deterioration was no accident but a disease caused by relentless blows to the head that could affect everyone playing the game—was the one truth the NFL would do anything to keep secret. Taut, gripping, and gorgeously told, Concussion is the stirring true story of one unlikely man’s courageous decision to stand up to a multibillion-dollar colossus bent on silencing him, and to tell the world the truth. – Jeanne Marie Laskas

Devin Grayson, Rewild, Spring 2023

Devin Grayson

Fables meets The Fisher King in this dark, magical realist tale about a mysterious young homeless woman, an enterprising engineer with a troubled past, and a dangerous new breed of Fae, ravaged by climate change and furious with the human race.

A motley collection of disturbing mythological creatures have started to stake out the land of those who damaged them—and the planet—and they aren’t backing down. When Poe, an entrancing drifter and self-proclaimed changeling demands that Demond build a park to appease them, he first worries about her grasp on reality, and then, along with his family, his own. Soon, he—and the reader—must question the rationality of our entire species as Demond struggles to save his city… and maybe even the world. But are we past the point of no return? – Penguin Books

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, Fall 2022

The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay.

The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.The Book of Delights offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives.

Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis. The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight. – Algonquin Press

Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Spring 2022

Deesha Philyaw

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions. There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher’s wife.

At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta’s “same time next year” arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other.

With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be. – West Virginia University Press

Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country, Spring 2021

An award-winning poet and former infantry team leader in Iraq, Brian Turner combines his devastating recollections as “Sergeant Turner” with his visions of the experiences of generations of warriors in his family—and even those of the enemy—in a work of profound understanding and shocking beauty. – W.W. Norton and Co.

Kristen Iverson, Full Body Burden, Spring 2019

Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated “the most contaminated site in America.” It’s the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and—unknown to those who lived there—tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

It’s also a book about the destructive power of secrets—both family and government. Her father’s hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed)—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. – From the author

Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Writing

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