Campus Announcements

The Office for Institutional Diversity is pleased to announce this year's Reed Community Reading Project book is The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson.

As with other Community Reading Project books, we have purchased a limited number of free copies for members of the Reed community. If you'd like a copy of the book and plan to attend the event, please stop by the Office for Institutional Diversity (Eliot 312) and pick one up! The books are first come, first serve so stop by soon before we run out!

Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America's whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the '90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a breakout voice that is nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. A book signing will follow the lecture.

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