Human Rights Book Clubs
Spark Curiosity. Stretch Perspective. Ignite Dialogue.
Reading together may be one of the most hopeful practices we have. Book clubs keep our shared humanity awake. When it’s tempting to retreat into our corners, these spaces invite us to lean in — to let stories unsettle us and conversations reshape us. A more just and joyful world can begin with a room full of readers willing to imagine better together.
The Wassmuth Center hosts two book clubs each month.
Generations for Justice Book Club meets on the second Tuesday of each month from 6:30 – 8:00 PM.
Hope & Humanity Book Club meets on the fourth Tuesday of each month from 12:00 – 1:00 PM and 6:30 – 8:00 PM
Generations for Justice
Generations for Justice is an intergenerational book club that brings together community members of all ages, offering a shared refuge to step away from the rush, open a text together, and rediscover how dignity grows when we make space to think, question, and listen deeply.
This book club is held on the second Tuesday of each month at 6:30 PM.
Register below for the current month or for all upcoming sessions in 2026.
Upcoming Selections
January 13
We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
A tight-knit group of 14 teens have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco. As second-generation Japanese Americans, or Nisei, they form a family, as conflicted as they are interconnected. Their lives are changed forever by the mass incarcerations of World War II.
In a world that seems to hate them, these young Nisei must pull together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.
February 10
Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo
Samira is determined to have a perfect summer with fun parties, exploring DC, and growing as a poet–until a scandalous rumor leaves her grounded and unable to leave her house. Samira turns to a poetry forum for solace, but soon she’s keeping a bigger secret than ever before–one that could stamp her reputation, and jeopardize her place in the community. An unflinching novel-in-verse, Bright Red Fruit traces a teen’s journey into the slam poetry scene and the dangerous new relationship that could threaten all her dreams.
2026 Generations for Justice Selections
- January: We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
- February: Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo
- March: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
- April: The Lilac People by Milo Todd
- May: The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson
- June: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson
- July: Choose your own adventure – no meeting this month!
- August: The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall
- September: The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuero
- October: Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay
- November: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
- December: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Hope & Humanity Book Club will also read this book in December and join our discussion.)
Hope & Humanity
The Hope & Humanity Book Club is a welcoming space for lively conversations about books that explore human rights across all genres—stories that spark empathy, deepen understanding, and inspire meaningful action.
We gather on the fourth Tuesday of each month at both 12:00 PM and 6:30 PM.
Register below for the current month or for all upcoming sessions in 2026.
Upcoming Selections
January 27
Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, traces the heartaches, losses, and quiet revelations of her poet-warrior road. Growing up in the red-dirt lands of Oklahoma, she listens to ancestors, to music and story, and to the changing earth–owls of grief, desert plants of resilience, the surprise of a green snake.
As the world bears down with erasure and injustice, she turns to the influences that shape her–Muscogee stomp dances, Navajo horse songs, Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Whitman, rain, and sunrise. Through prose that moves like song, she grieves stolen homelands and beloved family, yet finds in poetry a force for compassion, healing, and truth. In a world that has tried to silence her people, Harjo becomes a poet-warrior, carving a luminous path toward justice, home, and the enduring power of story.
February 24
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
After years abroad, Sonia, a British Palestinian actress, returns to Haifa seeking distance from heartbreak and the fragments of a life she can no longer hold together. Drawn into a daring West Bank production of Hamlet, she finds herself among artists who navigate checkpoints, surveillance, and the weight of occupation with defiant creativity. As rehearsals unfold, Sonia listens to the stories of family and homeland she thought she’d left behind–echoes of loss, flashes of resilience, and the fierce pulse of a people refusing silence. In a world determined to constrain them, these actors turn theater into resistance, community, and truth-telling. Through her role, Sonia is pulled into a collective struggle for dignity and voice, emerging as part of a chorus demanding justice, connection, and the right to imagine a different future.
2026 Hope & Humanity Selections
- January: Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo
- February: Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
- March: Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
- April: Soft as Bones by Chyana Marie Sage
- May: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
- June: The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon
- July: Choose your own adventure – no meeting this month
- August: Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours by Sarah Sentilles
- September: The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
- October: Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy
- November: Written in the Waters by Tara Roberts
- December: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (We will join Generations for Justice Book Club for this discussion.)
Previous Selections
Generations for Justice Book Club
2026 Selections
- January: We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
- February: Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo
- March: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
- April: The Lilac People by Milo Todd
- May: The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson
- June: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson
- July: Choose your own adventure – no meeting this month!
- August: The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall
- September: The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuero
- October: Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay
- November: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
- December: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Hope & Humanity Book Club will also read this book in December and join our discussion.)
2025 Selections
- January: Fire Keeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
- February: Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley
- March: Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez.
- April: Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers
- May: The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton
- June: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- July: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
- August: Apple (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth
- September: Finding Eve: Raising a Transgender Teen in Idaho by Michael and Angie Devitt
- October: Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
- November: The Collectors: Stories edited by A.S. King
- December: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall
2024 Selections
- July: Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
- August: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
- September: This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
- October: We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib
- November: Borderless by Jennifer De Leon
- December: The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Hope & Humanity
Book Club
2026 Selections
- January: Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo
- February: Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
- March: Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
- April: Soft as Bones by Chyana Marie Sage
- May: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
- June: The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon
- July: Choose your own adventure – no meeting this month
- August: Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours by Sarah Sentilles
- September: The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
- October: Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy
- November: Written in the Waters by Tara Roberts
- December: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (We will join Generations for Justice Book Club for this discussion.)
2025 Selections
- January: The Bones of the World by Betsy L. Ross
- February: Decent Exposure by Edna Shochat
- March: The Children of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek
- April: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
- May: Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
- June: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
- July: By the Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle
- August: After Auschwitz by Eva Schloss
- September: Memories in Focus by Pinchas Gutter
- October: I Still See Her Haunting Eyes by Aaron Elster
- November: Inherit the Truth by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
- December: No gathering this month
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
-JAMES BALDWIN, AMERICAN WRITER