Author: Kendra Winchester

This incredible cookbook is a 2019 James Beard Award Finalist. Plus, it was named a Best Cookbook of the Year by The New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, Houston Chronicle, Food52, PopSugar, and more. This cookbook invites readers into the diverse range of Filipino cuisine with all of its many influences, including Chinese, Arab, Mexican, and Spanish cooking techniques. The authors invite readers to learn more about the origins of their recipes through a cookbook that is such a wonderful celebration of Filipino cooking.

One of the most famous cookbook writers from Southern Appalachia, Edna Lewis is a true treasure of the region. Her recipes are structured around the four seasons. She encourages readers to cook with what is in season and to cherish every flavor. When reading her recipes, I can’t help but think that Lewis’ recipes harken back to another time. With recipes like Cornpone and Brandied Peaches, I can’t help but wonder if my own Southern grandmother would have cooked these dishes too. Lewis is such a phenomenal cornerstone for Southern Appalachian cuisine.

I didn’t realize that most Americans don’t have US history in college. So I was thrilled to find These Truths, which gives people a bird’s eye view of American history. It’s great for people who aren’t from the US and includes the history of minority groups, such as African Americans and Indigenous peoples. Jill Lepore tells the story of America in a way that you have never heard before. In this macro look at the history of the American colonies to the modern day, Lepore examines how America came to be and the way that it evolved over the decades. In a sprawling history of the United States, Lepore uses people to anchor the perspective at any given time in history. She makes sure to introduce a new character before another one dies, passing the baton, as it were, to carry you through the overall narrative.

Isabel Wilkerson is such an incredible writer and researcher. I adored The Warmth of Other Suns and couldn’t wait to pick up her next book. In Caste, she compares America’s systemic racism to the Caste systems in India and Nazi Germany. She argues that America has a similar Caste system, just by a different name. I really appreciated her insight. Her writing is always thought-provoking, but Caste asks readers to reconsider how they view America’s history of racism. It’s definitely a read you won’t want to miss.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Disordered Cosmos took the world by storm when it was released in 2021. This book also received a delightfully ridiculous number of accolades, including the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology, the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science, the 2022 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and it was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein dives into ideas around physics from her perspective as a Black woman scientist. She discusses how science, like other fields, contains an intense amount of sexism, racism, and other kinds of oppression. I really appreciate her viewpoint, and she deftly explains a scientific field that I have zero background in. There’s something about Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s enthusiasm for the topic that is infectious.

I’m always looking to learn more about prominent women in history, especially key figures in traditionally male-dominated fields. So, I love Rachel Ignotofsky’s books about women from history. The first one is about women in science. Each woman is featured on a beautiful two-page spread filled with her biography, fun facts, and incredible illustrations. And if you love this one, there’s also Women in Sports and Women in Art. Yes, I do indeed own them all and would recommend them to anyone and everyone.

In Good Talk, Mira Jacob describes how her son asked her why his Jewish paternal grandparents would vote for Trump, a man who hated immigrants like Mira and her parents. This question launches her into even more questions that she’s not quite sure how to answer. She works through these conversations in Good Talk, illustrating them on the page and giving readers a fuller picture. I read this graphic memoir while waiting for a delayed flight at the airport. I felt consumed and barely even noticed spending the extra four hours surrounded by disgruntled passengers.

Roz Chast’s parents have lived in the same apartment for decades. As her parents age, she begins to think through how she will care for them when they get older and how she wants to spend as much time with them as possible. But her parents want to have nothing to do with any of these conversations. With her classic sense of humor, Chast captures the ridiculous moments of a very difficult time in her life. This graphic memoir is so good; no wonder it was a finalist for the National Book Award.

I had never read Annie Dillard before, so I thought this short book of essays would be a great place to start. Dillard possesses the ability to capture ideas in such beautiful ways. She’ll start talking about forming sentences and how long she feels that it takes, and I find myself completely engrossed with how she spent her afternoon. She has a lot to say about the craft of writing, how much of it is all about mindset, setting aside time for writing, and coming to writing for the long haul. If you love books about writers and writing, then you will absolutely love this book.

When Julia Lee was in high school, she witnessed the riots in L.A. Her parents owned a business in the predominantly Black neighborhood. After the white police officers were acquitted of the beating of Rodney King, Lee realized that even though she wasn’t white, she still possessed a type of racial privilege. This experience informs her interest in examining race in literature. Her parents are also working-class immigrants, and Lee didn’t grow up with much, but she ends up attending an Ivy League school, where her working-class background has never been more apparent to her. Biting the Hand is an intersectional look at Lee’s experience growing up and living as an Asian American woman in the United States. Each essay takes on the topic from a different angle as Lee examines her experience as a multi-marginalized person who, at the same time, holds a lot of privilege in different areas of her life.

Black Folk Could Fly is a posthumous collection of nonfiction works from throughout Randall Kenan’s career. In it, he writes about his childhood in rural North Carolina, his move to New York City to work on his writing career, and his travels around the country to interview Black people about their experiences. Kenan was always pondering, “What does it mean to be Black in America today?” Through his writing, we can see the progression of his thought process as he mulls over this question and reads other Black writers on the topic.

We are now in a golden age of myth retellings. Everyone and their mother’s brother has been trying their hands at these myth-inspired tales, but few authors are as good as Natalie Haynes. While Haynes is more known for her fiction, Divine Might is nonfiction, with each chapter examining different goddesses and their stories. Haynes’ holistic way of viewing these goddesses invites readers to reexamine their own assumptions about these divine figures.

Year of the Tiger was, hands down, one of my favorite books of 2022. In the disability community, Alice Wong is a legend. She’s such a strong advocate for disability justice, and her memoir is a gift. She shares stories from her life, excerpts from articles she’s written for various publications, and transcripts of interviews she conducted in the last several years. I really appreciated her multimedia approach to her memoir, which gives it a unique feel, like snapshots from her life.

Disability advocate and technology professor Ashley Shew examines the idea of “technoableism,” which is “the belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for.” As a disabled person myself, I really appreciated Shew’s frank discussion of the ways that society often forces technology on disabled people in order to “cure” us, whether we like it or not. Shew discusses the way amputees are encouraged to get prosthetics, even if they aren’t the best fit for that person’s situation. She describes how autistic and other kinds of neurodivergent people are pushed to try to behave as “normal” as possible. And she highlights how technology can actually be incredibly helpful for disabled people when they are directing their own futures.