Richmond Public Library’s Read Up Richmond challenges people to read differently, to read outside one’s own lived experience to develop an understanding of the world. This program is an opportunity for people from different walks of life to come together in the library to learn together, enter into a conversation with the larger community, and share the same space – making Richmond a more connected, more civil place.
Read Up Richmond 2024 features Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand, in conversation with Linda Janet Holmes. Take My Hand was inspired by true events and is a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients.
Their conversation will be followed by a Q&A period. Works from both authors will be available for purchase at the library and a signing will be held after the main event.
Be sure to register for this event!
Richmond Public Library will be giving away copies of the book! Drawings will be held every week leading up to Read Up Richmond on October 13, 2024. One entry per person, please. All lucky winners will be notified by phone, and will be able to pick up their copy at their local RPL branch.
Whether you have already read Take My Hand, are waiting to read it, or just want to know more about the ways that race, gender, and poverty impact medical and reproductive justice outcomes, try these other titles:
Nonfiction Titles
- Birthing Liberation: How Reproductive Justice Can Set Us Free by Sabia Wade
- Black Women and Public Health: Strategies to Name, Locate, and Change Systems of Power by Stephanie Y. Evans
- The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches From a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal by Brian H. Williams
- The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants out of America by Daniel Okrent
- Imbeciles: the Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen
- Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya
- Invisible Labor: the Untold Story of the Cesarean Section by Rachel Somerstein
- Legacy: a Black Physician Reckons With Racism in Medicine by Uche Blackstock
- Loved and Wanted: a Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood by Christa Parravani
- No Choice: the Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right by Becca Andrews
- The Pain Gap How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women by Anushay Hossain
- Pregnant While Black: Advancing Justice for Maternal Health in America by Monique Rainford
- Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia by Elizabeth Catte
- Say Anarcha: a Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health by J. C. Hallman
- Twice as Hard: the Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, From the Civil War to the 21st Century by Jasmine Brown
- Under the Skin: the Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa
- Undue Burden: Life-and-Death Decisions in Post-Roe America by Shefali Luthra
- Unfit Heiress: the Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt by Audrey Clare Farley
- We’ll Fight it Out Here: a History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity by David Chanoff
- A Woman’s Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice by Felicia Ann Kornbluh
Fiction Titles
- Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
- Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain
- Black Sun Rising by Matthew Carr
- Master Class by Christina Dalcher
- The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
- Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo
- This Other Eden by Paul Harding
- When She Woke by Hilary Jordan
- White Tears by Hari Kunzru
- The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
- Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
- The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
- Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner
- The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope
- The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
- Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton
- Great Small Things by Jodi Picoult
- River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer
- Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
- Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
