When I Was Puerto Rican

The Complete Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi · 352 pages

From inside front cover: The story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a ... loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a coutnry plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming -- both sweet and terrible; and, fina

Reaching Out

Francisco Jimenez · 196 pages

Leaving his home in a migrant community, Francisco sets off for college, carrying memories of years of poverty and prejudice.

Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child

Elva Trevino Hart · 236 pages

Autobiography. Latino/a Studies. BAREFOOT HEART is a vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. Elva Trevino Hart was born in south Texas to Mexican immigrants and spent her childhood moving back and forth between Texas and Minnesota, eventually leaving that world to earn a master's degree in computer science/engineering. This is a

'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood

Richard Blanco · 260 pages

A poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities. Richard Blanco’s childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents’ nostalgic w

Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America

Firoozeh Dumas · 205 pages

In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father's glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas's wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a

Stealing Buddha's Dinner

Bich Minh Nguyen · 272 pages

As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mai

Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy's Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard

Mawi Asgedom, Dave Berger · 167 pages

An autobiography of a boy who, at the age of three, fled civil war in Ethiopia by walking with his mother and brother to a Sudanese refugee camp, and later moved to Chicago and earned a scholarship to Harvard University. Includes recipes and discussion questions

Do They Hear You When You Cry?

Fauziya Kassindja, Layli Miller Bashir, Fauziya Kasinga · 518 pages

A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey

Leila Ahmed · 318 pages

Leila Ahmed grew up in Cairo in the 1940s and '50s in a family that was eagerly and passionately political. Although many in the Egyptian upper classes were firmly opposed to change, the Ahmeds were proud supporters of independence. But when the Revolution arrived, the family's opposition to Nasser's policies led to persecutions that would throw their lives into turmoil and set their youngest chil

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali · 353 pages

"Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress

Fifth Chinese Daughter

Jade Snow Wong · 264 pages

No well brought up Chinese girl refers to herself in the first person, so the author tells her charming story in the approved Chinese fashion. How, as the fifth daughter of a hard-working Chinese tailor, she and her sisters lived in a San Francisco basement, cutting, sewing, and sorting hundreds of men's overalls for the wholesale market. How she went to school and later, in face of parental oppos

Paper Daughter: A Memoir

M. Elaine Mar · 292 pages

When she was five years old, M. Elaine Mar and mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver to join her father in a community more Chinese than American, more hungry than hopeful. While working with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and living in the basement of her aunt's house, Mar quickly masters English and begins to excel in school. But as her home and school life - Chinese trad

West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

Tamim Ansary, Mir Tamim Ansary · 292 pages

"The day after Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an anguished e-mail to twenty friends, discussing the attack from his perspective as an Afghan American. That message, spreading via the Internet, reached and touched millions of people around the world." "Now Ansary gives us West of Kabul, East of New York, an account of a life lived in two very

Out of Place

Edward Said · 320 pages

"Out of Place is an extraordinary story of exile, a narrative of many departures, a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the Arab landscape of his early years - "the many places and people [who] no longer exist....Essentially a

American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

Marie Arana · 320 pages

For years, Arana shuttled easily between her father's aristocratic Peruvian family and her mother's American family. Only when she immigrated to the United States as an adolescent did she come to understand that her cultural identity was split in half. She was a hybrid Hispanic American: a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica. In her father's Peruvian family, Marie Arana wa

God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir

John Bul Dau, Michael S. Sweeney · 295 pages

"Lost Boy" John Bul Dau's harrowing experience surviving the brutal horrors of Sudanese civil war and his adjustment to life in modern America is chronicled in this inspiring memoir and featured in an award-winning documentary film of the same name. Movingly written, the book traces Dau's journey through hunger, exhaustion, terror, and violence as he fled his homeland, dodging ambushes, massacres

American Gypsy

Oksana Marafioti · 370 pages

The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir

Jennifer Baszile · 310 pages

Traces the author's coming-of-age in an exclusive white California suburb in the 1970s and 1980s, describing the prejudices that minimized her family's achievements and her struggles to define herself as "the black girl next door" in light of her parents' dreams.

Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh · 144 pages

"At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. At age eleven, when the United States began their invasion in Iraq and the television was flooded with anti-Muslim commentary, Amani felt overwhelmed with feelings of intense alienation from American so

The Illiterate

Agota Kristof · 44 pages

Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter

Adeline Yen Mah · 278 pages

Adeline Yen Mah was born in 1937 in Tianjin, a port city one thousand miles north of Shanghai. She was the fifth and youngest child of an affluent family. Her grand aunt - in an unprecedented achievement - had founded the Shanghai Women's Bank in 1924, and her father was a revered businessman whose reputation for turning iron into gold began when he started his own firm at the age of nineteen. Ye

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · 281 pages

She was born Marguerite, but her brother Bailey nicknamed her Maya ("mine"). As little children they were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Their early world revolved around this remarkable woman and the Store she ran for the black community. White people were more than strangers - they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen they ruled. The Store was a microcosm

The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 248 pages

An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civiliza