Gabino Iglesias

Alexandra Robbins illuminates how teachers, who shape our future, live a constant battle against financial pressure, entitled parents, politicians, and the educational system at the local level.

Javier Zamora's book, as touching as it is sad, and as full of hope and kindness as it is harrowing, is the kind of narrative that manages to bring a huge debate down to a very personal space.

The book by NPR's Tim Mak might be the final blow in terms of exposing the organization's rotten core and showing how a boundless love for money and power has eaten away at the group's foundations.

Raven Leilani's new novel will make you cringe for all the right reasons. It's an intergenerational, interracial love story with a heart of noir and gallows humor, so honest it will make you squirm.

Betsy Bonner presents her sister with love, but also with honesty; she is the storyteller, but Atlantis Black is the story, the mystery, the victim, sometimes the perpetrator and always the question.

Journalist Eduardo Porter has written a book that cuts to the root of racism, tracing it from slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation — and bringing it to today — with unblinking honesty and facts.

As "traditional bonds disintegrate in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and secularization, brands and objects become a means to curate and project who we are," writes reporter Adam Minter.

Andre Perry's debut essay collection reads like a slightly fragmented memoir focused on the search for identity, the desire to write, and his constant sense of unease as a black man in Iowa City.

Confined in a tiny cell, Ahmet Altan recoils into his own thoughts; his talent as a writer allows him to communicate his experience in rich, haunting detail in I Will Never See the World Again.

Ian Urbina combines stellar investigative reporting skills and straightforward writing to convey what lies on the other side of the ocean — opposite cruise-ship vacations to beautiful beaches.