Spoken by a mother to her small daughter as they are detained at a border wall, Under the Ocelot Sun is a powerful account of refugees’ plight. The mother speaks of the beauty of their Honduran homeland and of her abuela’s wisdom. She also touches on the violent forces they are fleeing. She wants her little one to know her heritage and why they have taken this perilous journey. Lyrically told (in English and Spanish) and vibrantly illustrated, this is a picture book for our time.

Cradled by Skeletons: A Life in Poems and Essays is a raw expression of identity and place. This memoir relates Marta Miranda-Straub’s experience of trauma, resilience, and transformation. The book also portrays how her life’s work as a social worker, educator, leader, activist, advocate, and community organizer has been fueled by discernment, resistance, and transformation of individual, institutional, and societal systems of power.

Nine hundred twenty-five Appalachian women have graduated from the life-changing New Opportunity School for Women programs located in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia/West Virginia. In I Am Not a Nobody eleven of these courageous women share their life stories—difficult and painful stories of abuse, poverty, limited education, drugs, and early marriages. They also share their life-changing journeys with the New Opportunity School for Women where they became empowered to believe in themselves and their values and abilities and gained the courage to succeed—for themselves and their families.

Grayson Armstrong’s vision for a dying church has everyone in small-town Mercy, Kentucky, talking. The truth is everyone has been talking about Grayson ever since this dark-haired twenty-eight-year-old preacher with shoulder-length hair and an ill-fitting suit drove into town twelve years before in his silver convertible with his pretty wife and two rambunctious boys. It’s his untimely death, though, that has everyone trying to understand who they thought he was.

Us, in Pieces is a fresh and witty love story that follows two old friends into the unforgiving and wild terrain of the heart. In college, Lilly Jameson and Adin Driscoll were as close as friends could get, until Lilly leaves unexpectedly and without explanation at the end of their sophomore year. Nearly ten years pass without contact until a sudden invitation from her parents brings them back into each other’s lives. Old, unspoken feelings resurface, and they take a gamble on their limited time together: they will be a couple for forty-eight-hours, and then go back to their own separate lives—no strings attached.