Common Read

The annual Common Read is designed to give students new to Mount Holyoke College their first intellectual dialogue based on a shared text. New students start to explore the selected text during Orientation and continue the discussion into their fall classes and throughout the year.

Open to the entire College community to read and discuss — staff on campus and alum groups across the country discuss the book — the Common Read sets the tone and frame discussions for the upcoming academic year.

Current and prospective students, faculty, staff, alums and trustees are invited to participate.

Campus Voices

The Common Read experience

Students holding up their copies of There, There by Tommy Orange

Attending the Common Read Kickoff

explore stories

Happening at Mount Holyoke

The Common Read in the news

Earl Wren ’24, An AAC user in a manual wheelchair

Alum Earl Wren ’24 receives AHEAD Student Recognition Award

Mount Holyoke College alum Earl Wren ’24 is the recipient of the AHEAD Student Recognition Award for their work amplifying student-led networks of accessibility and disability support and providing critical feedback to the Disability Services office.

Mount Holyoke Campus during the summer of 2024 - a banner on a pole out of focus with a brick building with pretty architectural details in the background

Managing difficult conversations as a life skill

Marcella Runell, vice president of student life and dean of students at Mount Holyoke College, spoke to The Boston Globe about fostering the skill of having difficult conversations.

I never thought of it that way, book cover

The 2024 Common Read: “I Never Thought of It That Way”

Mount Holyoke College’s 2024 Common Read is “I Never Thought of It That Way,” a timely personal guide to the front lines of a crisis that threatens America — broken conversations among confounded people.

Common Read selections

Year	Author	Title
2023	Written by people with disabilities and edited by disabled activist and writer Alice Wong	“Disability Visibility”
2022	Robin Wall Kimmerer	“Braiding Sweetgrass”
2021	Jesmyn Ward	“The Fire This Time” \| Library guide for “The Fire This Time”
2020	The New York Times Magazine	“The 1619 Project”
2019	Tommy Orange	"There, There"
2018	Cristina Henriquez	“The Book of Unknown Americans”
2017	Claudia Rankine	“Citizen: An American Lyric”
2016	Ta-Nehisi Coates	“Between the World and Me”
2015	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	“Americanah”
2014	Piper Kerman	“Orange is the New Black”
2013	Junot Díaz	“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
2012	Jhumpa Lahiri	“The Namesake”
2011	Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn	“Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide”
2010	List of readings
2009	Anne Fadiman	“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures”
2008	Danzy Senna	“Causasia”
2007	Elizabeth Kolbert	“Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change”
2006	Tracy Kidder	“Mountains Beyond Mountains”
2005	Ruth L. Ozeki	“My Year of Meats”
2004	Azar Nafisi	“Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”
2003	Barbara Kingsolver	“The Poisonwood Bible”
2002	Barbara Ehrenreich	“Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”
2001	Julia Alvarez	“How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”
2000	Terry Tempest Williams	“Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”