The Voice of Witness team has put together a short summer reading list, featuring a few personal recommendations from our staff. What do you plan to read this summer? 
Electric Arches
by Eve L. Ewing
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality.
The Faraway Brothers
by Lauren Markham
In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores as they are forced to flee El Salvador and make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
by Zora Neale Hurston
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis, then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.
Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince
Edited by Peter Orner & Evan Lyon
Seven years after the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck Haiti, the island nation remains in crisis, all but ignored by the international community. At the center of this crisis is Lavil—“The City” in Kreyol, as Port-au-Prince is known to Haitians—the cultural, political, and economic capital of Haiti and home to over 2.5 million resilient souls.
Pachinko
By Min Jin Lee
Profoundly moving and gracefully told, Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them. Sunja finds unexpected salvation when a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan to start a new life.
