2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Adults

Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age

Informed by her own experiences and those of her ancestors, Harjo offers inspiration and insight for navigating the many challenges of maturation. She grapples with parents, friendships, love, and loss. She guides young readers toward painting, poetry, and music as powerful tools for developing their own ethical sensibility. As Harjo demonstrates, the act of making is an essential part of who we are, a means of inviting the past into the present and a critical tool young women can use to shape a more just future.

Braiding Sweetgrass

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.

 

To the Moon & Back

Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.

Love Is a War Song

A Muscogee pop star and a cowboy who couldn’t be more different come together to strike a deal in this new romantic comedy by Danica Nava, USA Today bestselling author of The Truth According to Ember.

Big Chief

Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unexpected, disturbingly funny and unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.

There There

A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Small Ceremonies

A poignant and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that follows the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s North End, illuminating what it's like to grow up in the heart of an Indigenous city.  

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity.

Autumn Reads at EBPL

As the leaves change with the season, so do our reading habits.  We find ourselves craving literature that matches the mood and atmosphere of the time of year.  Autumn takes on a more somber feel, one marked by wistfulness that conjures images of leaf-laden ponds and bare trees.  Below are some reading materials that evoke these emotions and puts us right into the fall setting, all of which are available through the East Brunswick Public Library catalog: