Centering Student Voices

On the opening page of Unchartered: How One Public High School Transformed First-Generation College Success by Erika M. Kitzmiller ’00, a majority-Black, Title I school celebrates receiving a National Blue Ribbon Award with the choir singing “Stand By Me.” Since then, the Trump administration has discontinued the Blue Ribbon program, a public recognition of excellence, as part of its push to defederalize schooling, representing just one of the many shifts rocking the foundation of the U.S. education system in recent years.

Across the political spectrum, there is a growing consensus that public schools are failing, and that top-down, market-driven reforms present the best path forward. In Unchartered, Kitzmiller pushes back against this narrative, highlighting the promise of “asset-based, inquiry-driven school reform” that foregrounds the perspectives of students and educators and amplifies the successful practices happening in even the most under-resourced public schools.

Unchartered is the culmination of an ambitious research-to-practice partnership that aimed to increase college persistence for students at an urban public high school, most of them first-generation students from low-income families. Kitzmiller was herself a first-generation student at Wellesley, so her lens is not just that of a researcher but one that reflects firsthand experience and a personal investment in the mission of preparing first-generation students for college success.

Kitzmiller embedded herself within the school’s community for years, logging hundreds of hours of classroom observations, focus groups, interviews, and surveys, which the book captures in compelling vignettes. In one, a teacher introduces a gender studies course as the school attempts to improve student engagement by offering more electives. The students enter a lively debate about the feminist origins of the Black Lives Matter movement, practicing critical thinking and communication skills that would transfer seamlessly to any college setting.

Rather than conducting research on her participants, Kitzmiller engaged them as expert collaborators throughout the project, working with them not only to design the study but to use the findings to drive change. What resulted was a real, measurable transformation in the school’s culture and college outcomes—a testament to the power of Kitzmiller’s “decolonial, liberatory” approach to education research and reform.

The theme of Unchartered is “We can try.” It’s what the school’s principal said when Kitzmiller first broached the topic of launching this project, and it reappears throughout the book as the motivating spirit behind her work. In an era of diminishing support for public education, Kitzmiller urges us to consider a future in which we bolster the good work happening in public schools across the country and uplift the educators and students who continue, against all odds, to try.

Finding Our Voices

Susan Wolfe Ware ’72, Speaking Louder Than I Can: The Power of Feminist Biography
Oxford University Press, 312 pages, $35.00

In Speaking Louder Than I Can, eminent historian Susan Wolfe Ware ’72 traces the rise of feminist biography from the 1970s onward, arguing that recovering women’s lives requires more than simply adding female figures to history. Through profiles of groundbreaking women including Alice Paul, Pauli Murray, and Carolyn Gold Heilbrun ’47, Ware explores how feminist biographers reshaped the field by placing gender and modern feminist interpretation at the center of writing about their lives.

A Life in Nature

Martha Hatch Balph ’65, The Entire Sky
Utah State Poetry Society, 91 pages, $10.00

The Entire Sky by Martha Hatch Balph ’65 won the Utah State Poetry Society Book Publication Award in 2025.  Her work reflects a lifetime of curiosity and creativity, drawing on experience as a poet and scientist and a deep fascination with nature. The poems include free verse, haiku, sonnets, and villanelles, and they portray the intricacies of the natural world and our shared human frailty. Balph’s own intricate pen-and-ink illustrations of birds and scenery accompany the poems.

Out of the Frying Pan

P. Paramita ’18, Appetite
Dial Press, 272 pages, $18.00

P. Paramita ’18 sets her debut novel in New Haven, Conn. Zarina, a young Bangladeshi American prep cook, struggles to balance ambition and obsession. She dreams of opening her own restaurant, cooking inventive dishes inspired by the food she grew up with. She also dreams of pro wrestler Sierra Myst. When an online post sparks an unlikely friendship with her hero, Zarina’s confidence soars—but the relationship grows all-consuming, threatening her culinary ambitions and her sense of self.

Seaside Sleuthing

Judy Foreman ’66, The Scallop Plot
She Writes Press, 272 pages, $17.99

In The Scallop Plot by Judy Foreman ’66, a former Boston Globe health columnist, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter teams up with a Provincetown, Mass., scallop fisherwoman to uncover a deadly scheme involving offshore wind power, gene-edited scallops, and paralytic shellfish poisoning. As a developer plots to destroy local scallop beds to clear the way for turbines, the pair follow a trail of corruption. Along the way, love blooms, tragedy strikes, and lives hang in the balance.