McSweeney’s Teaching Companions
To help facilitate classroom discussion we’ve created the following educator guides for select titles, along with title specific educator discounts.
Curated by Natasha Marin
Featuring a foreword by Jason Reynolds.
Award-winning viral curator and poet Natasha Marin follows up her acclaimed Black Imagination with a brilliant new collection of sharply rendered, breathtaking reflections from more than one hundred Black voices.
When do you feel most indigenous?
What does it sound like when you claim yourself?
When do you feel most powerful?
Black Powerful explores the monumental resilience, joy, and triumph of Black People everywhere.
Cover art by Vanessa German.(Click here for teaching companion.)
Enter the code “BlackPowerfulGroup” for 15% off orders of five or more to facilitate classroom conversation.
by Emerson Whitney
Emerson Whitney writes, “Really, I can’t explain myself without making a mess.” What follows is that mess—electrifying, gorgeous, defiant.
At Heaven’s center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose—all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton—to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.
An expansive examination of what makes us up, Heaven wonders what role our childhood plays in who we are. Can we escape the discussion of causality? Is the story of our body just ours? With extraordinary emotional force, Whitney sways between theory and memory in order to explore these brazen questions and write this unforgettable book. (Click here for teaching companion.)
Enter the code “HeavenEdu” for 15% off orders of five or more to facilitate classroom conversation.
Curated by Natasha Marin
“Witnessing is sacred work too. Seeing ourselves as whole and healthy is an act of pure rebellion in a world so titillated by our constant subjugation,” reflects viral curator Natasha Marin, on Black Imagination. This dynamic collection of Black voices works like an incantation of origin, healing, and imagination. Born from a series of conceptual art exhibitions, the perspectives gathered here are no where near monochromatic. “Craving nuance over stereotype, we sought out black children, black youth, LGBTQ+ black folks, unsheltered black folks, incarcerated black folks, neurodivergent black folks, as well as differently-abled black folks.” Each insists on their own variance and challenges every reader to witness for themselves that Black Lives (and Imaginations) Matter. (Click here for teaching companion.)
Enter the code “BlackJoy” for 15% off orders of five or more to facilitate classroom conversation.
Of Color
by Jaswinder Bolina
In his debut essay collection, award-winning poet Jaswinder Bolina meditates on “how race,” as he puts it, “becomes metaphysical”: the cumulative toll of the microaggressions and macro-pressures lurking in the academic market, on the literary circuit, in the dating pool, and on the sidewalks of any given U.S. city. Training a keenly thoughtful lens on questions that are never fully abstract―about immigration and assimilation and class, about the political utility of art, about what it means to belong to a language and a nation that brand you as other―Of Color is a bold, expansive, and finally optimistic diagnosis of present-day America. (Click here for teaching companion.)
Enter the code “OfColor” for 15% off orders of five or more to facilitate classroom conversation.