Tesoro by Yesika Salgado is Ackerman’s Community Book Club November book of the month. The author, a Salvadorian-American writer, is a two-time National Poetry Slam finalist and the recipient of the 2020 International Latino Book Award in Poetry. A self-described “fat, fly, and brown poet and activist,” Salgado writes about “her family, her culture, her city, and her fat brown body.” Each poem in Tesoro glimpses into the complexity and multidimensionality of forging an identity as a Latina growing up in the stigmatized and racialized US society.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson is Ackerman’s Community Book Club October book of the month. This book was chosen because it describes the racial hierarchy in the United States as a caste system—an unseen infrastructure that tightly holds each group in its place.

Ackerman’s Community Book Club is a pathway to curiosity. We invite you to read one book each month that explores diversity, equity, and inclusion. The books on our list have been selected with the aim of increasing knowledge, empathy, willingness, and skill to confront xenophobia as therapists, educators, and lifelong learners, in the personal and professional spaces we occupy.