📖 StrongWithDana's Ultimate Book List

Community First

💰 Fundraiser alert! Donate to my friend Maureen's Mobile Care Chicago fundraiser to help hit her $1000 goal and provide high quality healthcare in disinvested neighborhoods in Chicago.

Miles for Mobile Care is a digital, four-week fundraising campaign that highlights the power of access. This year, we’re walking The Road Less Traveled: a reflection of the daily work our mobile clinics do to bring free, high-quality care into communities where barriers to care are high and provider access is low. We go where other providers won’t: into school parking lots, neighborhood blocks, and community spaces often overlooked by the traditional healthcare system. This year, we’re raising $20,000 to expand that reach by launching a new Dental Van. Every dollar donated helps us keep more kids in class and out of pain, and bring care where it’s needed most.

🎃 Happy Halloween, Friends!

Today, I'm sharing the first version of the official Strong With Dana reading list. I've chosen these books because they span across all the topics I cover in this newsletter and on my Instagram. This way, everything is in one place, so when you need a recommendation, you can come back to this post!

I've separated them by topic and included the Bookshop.org link to purchase, which will allow you to support local bookstores in your area. I've also included audiobooks wherever they're available.

Plus, there's a FREE option for each one - our very own Chicago Public Library! You can place any of these on hold with the links below to have them shipped to your nearest CPL branch. If you don't have a card, pop in to a branch sometime soon. It only takes a few minutes to sign up, and you can start using it right away.

Happy reading!

🧡 Immigration

📚 Our Migrant Souls, by Héctor Tobar

Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now.

Audiobook: Spotify | Libby
Get it at the library

📚 Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, by Jose Antonio Vargas

This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.

Audiobook: Libro.fm | Spotify
Get it at the library

🌻 Community and Culture

📚 Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, by Eric Klinenberg

Starting with the question of why so many people died at home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how the city government responded to the crisis, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported on and explained these events.

Get it at the library

📚 Unabridged: The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary, by Stefan Fatsis

Fatsis reveals the little-known story of how the brothers George and Charles Merriam acquired Noah Webster's original American dictionary and reshaped the business of language forever. Merriam-Webster became America's most successful and enduring compendium of words, withstanding intense competition and cultural controversies--only to be threatened by the power of Google and artificial intelligence today.

Audiobook: Spotify | Libro.fm
Get it at the library

🍁Movement, Mind, and Body

📚 The Year’s 20 Best Sports Writing 2025, edited by Hanif Abdurraqib

This extraordinary collection reveals the fascinating stories behind the sports we love, the competitors who push their boundaries, and the cultures they are ultimately embedded in.

📚 The Body Is Not An Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor

World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength.

Get it at the library

📚 "You Just Need To Lose Weight" And 19 Other Myths about Fat People, by Aubrey Gordon

This book equips readers with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people. Bringing her dozen years of community organizing and training to bear, Gordon shares the rhetorical approaches she and other organizers employ to not only counter these pernicious myths, but to dismantle the anti-fat bias that so often underpin them.

Audiobook: OneDrive
Get it at the library

📚 Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker

Since May 2020, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker have used their Conspirituality podcast to expose countless facets of the intersection of alt-health practitioners with far-right conspiracy trolls. Now this expansive and revelatory book unpacks the follies, frauds, cons and cults that dominate the New Age and wellness spheres and betray the trust of people who seek genuine relief in this uncertain age.

Audiobook: Libro.fm
Get it at the library

🍃 Indigenous Science and Education

📚 An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar‑Ortiz

With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present.

Audiobook: Overdrive | Chicago Public Library
Bonus: there’s a version for young people! 

📚 Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.

Audiobook: Libby
Get it at the library

📚 Returning Home to Our Bodies, by Abigail Rose Clarke

A body-based healing model that interrogates what we’ve been wrongly taught about hierarchies of nature and the body—and pushes back against the white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism embedded in modern embodiment practices.

Get it at the library

📚 Sacred Instructions, by Sherri Mitchell

Penobscot leader, lawyer, and activist Sherri Mitchell offers enduring lessons rooted in powerful First Nations cosmologies and timeless universal insights. She speaks directly into the crises of our time—environmental injustice, colonial extraction, and profound disconnection—with teachings and tools for embodying sacred and reciprocal ways of life.

Get it at the library

📚 An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo

A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.

Get it at the library

With you as we educate ourselves,
Dana