Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
The act of reading does not immediately seem like a dynamic experience. Yet in the quiet turning of pages, growth takes root — not just in knowledge, but in empathy, perspective and self-discovery.
Thus, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle’s 2025 vertical theme of “Growth” fits perfectly with Chautauqua as a community of lifelong learners. The theme responds, in part, to the 2024 CLSC theme of “Legacy,” chosen in celebration of Chautauqua Institution’s 150th Anniversary.
“Since we’ve reflected so thoroughly on our past, our history here, and celebrated that last summer, we wanted to think forward,” said Stephine Hunt, managing director of Chautauqua Literary Arts, whose department selects a minimum of nine books to coincide with each week of the Summer Assembly.
Now, as the 150th anniversary of the CLSC approaches in 2028, Hunt emphasized a desire to bring together threads of the past while looking toward the future.
“Growth is not always comfortable,” said Hunt.
In the selection of the books for the 2025 season, she imagined the curation would “not necessarily just look at beauty and progress — the experiences that keep us going — but look at parts of growth that are difficult.”
The Week One selection, King: A Life by Jonathan Eig, fits into the Chautauqua Lecture Series’ theme of transformation as the book turns Martin Luther King Jr. from myth to man in an intimate look into his triumphs and struggles. The memorialization of the civil rights leader over time has created King’s larger-than-life persona in which “it can be hard not to lose the human behind the name,” Hunt said.
Eig’s comprehensive biography addresses this problem, Hunt said, as he “beautifully transforms King’s humanity in intricate detail.”
Damon Young’s recent anthology That’s How They Get You: an Unruly Anthology of Black Humor presents a vivid and impressive collection of Black American voices for Week Two’s comedy theme.
“It gives us a glimpse into something that’s often sacred to communities of color: humor,” Hunt said. The authors translate experiences of micro- and macro-aggressions “blaringly on the page. It’s unruly because it is right there in your face.”
Hunt described the book as a call to grow one’s understanding of the systems that continue to impact communities of color on a daily basis.
In a week themed “Arts in Action: Building Community Through the Arts,” lauded short story writer George Saunders will speak on the Amphitheater stage; his newest collection, Liberation Day, is the CLSC pick for the week.
Because the Chautauqua Opera Company and Conservatory, with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, are presenting a Metropolitan Opera-commissioned workshop of Saunders’ debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, Hunt has received many questions as to why that book was not selected for Saunders’ visit. Instead of a sole focus on that novel, Hunt wanted to showcase Saunders’ Liberation Day “as one of the best short story writers of our generation.” Touching on different ideas of “liberation,” the stories reflect an intricate understanding of human ethics, relationships and freedom.
“There is something in that collection for everybody,” Hunt said.
The Week Four selection develops the theme of growth not only in the arc of its characters, but in the genre of memoir. Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez’s My Side of the River presents an intimate portrait of her life as a child of Mexican immigrants and the struggles she and her family faced when her parents were deported. Age does not limit Gutierrez’s depth and breadth of writing, but instead enhances the story with a young voice.
“I think it’s a beautiful combination of works people might have experienced before, like Javier Zamora’s Solito: A Memoir and Tara Westover’s Educated,” said Hunt.
Week Five’s theme “Innovation in Capitalism: How to Meet 21st Century Challenges?” required the team to find a book “that’s engaging and can be accessible to a wide audience.” Upon reading Cat Bohannon’s exhaustively researched Eve, Hunt said “What better way to think about growth in meeting 21st-century challenges than to see the way science is evolving right now and its much needed expansion and understanding of the female body?”
Focusing on the growth of scientific research and on the re-centering of women in the story of human evolution, the non-fiction work reveals the shortcomings of modern science as both “infuriating and illuminating,” said Hunt.
In a week focused on authoritarianism, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars introduces a gruesome and enthralling prison system in a dystopian reality only a few degrees away from our own. The story critiques the American prison system, while highlighting the development of characters who challenge the status quo.
“It follows these really incredible characters,” said Hunt. “Some you love to hate, some you’re rooting for the entire time, and they surprise you, and some that you just heartachingly want something good to happen for them.”
A finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Prize, Adjei-Brenyah’s book stirred intense discussion from Chautauqua audiences last year, Hunt said, and she hopes that “people will take on those big emotions and will examine that reading experience” during Week Six.
Week Seven’s selection for “Kwame Alexander and Friends: The Power of One” invites Kevin Nguyen to discuss his novel Mỹ Documents, which fictionalizes the immigrant experience.
“There’s four different characters we follow,” Hunt said, “and we see the reverberations of their choices and actions and the power they hold.”
Exploring themes of resilience, identity and empathy, the story fits into the theme by centering “the growth of human experience,” according to Hunt.
Mỹ Documents replaces the previously announced Week Seven selection, Blackout by Angie Thomas, who canceled due to scheduling conflicts.
The two poetry selections for Week Eight unite a single humanity across different languages and lenses. E. Ethelbert Miller and Rafi Ellenson’s the little book of e demonstrates how the “Jewish and Black experience intermingle and interact in this country and beyond,” Hunt said, with the book emphasizing the “dynamic ways that language can bring us together.”
In her collection The Tiny Journalist, Naomi Shihab Nye draws on her ancestry in the West Bank of Israel. The book “shows us the experiences of the young Palestinian girl in an occupied territory in the West Bank but also shows us that this conflict doesn’t erase the humanity of the story,” said Hunt.
Miller and Nye will discuss the little book of e and The Tiny Journalist in an event together during a week themed “The Middle East: The Gulf States’ Emerging Influence.”
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel, by Debra Magpie Earling, concludes the CLSC season by taking control of the narrative of the legendary Indigenous figure.
“Unless you’ve had interactions in archives, it’s certainly not a story you’re likely to hear,” Hunt said. “Debra Maggpie Earling, as an Indigenous woman herself, really brings the heartbeat into Sacajewea’s life.”
In a week focused on the relationship of the past and the present, Earling’s book brings the theme of growth full-circle as it expands historical narratives through a story about a highly mythologized individual.
The breadth and depth of the 2025 CLSC selections promise to plant seeds of compassion, perspective and ideas that will continue to grow long after the quiet turn of the final page.
