Orcutt chairs Common Reading committee

NC State just announced Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me as its Common Reading Program title for 2017. The book, which confronts the social construction of race and the role it has played in our nation’s past and present, will be distributed to all new first-year students during orientation and will be the focus of Convocation in August to welcome the Class of 2021.

NCSU Libraries Assistant Head of Collections and Research Strategy Darby Orcutt chaired the selection committee this year, which includes students, faculty and staff. Orcutt lauded the book and noted that “Coates’s intimate working out of his own identity within the larger, and often invisible, forces and frameworks of American culture and history will hopefully inspire students who are themselves at a point in their lives of questioning and crafting their own sense of who they are. At a larger level too, this book should foster important conversations across subjects and disciplines on very timely issues, encouraging and assisting us as a campus community to grow in our understanding of ourselves and others.”