The book was a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Reading Women Award, and shortlisted for Goddard Riverside Stephen Russo Book Prize for Social Justice. After graduating from Harvard Law, she became an immigrants’ rights lawyer at Centro Legal de la Raza, a nonprofit i Michelle Kuo is the author of the memoir READING WITH PATRICK, a story of race, inequality, and the transformative power of literature. Michelle has taught English at an alternative school in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. It has been honored as a community reads pick at programs across the United States, including Washtenaw Reads, University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, and Yale Prison Education Initiative.

As Michelle puts it in The New York Times, her book is an “intimate story about the failure of the education and criminal justice systems and the legacy of slavery about how literature is for everyone, how books connect people, and the hope that with enough openness and generosity we can do the hard work of knowing each other and ourselves.Michelle Kuo is the author of the memoir READING WITH PATRICK, a story of race, inequality, and the transformative power of literature. What social transformation is necessary to change a life? And what kind of connection can two people make when there exists such dramatic inequality between them?Īt its heart Reading with Patrick is a meditation on how education changes the experience of incarceration and the limits of that change. In her time reading with Patrick, Kuo is herself transformed as she contends with the questions of what it is we owe each other and how starkly economic and racial inequality determine our life outcomes.

Patrick reads and writes daily, writing letters to his daughter and discovering new worlds both inside and outside of himself. Lewis, Marilynne Robinson, James Baldwin, W.S. At the local jail of Phillips County, Arkansas, one of the poorest counties in the United States, Michelle and her former student Patrick spend seven months poring over classic novels, poems, and historical narrative by Frederick Douglass, C.S.

Michelle kuo reading with patrick