Oppression, Revolution and Change: New Nonfiction

Miriam Pawel is an award-winning reporter and editor who spent twenty-five years working for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement. Pawel was recently an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow and a John Jacobs Fellow at the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. In her latest book, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (Bloomsbury Press), Pawel offers a searching, yet empathetic portrayal of Cesar Chavez, who founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation. He rose from migrant worker to national icon, becoming one of the great charismatic leaders of the 20th century. Two decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino leader in US history. Yet his life story has been told only in hagiography-until now. Drawing on thousands of documents and scores of interviews, this biography deepens our understanding of one of Chavez's most salient qualities: his profound humanity.

Nelson A. Denis is a writer, film director, and former New York State Assemblyman. His award-winning films premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico. His editorials for the New York Daily News and El Diario (over 300 of them) won awards from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.He is the writer of eight feature-length screenplays, writer/director of the feature film Vote For Me!. In War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony (Nation Books), Denis tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico’s history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination.

Ronnie Greene is an investigative journalist for the Associated Press who teaches graduate writing at Johns Hopkins University. Before joining AP, he edited a 2014 Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation for the Center for Public Integrity. Greene spent much of his career at the Miami Herald, and he is author of Night Fire: Big Oil, Poison Air, and Margie Richard’s Fight to Save Her Town. In Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence and Cover-Up in the Wake of Katrina (Beacon Press), Greene explores one of the most dramatic cases of police violence seen in our country in the last decade—the massacre of innocent people, carried out by members of the NOPD, in the brutal, disorderly days following Hurricane Katrina. It reveals the fear that gripped the police of a city slid into anarchy, the circumstances that drove desperate survivors to the bridge, and the horror that erupted when the police opened fire.