Smith Reads

Smith Reads is a first-year reading experience for all students new to Smith College. This includes first-year students, Ada Comstock Scholars, and visiting and transfer students. The program consists of three essential components:

• Reading the assigned text before your arrival at Smith
• Attending the guest author’s speaking engagement
• Participating in small group discussions of the reading

On Cromwell Day 2022, the college announced that our Smith Reads program will collaborate with the Office of Equity and Inclusion in advancing their mission toward improving and enriching the educational work and experiences of everyone in the Smith community.

To that end, we anticipate that our choices moving forward will offer keen insight into the discrepancies of our everyday world and support OEI’s mission of opening hearts, minds and systems.

The first-year reading program at Smith has been in place since 1999. Since its inception, the program’s mission has been predicated on the awareness that co-curricular activities are vital to a student’s overall academic success and residential experience.

Reading closely and deeply serves as a tool—a means—not an end in itself. Reading prompts participants to reflect on their own background, beliefs and experience. Engaging in reading with others provides all readers with a commonality to anchor further conversation.

While books comprise the basis of most first-year reading experiences, other forms of “texts,” such as paintings, photographs, film, poetry and works of art are also considered valuable as potential and future reads.

As a community initiative, Smith Reads operates so that all incoming students:

• enjoy a shared intellectual experience upon their arrival at Smith
• join a facilitated conversation about topics of intellectual, social and/or ethical significance with their house peers
• interact with critically acclaimed authors, scholars and artists as well as with Smith faculty and teaching staff who are invested in their learning

Following is an abbreviated history of past books for Smith Reads.

2023
The Book of Delights, Ross Gay

2022
The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki

2021
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

2020
Educated, Tara Westover

2019
How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, Andrew Hoffman

2018
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

2017
The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez

2016
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

2015
The Collapse of Western Civilization, Naomi Oreskes

2014
Whistling Vivaldi, Claude Steele

2013
My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor

2012
Dreaming in French, Alice Kaplan

2011
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

2010
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women, Nicholas D. Kristop and Sheryl WuDunn

2009
The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones