Summer Reading
A central feature of Skidmore’s First-Year Experience is the Summer Reading program.
Its purpose
is twofold.
- First, we want to highlight that intellectual engagement and education is not confined to the classroom or to academic calendars. On the contrary, learning is ongoing and transcends campus boundaries.
- Second, we want to provide the first-year class, as well as the broader campus community, with a common intellectual experience centered on an engaging topic. The summer reading helps us accomplish both of these goals.
Sincerely,
Professor Rachel Roe-Dale
Director of the First-Year Experience and Professor of Mathematics and Statistics
Class of 2029 Selection
We are excited to announce the Class of 2029 summer reading is Stay True by Hua Hsu. Hsu received a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his memoir, and he is a Professor of Literature at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Many thanks to the Skidmore Office of Special Programs and the McCormack Artist-Scholar Residency Fund for their support of the summer reading program.
suggest a summer reading title
past summer reading titles:
- Class of 2028: Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad
- Class of 2027: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Class of 2026: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
- Class of 2025: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
- Class of 2024:Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
- Class of 2023: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling
- Class of 2022: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
- Class of 2021: The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation by Randall Fuller
- Class of 2020: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Class of 2019: Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
- Class of 2018: What Money Can't Buy by Michael Sandel
- Class of 2017: The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
- Class of 2016: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
- Class of 2015: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
- Class of 2014: Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
- Class of 2013: Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World by Eric Foner
- Class of 2012: A Tale of God's Will: A Requiem for Katrina soundtrack by Terence Blanchard
- Class of 2011: Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
- Class of 2010: Life on the Color Line by Gregory H. Williams
- Class of 2009: The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heanley