Smith Reads

What Is 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

New to Smith Reads

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, our choices offer keen insight into the challenges of our everyday world and support OEI’s mission of opening hearts, minds, and systems.

2025 Smith Reads Selection

Calling In

How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel

Please join us in reading Loretta J. Ross’s Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel, our 2025 Smith Reads selection.

This year, Smith College celebrates its 150th Anniversary. The Smith Reads Program reflects an ongoing history of selecting insightful books to introduce new students to academic life, to share a common experience as they transition to college, and to stimulate conversations among people who do not yet know one another. This year, Smith Reads is pleased to showcase the work of our very own faculty member, Professor Loretta J. Ross. With vivid stories from her five remarkable decades in activism, her 2025 book, Calling In, invites readers to examine shared values and self-reflection as strategic choices for making real change.

“Courageous, awe-inspiring, and blisteringly authentic, Calling In is a practical new solution from one of our country’s most extraordinary change-makers—one anyone can learn to use to transform frustrating and divisive conflicts that stand in the way of real connection with the people in your life.” —Simon & Schuster

Check out the Smith Libraries’ Smith Reads Research Guide

Sensitive Content
As a life-long supporter of sexual violence victims and as a survivor herself, Prof. Ross’s book includes some sensitive material, especially in the first chapter, as she details her own experience. We ask that readers be aware of their comfort levels around reading content of this nature, and if concerned, you might skip ahead to Chapter 2 without missing the key messages of the book.

About Professor Loretta J. Ross

This year, the author of the Smith Reads selection is a Smith faculty member in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, a pioneering Black feminist, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. We hope you will enjoy this special welcome message from Prof. Ross and use Calling In as an opportunity to talk and study with this vital member of our own community.

More About Professor Ross

Need Help Purchasing or Locating a Copy?

If you need help purchasing or locating a copy of Calling In, please contact Xochitl Quiroz, our First-Years’ Engagement Librarian, or check out the sections titled “Copies of Calling In at Smith College Libraries” or “Audiobook Options” on the Smith Reads Research Guide.

Past Readings

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.

2024
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil

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

Contact Smith Reads

Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

Email: smithreads@smith.edu

If you have a suggestion, please submit a nomination for Smith Reads for Fall 2026.