One Book One Community 2024 Events Announced

One Book One Community is pleased to announce our fall 2024 events! 

Rising Class: How Three First-Generation College Students Conquered Their First Year by Jennifer Miller is the 2024 campuswide common read. This book was chosen because it connects with and reflects the experiences of so many on campus: undergraduates who had their college experiences shifted by COVID, first-generation college students and first-generation immigrant students. It will also be impactful for those working with students and others interested in learning about the lived experiences of others. Hopefully, it will spark meaningful conversations among students, faculty, staff and the larger community. 

Rising Class follows three first-generation freshmen – Briani, Conner and Jacklynn – as they not only experience their first semester of college but the COVID-19 pandemic that turned their spring semester upside down. From life in the Ivy League to classes at a community college, this nonfiction book follows these students’ challenges, successes and dreams as they tackle their first year of college and juggle responsibilities to their families back home.

Miller’s keynote speech will be in the John Tyson Building Auditorium 211 at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 8. A luncheon event is scheduled on Oct. 9 at noon in Arkansas Union 510-511. The signup for this popular annual lunch will be released soon, so keep an eye out!

One Book One Community is collaborating across campus to support conversations around the book and topic. The University of Arkansas Libraries has copies of the book available. There are reading circles and other events being planned. We are continuing the tradition of incorporating the OBOC read into ENGL 10013 Composition I sections to reach a large number of students on campus. Numerous other courses across campus are also participating. Well over 2,000 students are reading the book this fall!

If you would like to enter our book giveaway, join a reading circle/book club or participate in an event related to the book, please email onebook@uark.edu.

More about Jennifer Miller: Miller is the the author of five books: Rising Class (2023), Mr. Nice Guy (2018), The Heart You Carry Home (2015), The Year of the Gadfly (2012) and Inheriting the Holy Land (2005). Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Washignton Post and many other publications. Miller holds an M.F.A. in fiction-writing and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia. She has also taught creative writing and journalism at Columbia University. A Washington, D.C., native, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. 

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.