The Write Page Book Group

The QEP is dedicated to creating fun opportunities for students to foster positive attitudes about writing. We encourage students to explore our values and views on the world through engagement in reading, writing, and conversation. If you are interested in stimulating your critical thinking and awareness, please join us!

Spring 2016: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author.

Following the riveting keynote address delivered by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author, Isabel Wilkerson, at Savannah State University's 2nd Annual Women's Leadership Conference in March 2016, we organized an exciting book discussion group.

Fall 2013: The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today by Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter

In this riveting book, authors and authorities on modern day slavery Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter expose the disturbing phenomenon of human trafficking and slavery that exists now in the United States. In The Slave Next Door we find that slaves are all around us, hidden in plain sight: the dishwasher in the kitchen of the neighborhood restaurant, the kids on the corner selling cheap trinkets, the man sweeping the floor of the local department store. In these pages we also meet some unexpected slaveholders, such as a 27-year old middle-class Texas housewife who is currently serving a life sentence for offences including slavery. Weaving together a wealth of voices--from slaves, slaveholders, and traffickers as well as from experts, counselors, law enforcement officers, rescue and support groups, and others--this book is also a call to action, telling what we, as private citizens, can do to finally bring an end to this horrific crime.

Spring 2014: What the Devil Meant for Bad by T.M.Duncan

Follow thirty-two-year-old Shantelle Williams in her hilariously serious journey toward channeling her Higher Self. Shantelle marks the third generation of women in her family to mistress as a means of making ends meet. However, the collapse of her gifted lifestyle causes her to question her mere existence. Who is she? What is her purpose? Everyone seems to know theirs but her. She begins to realize that the life that she is living is not hers and she must make a critical choice of either stepping onto new grounds or resorting back to what she knows best. Her decision grows even more complicated with the revelation of a familiar stranger from her past causing everything that she thinks she knows to be questioned in ways that only she can answer.

Spring 2013: Finding My Way by Lisa Dumas Harris

Angel Wesley, the only child of a drug-addicted mother grows up in the West Savannah's Projects lonely, confused, and sad. Despite years of abuse and watching her mother lead an unproductive life, Angel refuses to be a victim of circumstance. She's determined to be a strong, black woman. With the help of her friends Kim, Lynn, Michelle, and Wanda, Angel finds strength to overcome her upbringing, but it wasn't until she meets striving entrepreneur Derrick Simmons, that her life would change forever. Derrick introduces Angel to a love she has never known, and for the first time in her life, she feels complete. However, along with their priceless romance come numerous speed bumps, potholes, and a variety of twists and turns.

Fall 2012: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West; QEP partnership with Tigers on the Probe.

Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control-relegating millions to a permanent second-class status-even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action."

Fall 2012: The Help by Kathryn Stockett; QEP partnership with Tigers on the Probe.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women-mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends-view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.