Category Archives: Books

BLACK HISTORY MONTH BOOK REVIEW – by David Grinberg

 “Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race
in Contemporary America”

James Baldwin, the famous 20th century American intellectual, once observed:

“History is the present. We carry our history with us.
To think otherwise is criminal.”

This is an important point to ponder during the annual Black History Month observance during February in the United States. Baldwin was an iconic and outspoken figure of his time who was internationally recognized as a leading voice of the African American experience.

Thus, as Baldwin reminds us posthumously, we should not only focus on trailblazers of centuries past, but also consider more recent history when assessing the state of racial progress.

Continue reading BLACK HISTORY MONTH BOOK REVIEW – by David Grinberg

New Trends in Social Awareness: Audiobooks – by Rose Joneson

Listening Impact: How Audiobooks Drive Social Awareness 

Technology has become an integral part of society, driving innovation and empowerment in many ways, including social awareness. Information and resources on social issues from various perspectives and cultures are now easily accessible to many, and one way such knowledge is spreading is through audiobooks. Audiobooks, once perceived as mere entertainment, are increasingly recognized for their unique potential to cultivate social awareness. This medium has great potential, as audiobooks have been increasing in popularity; Statista reports that audiobook publishing and consumption have increased tenfold in recent years, meaning more people are willing to listen and learn something new through these books. This immersive format offers distinct advantages in fostering empathy, understanding, and engagement with diverse perspectives and challenging issues. Here’s how audiobooks can drive social awareness:

Empathy and emotional connection

Audiobooks excel at conveying the emotional depth and complexity of characters and situations. The narrator’s voice can breathe life into diverse characters, allowing listeners to step into their shoes and experience the world through their eyes. This fosters empathy and understanding towards marginalized groups or individuals facing different challenges. For example, listening to a first-hand account of racial discrimination through an audiobook narrated by the author can be far more impactful than reading the same account on paper.

A writer’s account of listening to Michelle Zauner’s Crying In H Mart allowed her to more deeply appreciate the retelling of the author’s experiences with culture, identity, and relationship with her immigrant mother by listening to the sadness, humor, and longing in her voice. This prompted her to share the audiobook with her immigrant mother, fostering a deeper connection and awareness of each other’s social realities. Audiobooks allow for a more immersive listening experience and a greater emotional connection, making social awareness feel like a more real and tangible concept and practice rather than mere theory.

Diverse topics and perspectives

Audiobooks offer a platform for amplifying marginalized voices and perspectives that might otherwise be unheard. Listening to diverse authors narrate their own stories or experienced narrators portraying characters from different backgrounds can challenge listeners’ biases and expose them to new viewpoints.

Digital libraries also allow easy access to these diverse topics and perspectives, with millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and more available on one platform. The audiobook selection on Everand showcases a vast array of social awareness resources for various contexts, such as Rohit Bhargava and Jennifer Brown’s Beyond Diversity: 12 Non-Obvious Ways To Build A More Inclusive World or the platform-original Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language by Roxanne Gay. This exposure can be instrumental in breaking down stereotypes and fostering a more inclusive and understanding society.

Accessibility and convenience

Other than conveying messages and topics on social awareness, audiobooks play an essential role in making literacy more equitable and accessible. Audiobooks break down barriers to knowledge and understanding. Unlike traditional reading, they can be easily enjoyed during commutes, chores, or even exercise.

feature on audiobooks on NBC News notes that this convenience makes books more accessible to those with visual impairments, people with processing issues or learning disabilities, or readers who are on a busy schedule. Audiobooks can overcome challenges to literacy and make learning about social awareness less daunting or challenging, encouraging more curiosity and connection. This broader reach allows social awareness messages to reach a wider audience, potentially sparking conversations and action beyond the pages of a book.

Audiobooks are a prime example of how tech is instrumental in innovation and empowerment. By making topics on diversity, inclusion, culture, and more widely accessible and immersive, audiobooks prompt the growth of social awareness and how it can be set into motion in reality. The “Embracing Diversity in The Workplace” post highlights how diversity is crucial for innovation in the modern world, bringing together many experiences, thoughts, and ideas that can offer more solutions and approaches to problems. In turn, innovations from this diversity can create more avenues to accessibility and social awareness, such as audiobooks.

The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 1) – by Leslie Nelson

racial healing“What are the typical saboteurs of genuine efforts to have cross-racial dialogues about race?”

That was the opening question posed to Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz, co-authors of Longing Stories in Racial Healing.  They were invited by Terry Howard, co-founder of Douglasville’s 26 Tiny Paint Brushes Writers’ Guild, to speak at our Nov. guild meeting. 

The book is a memoir of the White couple’s immersive journey across the nation exploring the deep, murky, irritable waters of racism. Their mission was to have a candid and honest conversation about racism in a room mostly filled with people of color.

Continue reading The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 1) – by Leslie Nelson

SoLit Award Acceptance Speech – by Deborah Levine

Local Distinguished Author Award 2022

I’m deeply honored by this award from the prestigious SoLit Alliance. Literature is my passion and growing up in Bermuda’s 24 square miles, I explored the vast world through reading. You should have seen me with a pad of paper and a number 2 pencil while still in diapers. I published my first story at age 16 and wrote grants and newsletters for decades. But not until coming to Chattanooga did I blossom as a writer, and thought of myself as one.  

SoLit award  Chattanoogans from every sector empowered me. Thank you to faculty friends at our schools and colleges. And thanks to community service organizations for your support. I’m truly grateful to the Human Resource Directors and diversity officers who encouraged me. Many thanks to local foundations, city and county departments, and, of course our local newspapers which turned me into a columnist. And hugs to the creative souls who helped surface my storytelling skills, almost a century after my mother’s publications about the science of storytelling. Love you, Mom! 

A shout out to all my diverse colleagues with special thanks to friends who lifted me up when dire illness cut short my role as the Jewish Federation’s executive director. I thought my life was over, but you helped me find a new purpose. 

My books, articles, columns, and scripts transformed me, as has the opportunity to give back. 16 years ago, advisors, writers, poets, editors and interns helped create the American Diversity Report.  We’ve now published hundreds of writers, spreading our Inclusion message across the globe. 

SoLit’s words are profound, “Literature has the incomparable power to connect, uplift and inspire people.” And this award magnifies that power. I feel the creative energy percolating inside me. Seeing my hubby’s grin, he knows that this moment will inspire new ideas to take shape and words to be written. 

Thank you so much, SoLit. You’re elevating me to the next level, and the best is yet to come.

WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZES REVEAL 10TH ANNIVERSARY RECIPIENTS

WINDHAM-CAMPBELL
(l-r: Sharon Bridgforth, Emmanuel Iduma, Margo Jefferson, Wong May, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, Tsitsi Dangaremba, Winsome Pinnock and Zaffar Kunial)

“I am receiving this award with wide open arms, humbling crumbling with gratitude – calling the names of those on whose shoulders I stand, those that have loved and guided me, those known and unknown who are my champions.”

~Sharon Bridgforth, 2022 Windham-Campbell Recipient for Drama

The Windham-Campbell Prizes recently announced the 2022 class of recipients – including Pulitzer prize-winning Margo Jefferson, the trailblazing playwright Winsome Pinnock, and PEN Pinter prize-winning Tsitsi Dangarembga – marking the 10th anniversary of one of the world’s most significant international literary awards. 

For the past decade, this major global prize has recognized eight writers annually for literary achievement across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, at every stage of their careers. With total prize money now exceeding $14m USD, each recipient is gifted an unrestricted grant of $165,000 USD to support their writing and allow them to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.

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MODERN VIEWS OF MASCULINITY AND MANHOOD – by David B. Grinberg

BOOK REVIEW:
“TALKIN’ TO YOU, BRO!” 

James Baldwin, a leading voice of Black America in the 20th century, once observed: “The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity.”

This truism raises complex questions at the dawn of a new millennium. For instance:

  • What is the appropriate archetype to define masculinity in today’s increasingly diverse demographic construct? 
  • What characteristics most resemble the proverbial modern man according to today’s conventional wisdom?

These questions are posed and answered in a compelling new book by  Elwood David Watson, PhD: “Talkin’ To You, Bro! Liberate Yourself from the Confusing, Ambiguous Messages of Contemporary Masculinity” (Lasting Impact Press).

Continue reading MODERN VIEWS OF MASCULINITY AND MANHOOD – by David B. Grinberg

Books for Peace International Award Ambassador 2022

Deborah Levine:
Silver Ambassador for Culture

Editor-in-Chief Deborah Levine of the American Diversity Report has now been named Silver Ambassador as a  humanitarian supporter for promoting culture of the Books for Peace International Award.

Dear Noblewoman Ms. Levine,
I feel embarrassed to write to you because our small prize can never be as great as your culture, as your immense soul, as your immense heart, as your wonderful and immense literary capacity.

You enclose the essence of the Woman, the Friend, the Artist, the Poetess, the Woman of today with the ethical and moral values of other times.  You are a unique woman.

THANK YOU FOR EXISTING, thank you for accepting our recognition.

With affection, esteem and gratitude,

Prof. Antonio Imeneo
DIRECTOR UNIFUNVIC EU- (BFUCA UNESCO BRASIL) CEO International Research Center Sport Prevention / Founder BOOKS for PEACE International Award
________________________ Continue reading Books for Peace International Award Ambassador 2022

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY BOOKS

Creative Resources for the Workplace, Community and Classroom

Instruct & Inspire with these Religious Diversity books by award-winning author Deborah Levine

For more information: CLICK on titles for Videos & Testimonials

Teaching Curious Christians about Judaism  TEACHING CURIOUS CHRISTIANS ABOUT JUDAISM

 

Religious Diversity at Work ResourceRELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AT WORK:  Guide to Religious Diversity in the U.S. Workplace

Religious Diversity in our Schools ResourceRELIGIOUS DIVERSITY IN OUR SCHOOLS

 

 

 

Un-Bias Guide for Leaders

The Un-Bias Guide for Leaders is based on  Matrix Model Management System which involves the storytelling principles of cultural anthropology, the planning methodology of urban planning, and the team leadership of facilitation. The Un-Bias Guide is combination text / workbook customized for the workplace. The guide is an innovative tool for addressing unconscious bias and conscious choices.

UN-BIAS GUIDE FOR LEADERS

Designed for team training in the workplace: business leaders, nonprofit administrators, and innovative entrepreneurs. CLICK at the bottom of the following short video to hear Deborah Levine share why the Un-Bias Guide is what today’s workplace needs.

TESTIMONIALS

“When Ms. Levine introduced her story methods and the Matrix Model Management system, light bulbs went off. Tell our stories breaks down barriers and let us react on a different level.”
~ Online Wall Street Journal

“Deborah Levine leads Un-Bias trainees through a discovery process that promotes awareness of the unconscious, deeply held cultural views that we all carry. When those views are examined and shared, a new paradigm of equity and insight begins to evolve. Ms. Levine’s revelatory training, smattered with humor and even a bit of Yiddish, challenge existing notions of diversity and unleash opportunities for leaders and change-makers to shape a more inclusive and representative future.”
~ Rebecca Whelchel, Executive Director of Metropolitan Ministries/Chattanooga Social Services

“Deborah Levine is one on the nation’s leading experts, speakers, authors, trainers and communicators on sensitive and complex issues of cultural diversity. She takes you below the surface and gets at the heart of what works in bringing diverse people together in a mutually beneficial way in which everyone wins. Her latest workbook is a ‘must read’ for employers, managers and labor across all industries. Unlawful discrimination can cost companies big bucks, bad publicity, damage the brand and alienate the consumer base. This exemplary educational guide is a small but wise investment in better understanding and leveraging diversity from the corporate boardroom to the classroom, from Wall Street to Main Street USA. This is an especially important issue to comprehend as America’s population becomes increasingly more diverse in all walks of life. This trend is projected by the U.S. Census Bureau to continue well into the foreseeable future — and the future is now.”
~ David Grinberg, former national media spokesman for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

“In my role as a Human Resources Manger, the training and cultural awareness of the Matrix Model Management System will allow me to relate to others as they would like without assuming what they want or need.”
~ Valoria Armstrong, TN American Water/President,
NAACP Chattanooga/Former President

Purchase your Signed copies:
UN-BIAS GUIDE for LEADERS

Black History Month: Keepin’ It Real on Race – by David B. Grinberg

James Baldwin, the 20th century black intellectual, renaissance author and cultural critic, once observed: “History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.”

In addition to recognizing African American trailblazers of centuries past during Black History Month, it’s also instructive to consider more recent history. That’s why a compelling new book by historian Elwood David Watson, Ph.D. is recommended reading:
Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press).

Continue reading Black History Month: Keepin’ It Real on Race – by David B. Grinberg