The suggestion box is open! Do you have a book you love, that you think can bring Maryland’s communities together through discussion, learning, and enrichment?
Share your ideas for what Maryland will read in 2025! Submit your title suggestions by Friday, December 6, 2024.
The theme for One Maryland One Book 2025 is:
WHAT WE COLLECT / WHAT WE TELL
“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on ‘what happened then’ than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell.” – Saidiya Hartman.
The humanities are fundamentally an art of narrative—a complex tapestry of storytelling and recordkeeping. Whether expressed through pictures, recordings, paintings, or diaries, these materials help us interpret and reinterpret the past. In other words, they serve as a testament to what we value. The same goes for literature where writers perform acts of cultural preservation through stories they’ve taken from the research and ephemera of past lives and present them to their audiences.
As a humanities organization, we see our work as interpreting and re-interpreting materials from the past for audiences today. A book is the result of a writer choosing which stories to put forward from the experiences, research, and ephemera of the past: the diary, the photo, the recording, the heirloom. The same goes for the museum exhibit, the art show, or the conversations we have around it. In the end, what we record and save is the testament to what we value.
For this year’s One Maryland One Book, we want your suggestions about books that show and make us think about how we collect and use materials in order to tell and preserve the stories they hold — especially those in danger of being lost. How do we assemble them into new narratives that speak to today’s audiences?
You are welcome to interpret the theme from here.
Along with the theme, titles are selected for the following criteria:
Selection Criteria:
• published in 2015 or later
• up to 350 pages
• available in paperback, affordably priced
• available in print, audio, electronic format and, if possible, large print, film, or translation
• able to generate sustained discussion on the year’s theme
• of interest people in the state of Maryland
• appealing to a wide + diverse range of readers of different backgrounds and reading levels
• appropriate to high school age readers as well as adults
While our titles are typically fiction or nonfiction, we also consider books of poetry, essays, short stories, and plays. We are committed to titles that bring diverse voices & narratives into the mix.
Books by living authors, and/or authors who are in Maryland are a consideration, but not a criterion.
Wondering what we’ve selected in the past? Review our Past Picks.