Writers & Books Announces 25th Anniversary of Rochester Reads
Award-winning authors Omar El Akkad and Sonja Livingston return on November 10th for the 25th Anniversary of Rochester Reads, the flagship community reading program of Writers & Books
In 2001, Writers & Books founder Joe Flaherty told the Democrat & Chronicle: “There are few things that we experience collectively as a society — the Super Bowl, maybe a movie — but it’s rare that these kinds of experiences involve books.” With that conviction, “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book...” was born, launching with Ernest Gaines’s moving exploration of racism and innocence, A Lesson Before Dying.
Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, Rochester Reads has become a defining tradition for Rochester — a citywide celebration of literature that has brought extraordinary authors to our city, including Russell Banks, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Ann Patchett, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and many others. Most recently, the program welcomed Camille Dungy, the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.
To commemorate this 25-year milestone, Writers & Books will welcome back two beloved Rochester Reads authors for a keynote address and conversation on November 10th at St. John Fisher University: Omar El Akkad and Sonja Livingston. In 2019, El Akkad’s debut novel, American War was the Rochester Reads selection. In 2016, Livingston’s Queen of the Fall was featured. The public may RSVP to be notified when tickets go on sale by visiting www.wab.org.
El Akkad is an Egyptian-born, Canadian American novelist, journalist, and winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Livingston is a Rochester-born writer, professor, and prize-winning author of five works, including memoirs and essay collections. Writers & Books will spotlight El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been AgainstThis (2025) and Livingston’s Ghostbread (2009), a powerful pairing that underscores literature’s capacity to bear witness to the lives, places, and issues that are often left in the margins.
Just as Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying invited readers to confront injustice through empathy and shared humanity, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and Ghostbread continue that tradition, telling stories that demand attention and ask readers to reconsider whose lives are seen, remembered, and valued.
In One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad examines the machinery of empire, the narratives that justify violence, and the moral contradictions embedded in modern power
structures. Reflecting on U.S.-led wars in the Middle East, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the broader war of narrative that threatens to erase voices, stories, and entire generations. El Akkad warns: “Rules, conventions, morals, and reality itself, all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.” Blending memoir and journalism, El Akkad challenges readers to examine complicity, conscience, and the stories we tell ourselves about justice and power.
Rochester’s own Sonja Livingston embodies Writers & Books’ longstanding commitment to amplifying diverse voices and lived experiences. After taking her first writing class at Writers & Books in the early 2000s, Livingston began documenting her transient upbringing in Rochester and across Western New York. She has since become an award-winning author and beloved professor, returning frequently to Writers & Books as an instructor and mentor. Ghostbread, the AWP-award winning memoir that launched her literary career, remains widely taught in classrooms across the country. Told in brief, incisive vignettes, it is an unsentimental memoir of poverty, instability, and family—written, as Livingston has said, “for houses, gardens, and children most of us never see.”
As part of the 25th Anniversary celebration of Rochester Reads, Writers & Books will also revisit past Rochester Reads Selections, from Octavia Butler’s Kindred to Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and many more. Throughout the year, Writers & Books will offer master classes, book clubs, panel discussions, and community workshops that highlight the enduring power of shared reading to build connection and foster hope.
The anniversary programming begins March 25th with a virtual conversation featuring 2025 Rochester Reads author Camille Dungy. Dungy will present from her new poetry collection, America: A Love Story, in conversation with poet Jennifer Grotz, director of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and faculty member at the University of Rochester.
The selection process for the 2027 Rochester Reads book is currently underway, with the next title and author to be announced later this year.
WRITERS & BOOKS, 740 University Avenue, Rochester, promotes reading and writing as lifelong activities for people of all ages and backgrounds to enrich their lives and the intellectual, social, and cultural vibrancy of their communities. The organization engages youth and adults with the literary arts through writing workshops, readings, presentations, and intersectional activities. Writers & Books owns and operates Ampersand Books, an in-house independent bookstore, and Gell: A Finger Lakes Creative Retreat, sited on 24 acres in Naples, NY. To learn more, visit www.wab.org.