Hastings Reads announces its 2025 author and schedule, this year featuring author Kao Kalia Yang and her works Where Rivers Part, A Map of the World, and The Diamond Explorer. This year’s theme …
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Hastings Reads announces its 2025 author and schedule, this year featuring author Kao Kalia Yang and her works Where Rivers Part, A Map of the World, and The Diamond Explorer. This year’s theme is “Kalia Writes, Hastings Reads,” a nod to the fact that this year for the first time, “one author wrote all our books,” said High School English Language Arts teacher Kari Jaeger, a member of the Hastings Reads Committee.
Hastings Reads is “a community-wide reading program that seeks to encourage reading and discussion of books and the ways in which they can help us understand the lives and experiences of ourselves and others,” according to the Hastings Reads website.
Each year the program selects three books across age ranges, one for adults, one for middle schoolers, and one for elementary-age children and hosts book club events that allow community members to come together to discuss the books.
Events for the 2025 Hastings Reads run from February through March and include book club events as well as various cultural events including Hmong Paj Ntaub “flower cloth” embroidery and Hmong Batik, a wax-resistant dye technique. Yang will be speaking about her books and work as an author at the Hastings Arts Center on Feb. 18.
Yang is a Hmong American teacher, speaker and writer. She has written and edited more than a dozen books ranging from children’s books to memoirs to collections of short stories. She won the Minnesota Book Award and the Reader’s Choice award for her book The Latehomecomer in 2009, and her work has been recognized for various other awards including PEN USA Literary peace prize finalist, Boston Globe, Star Tribune, & Pioneer Press best book of the year, Kirkus reviews best books of the year, and many others. Yang has taught at universities including Columbia University and Carleton College, as well as completed residencies across K-12 institutions. Yang was chosen as the Star Tribune’s 2024 Artist of the Year.
Hastings Reads dates back to 2007 when it was established by former Middle School Assistant Principal Allen Saunders and Media Specialist Glenda Peak with a “What If” grant from the Hastings Public School Foundation. The initial idea was based off One Book programs, community activities where community members all read a single book in order to come together to discuss it. Rather than having a single book, however, Saunders and Peak imagined a tiered program that allowed not only adults to come together to read a single book but middle-school-age and elementary-school-age children as well.
The first year, the theme of “Families and Racism: Stories of Hardship and Strength” was chosen featuring the books To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Watson Go to Burmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis, and My Brother Martin: A Sister Remembers by Christine King Farris. Jaeger joined that first year because To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the books she taught at the high school.
Over the years the program has featured authors on topics ranging from the American Civil War to “Native American Voices” to “Speaking, Listening and the Space Between.” Each year, Hastings Reads goes about selecting a topic a different way: “some years it’s a topic, some years it’s an author,” that pushes the group in one direction said Jaeger.
This year, with the publication of her first book for elementary-age children The Diamond Explorer in September 2024, Hastings Reads decided choose books solely written by Yang across each age group under the title “Kalia Writes, Hastings Reads.” This topic was further supported from Yang’s last appearance in the Hastings Reads lineup in 2018 when her book The Song Poet was chosen under the topic of “Refugee Voices.” Yang came to speak for Hastings reads in 2018 and “it was a huge hit,” said Jaeger.
Each of Yang’s books is available whenever books are sold, but can also be found at Tilden Community Center and at the Hastings YMCA while supplies lasts.
For updates on Hastings Reads, visit their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/hastingsreads/