This melodic volume explores relationships between the surreal, impossible conditions (and conditions of impossibility) experienced by Black people and our radical, imaginative “mad Black creativity.” Showing us “lessons [we can] learn from those who make homeland in wasteland” as blueprints for freedom dreaming, Bruce picks apart the self-obscuring cultural and political forces that shape understandings of madness to disempower, disenfranchise, and control Black life and Being. This work undermines violent and trenchant institutional beliefs about normalcy and wellness. It is ratchet. It is unruly. It is gorgeous.

What if you and your “hippie” camp friends changed the world? This joyful 2020 documentary shows how teenagers and counselors from Camp Jened, a summer camp for disabled people established in 1951, carried their experience of independence, inclusion, and friendship into adulthood to spark a movement. At Camp Jened, a camper was “just a kid” to play music, float in the pool, or try out a summer romance or two. “What we saw at camp was that our lives could be better,” shared writer/director and former camper James Lebrecht. This breakthrough was revolutionary at a time of profound discrimination. Outside of camp, people with disabilities did not have the right to accessible transportation or schooling. In the 1970s, Camp Jened community members would organize, participate and lead demonstrations—including an epic, weeks-long sit-in with supporters ranging from the local government to the Black Panther Party—that ultimately was part of a larger disability rights movement. Crip Camp’s power is its ability to personalize the fight for social justice—to show that self-acceptance can be a radical act that builds communities and advances meaningful social change.

A timely and compelling work, Global Health Watch 5 provides critical analysis of the state of health and healthcare worldwide. Each of the book’s essays is an incisive and well-researched look at the challenges and opportunities in the fight to achieve healthcare as a human right—as well as the political, economic, and social conditions that foster broadly shared health and wellbeing. Authored collaboratively by a diverse group of on-the-ground experts including healthcare workers, public health practitioners, patients, and activists, the book serves as a comprehensive alternative to WHO’s more conventional and pro-establishment World Health Reports. While deeply critical, it is also solutions-oriented and imbued with hope and solidarity. A great read for all who dream of a brighter healthcare future!

Storytelling is not only central to the foundation of health justice as a field—storytelling is itself a mode of repairing, healing, and dignifying our lives and our worlds, especially those of us not otherwise afforded restorative narratives of our own within western society. Not coincidentally, my absolute favorite book is Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko. Silko’s nonlinear and “IndiGenius” writing has altered my frame of mind when it comes to decolonizing the written word. I’ve shared this nonlinear style with other educators and parents to demonstrate alternative forms for understanding lived experience, especially when such experience is traumatic and lived as though on the peripheries of the world, in the margins. Silko helps me reframe my life’s work as a facilitator in generational trauma recovery by offering ways to integrate stories into my practice, an element that can only be captured by its creator, by the one who holds and offers it to us. I love how Silko describes the little girl in the “yashtoa” story, the little girl with a “mental illness”—or, rather, with gifts beyond this world—and of her death. As an educator and healer, this story tugged on my heart strings and continues to do so. Being a survivor of Indian boarding schools and of childhood as a little brown girl, I know about death too well. I feel like Silko was writing for me and me alone, to read and share, and I want others to experience this dual intimacy and collectivity through narrative. Throughout 20 years of my own storytelling practice, I have read Storyteller many times, and with each reading I realize Silko’s gifts for relating and connecting to her highest self.

Effortlessly combining the wisdom of the ages with the science of today, Thomas Hübl’s Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds is a work of art. In his poetic book, Hübl addresses the complexity of our human experience, pointing to the individual and transgenerational trauma we each hold in our bodies and minds, transmitted through the epigenetic and karmic transfer of energy. Readers will come away with increased awareness of our interconnectivity and a recognition of the “implicit cultural agreements” we hold that have taken root in our “collective nervous system.” With an emphasis on developing the capacities to foster resilience and create spaciousness to address complex problems, Hübl holds that individual and communal transpersonal development can aid in ameliorating the consequences of trauma—and that through the work of conscious trauma integration, we can be liberated from a destiny written solely by the past. With insights such as these, Hübl’s book gathers the most essential spiritual teachings grounded in the physical dimension through systems theories and a robust understanding of our interpersonal neurobiology. As we consider health justice, we must look to those who are able to carefully and attentively integrate mind, body, spirit, community, cosmos, and planet.