In a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism, and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe, Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class, and inheritance. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest—the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.
An author blending fact and fiction in her second novel, an anthropologist studying the origins of rituals and pilgrimages, and a mathematician investigating the complexity of large datasets have been named the 2026 Dean’s Faculty Fellows for the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
This month, explore how connections are formed, maintained and shared with letters and science authors. In this collection of books, our authors and scholars mine their own families as their inspiration for memoirs, poetry, fiction and analyses.
Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, L&S staff select works from our Bookshelf of authors within the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. We're hoping to read more fiction this summer, so our July selections include novels from faculty in the Department of English and Department of Chicana/o/x Studies as well as graduates of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.
The UC Davis Humanities Institute has announced five new faculty research fellowships for the 2025-2026 academic year. All five projects among faculty within the College of Letters and Science are centered around book projects, including one work of fiction.
