Common Read

Toni Jensen’s Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land will be SUNY Oneonta’s Common Read for 2025-26. Toni Jensen will be delivering the 2025 Mills Distinguished Lecture on the evening of October 6, 2025. Carry is a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land, and Indigenous women’s lives. Carry was a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist and a New York Times Editors' Choice Book. An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, Jensen's essays have appeared in Orion, Catapult and Ecotone. She teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Métis.

Faculty copies of Carry will be available in February 2025, and a workshop is planned for late February/early March to assist faculty who are considering adopting the book for courses in fall 2025.

Questions may be sent to members of the Common Read Committee or to its chair, George Hovis at george.hovis@oneonta.edu.
George Hovis, English.

About the Common Read

SUNY Oneonta’s Common Read advances diversity by encouraging students to examine and better understand topics such as equity, inclusion, and personal history through many lenses. It aims to further infuse cultural literacy into our academic program by asking the campus community to read a diversity-related book, which then is discussed in fall courses across several disciplines.

About the Mills Lecture

The Mills Distinguished Lectureship is named to honor the memory of Professor Albert Mills and his wife, Helena. Their bequest to the SUNY Oneonta Foundation led to the establishment in 1988 of a fund to bring prominent speakers to our campus.