Opportunity Matters Book Club

The featured book for 2025 is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (2026). The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into the family structure. Walls takes readers on a journey through her extraordinary childhood, marked by both deep familial love and profound dysfunction. This unforgettable story will leave you reflecting on the power of perseverance and the complexities of family.

• COE invites TRIO programs to register their local book club chapters here.
• Individuals, TRIO professionals, current participants, and alumni who are interested in participating in the 2025 book club may register themselves here.

In 2023, COE continued its successful Opportunity Matters Book Club initiative, inviting TRIO students to engage in discussions centered around how literature reflects their lives. The featured book for that year was Finding Me: A Memoir by Viola Davis, a renowned actress and TRIO Upward Bound alumna. Within the book, she candidly recounts her experiences with poverty, racism, and self-discovery, shedding light on her personal struggles with identity and self-worth. Through unwavering resilience and determination, Davis ultimately triumphs over adversities to become a highly respected and influential presence in the entertainment industry.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2023, TRIO programs nationwide organized local book club chapters to engage program participants in reading and discussing Finding Me. The book club discussions served as inspiration for student essays and artwork, with essay prompts revolving around themes such as addressing bullying, the severity of bullying in schools or communities, and creating resources for bullying victims. The art challenge encouraged students to draw inspiration from the themes explored in the memoir for their creative expressions.

The featured book for 2022 was The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984). Set in Chicago in the 1970s, Cisneros explores timely and important themes of individual identity, family and community loyalty, otherness, racial and sexual oppression, and being defined by others or defining oneself. She does this through a series of vignettes that, as she has written, “add up to tell one big story, each story contributing to the whole—like beads on a necklace.”

In 2022, Deloris Davis Grant, a co-recipient of COE’s 2018 TRIO Family Achievement Award, chaired our Book Club. Grant is an English and Drama teacher at Central Falls High School – the same school where she attended Upward Bound. During our kick-off conversation, she introduced an exciting feature to this year’s book club experience, a student essay challenge. From these prompts emerged the following student essays.