Now Reading: Faculty Books
A roundup of recently published works from Rice faculty
Fall 2025
By Lynn Gosnell
We Belong Here
Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place
Shani Adia Evans
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Rice sociologist Shani Adia Evans first got the idea for her groundbreaking study of historically Black neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon, after moving with her family to the city in 2015. The move, from a racially mixed neighborhood in Philadelphia to a city sometimes described as “America’s whitest city,” resulted in her rarely encountering other Black people in daily life. “I became interested in what it was like to be Black and grow up in this context,” she writes. However, she soon learned from speaking with longtime Black residents that Northeast Portland neighborhoods were once home to a thriving Black community. By 2015, the area was predominantly white.
Through in-depth interviews with Black adults who grew up in Northeast Portland and other qualitative research methods, Evans set out to learn how these residents experienced and responded to racial and economic displacement. In this deeply observed work of scholarship, we hear their voices, their memories, their feelings of belonging — and loss. Evans advocates for the framework of “White spacemaking” over “gentrification” for understanding this process. One respondent described it this way: “I’m from Portland, Oregon, but I can’t go home.”
Shani Adia Evans is an assistant professor of sociology in the School of Social Sciences.
City Summer, Country Summer
Kiese Laymon; illustrated by Alexis Franklin
Penguin Random House, 2025
For readers of Kiese Laymon’s lyrical, raw and fiercely loving memoir, “Heavy: An American Memoir,” the theme of “safeness” is ever present — in family and friendships, school and work, and especially in the world at large. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that the idea of safeness shows up in Laymon’s newest publication — “City Summer, Country Summer,” a children’s book published last spring by Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
The story evokes a day in the life of three Black boys during a Mississippi summer. One has been sent “down South” from New York for the summer. All three are under the watchful care of their elders, whose houses are separated by “the largest, greenest garden” in town. They build cardboard sleds, wander the woods, get lost and play Marco Polo in the lush garden. They tumble and laugh and find safeness in a summer idyll — “into the kind of freeing friendship that is love.” Young readers are bound to linger over the realistic illustrations by artist Alexis Franklin, who perfectly captures the story’s emotional range.
Laymon’s creative portfolio ranges far and wide, and includes essays, fiction, poetry, edited collections, television and film projects. He is the recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2023, he’s taught English and creative writing to Rice undergraduates who line up for his courses.
In a recent interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Laymon says that he was drawn to children’s literature because he “wanted to create something that was softer and honest … what happens if we explore a culture and a society and grandmothers that help create safeness in spite of the unsafety of the world.”
Kiese Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of Creative Writing and English in the School of Humanities.