Summer Reading

2026 Selection

Stay True: A Memoir
Hua Hsu

Stay True won both the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography and the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of Literature at Bard College, and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific and publishes Suspended in Time, a series of zines about music and life.

With a blend of humor and hard-earned insight, the memoir demonstrates the capacity to overcome preconceptions and to find commonalities across difference. As it tracks the relationship of two students at UC-Berkeley in the 1990s, Stay True explores the spectrum of emotions that accompany one’s formative years, from the monotonous to the thrilling, from sorrow to joy. 

The Community Reads Committee, composed of faculty, staff, and student representatives, stewarded the selection of the text.
 

Accessing Your Copy

First-year students have free electronic access to Stay True. More information will be available soon.

Summer Assignment

Due: Wednesday, August 5

More assignment information will be available soon.

About the Community Reads Program

This is the first opportunity for new students to engage with the practice of the liberal arts — engaging in dialogue with faculty and staff on questions that transcend disciplinary interests and require independent analysis. Through these conversations, which incorporate multiple perspectives, students synthesize a coherent understanding of human experience. The shared Community Read also provides a foundation for a variety of related events throughout your first year at Colgate.

In addition, your responses to the summer reading will provide a way to introduce yourself to your faculty adviser (your First-Year Seminar instructor) and administrative dean so that they can get to know you better.