Each year, a committee of faculty, staff, students, and community partners convene to select an intellectually stimulating, interdisciplinary book by a living author that appeals to a wide range of readers and can be incorporated into the UCSB curriculum. Each committee member suggests two titles to the longlist, which is narrowed down by vote to the "shortlist". The final book is chosen by vote from these five titles. Below is the list of 2021-2022 committee members.
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Rebecca Baker | Graduate Student, English |
| Lupita Barragan | UCSB Alumni |
| Ines D. Casillas | Faculty, Chicana and Chicano Studies |
| Brian Donnelly | Faculty, English |
| Jackson Eddy | UCSB Undergraduate Student |
| Bergen Forshay | UCSB Undergraduate Student |
| Allison Gray | Director, Goleta Valley Public Library |
| Michelle Grue | Faculty, College of Creative Studies and Writing Program |
| Emily Jacobs | Faculty, Psychological & Brain Sciences |
| Aaron Jones | Director, Educational Opportunity Program |
| Bruce Kendall | Faculty, Bren School |
| Dylan Martinez | UCSB Undergraduate Student |
| Patrick McCray | Faculty, History |
| Maria Napoli | Community College Programs Manager, Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships |
| Erin Nerstad | Associate Director, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center |
| Sharleen O'Brien | Director, UCSB Health and Wellness |
| Caitlin O'Hara | Senior Publicist, UCSB Arts & Lectures |
| Sameer Pandya | Faculty, Asian-American Studies |
| Behrooz Parhami | Faculty, Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| Kathy Patterson | Faculty, Writing Program |
| David Pellow | Faculty, Environmental Studies |
| Alex Regan | UCSB Librarian |
A Burning by Megha Majumdar (2020)
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck (2019)
American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (2018)
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard (2019)
Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks (2018)
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (2014)
Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen (2020)
Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chang (2019)
Finna by Nino Cipri (2020)
How Much of These Hills is Gold: A Novel by C Pam Zhang (2020)
Interior Chinatown by Charles Wu (2020)
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (2020)
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade (2020)
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (2019)
Ransom by David Malouf (2009)
The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones (2019)
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson (2021)
The Friend: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez (2018)
The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us by Paul Tough (2021)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019)
The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen (2020)
The Resisters by Gish Jen (2020)
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee (2021)
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornijo Villaviicencio (2020)
There, There by Tommy Orange (2018)
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (2020)
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elenore Ceghorn (2021)
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil (2016)
What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren (2020)
Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River by David Owen (2017)
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson (2017)
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (2017)