Best American Identity

Michael Bierut is an American graphic designer and a partner in the New York office of the design firm Pentagram, which he joined in 1990. He is widely recognized for his work on brand identities and visual systems for clients such as the MIT Media Lab, Mastercard, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the 2016 Hi...

Lance Wyman is renowned for his pioneering work in Washington, D.C.’s visual identity system, designing iconic maps and symbols that shaped the city’s public image from the 1960s through the late 1990s, significantly influencing civic design standards.

Carrie Mae Weems is a contemporary American photographer whose work explores themes of identity, race, and social structures. She utilizes photography and text to create conceptual narratives often centered around personal experiences and broader societal issues. Her projects, such as *The Kitchen T...

Lorna Simpson is a contemporary American photographer known for her conceptually driven work exploring identity, particularly through the intersection of race and gender. Her photographic series incorporate text to challenge traditional representations within visual media. She creates images that in...

“James Baldwin’s *Song of Solomon* examines themes of identity and belonging within the African American experience. Set in rural Georgia, the novel follows Milkman Dead as he uncovers his family history and seeks connection to his ancestry. It is notable for its lyrical prose and profound explorati...

Claude M. Steele is an American social psychologist known for research on identity, self-evaluation, and stereotype threat. With Joshua Aronson, he showed that situations making a negative group stereotype salient can impair the performance of people targeted by that stereotype, even without overt p...

Harrison C. White was an American sociologist known for applying mathematical network analysis to social structure. His work helped establish social network analysis as a major sociological method and examined how identities, relationships, organizations, and markets emerge from patterns of interact...

True West is a play by American dramatist Sam Shepard, first performed in 1980. Set in their mother's suburban Southern California home, it follows Austin, a screenwriter, and Lee, his estranged drifter brother, as rivalry and resentment overturn their apparent roles. Their struggle over a proposed...

Deana Lawson is a contemporary American photographer known for her staged portraiture exploring themes of identity and family within Black diasporic communities. Her work frequently depicts intimate moments in domestic settings, offering poignant observations on human connection and experience. Laws...

Nejma is a poetry collection by Nayyirah Waheed, published in 2014 as her second book following Salt. Its short, spare poems examine identity, race, diaspora, intimacy, violence, grief, and self-possession through compressed language and extensive use of white space. The collection is written for re...

David A. Snow is an American sociologist known for research on social movements, collective identity, framing, and homelessness. With Robert D. Benford and other collaborators, he developed the concept of frame alignment to explain how movement organizations connect their interpretations of events w...

"Goodbye, Columbus" is a literary collection published in 1959, marking the debut of American author Philip Roth. The book consists of a titular novella and five short stories that examine mid-century Jewish-American identity and social mobility, primarily set in New Jersey. The narrative explores c...

James Weldon Johnson’s *The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man* chronicles the life of a man navigating racial prejudice and shifting social perceptions across the United States during the early twentieth century. The novel employs a picaresque narrative style to examine themes of identity, belongin...

Bless Me, Ultima is a 1972 novel by Rudolfo Anaya, recognized as a foundational work of Chicano literature. Set in New Mexico during and after World War II, the story follows a young boy named Antonio Márez as he navigates his cultural identity and spiritual questioning under the guidance of Ultima,...

Patron Saints of Nothing is a 2019 young adult novel written by Randy Ribay that explores themes of cultural identity, grief, and moral complexity. The story follows Jay Reguero, a Filipino-American teenager who travels to the Philippines to investigate the suspicious death of his cousin under the a...

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex explores themes of identity and family through the life of Cal Stephanides, an American man born with intersex characteristics in Detroit during the 1960s and 70s. The novel offers a nuanced portrayal of a Greek-American family's experiences amidst social upheaval and pe...

Raising Victor Vargas is a 2002 American coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Peter Sollett. Set on Manhattan's Lower East Side, it follows Victor, a Dominican-American teenager, as he navigates family pressure, peer dynamics, and first love. The film features a largely non-professional...

Sherry Turkle is an American scholar whose work examines relationships among people, computers, identity, and communication. Trained in sociology and personality psychology, she is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her boo...

Walk Two Moons is a 1994 novel by American author Sharon Creech, winner of the 1995 Newbery Medal. The story follows thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle as she travels from Ohio to Lewiston, Idaho, with her eccentric grandparents, retracing the route taken by her missing mother. Through a parall...

Mary Bucholtz is an American sociolinguist and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the relationship between language and social identity, with particular focus on race, gender, and youth culture in the United States. She is known for her analysis of how wh...

Mary C. Waters is an American sociologist whose research focuses on immigration, ethnicity, racial identity, and immigrant integration in the United States. Her book Black Identities examines how West Indian immigrants and their children in New York negotiate ethnic identification and American racia...

The Raven Boys is a 2012 young adult fantasy novel by American author Maggie Stiefvater and the first volume of The Raven Cycle. Set in Virginia, it follows Blue Sargent, the daughter of a psychic, and four students from a private boys' school as they search for the legendary sleeping Welsh king Gle...

Kira Hall is an American linguistic anthropologist and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her academic research focuses on the intersection of language, gender, and sexuality, with significant ethnographic work conducted among the Hindi-speaking hijra communities in India. She has cont...

James Marcia is a Canadian developmental psychologist known for extending Erik Erikson's theory of identity formation into an empirical framework. He distinguished four identity statuses: diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, and achievement, based on whether a person has explored alternatives and mad...

Roy Baumeister is an American social psychologist whose research has addressed self-control, motivation, belonging, identity, meaning, and interpersonal rejection. He is associated with the ego-depletion hypothesis, which proposed that acts of self-control draw on a limited resource, although the si...

The Bean Trees is the first novel by American author Barbara Kingsolver, published in 1988 by Harper & Row. The story follows Marietta "Missy" Greer, a young woman from rural Kentucky who drives west and settles in Tucson, Arizona, where she is unexpectedly given an abandoned Cherokee toddler named...

Lyle Ashton Harris is an American contemporary artist whose work in photography, collage, and performance critically examines the intersections of Black and queer identity. Active since the 1980s, his art frequently challenges conventional representations of race, gender, and sexuality through intim...

The Joy Luck Club is a 1993 American drama film directed by Wayne Wang and adapted from Amy Tan's 1989 novel. Through interconnected stories, it follows four Chinese immigrant mothers in San Francisco and their Chinese American daughters, examining family memory, migration, trauma, cultural expectat...

I'll Fly Away is a 2020 poetry collection by American spoken-word poet Rudy Francisco. The collection blends personal narrative with social commentary, addressing themes including race, identity, relationships, and the experience of growing up Black in America. Francisco, based in San Diego, is a pr...