Amnesty Reading for Action: Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo

Join us for a discussion of Reading with Patrick with author Michelle Kuo, who first met Patrick when she was doing Teach for America in Arkansas, a state with some of the lowest literacy rates in the U.S. In the book, Michelle documents her struggles as a second-generation immigrant and a non-Black person of color trying to connect with her students in a predominantly Black community in the Mississippi Delta, living in a town with few job prospects, a history of anti-Black violence, and schools segregated by wealth rather than law.

Michelle will join us for this discussion on how we can better connect with people whose experiences may be very different from our own, especially those who face struggles we may not fully understand. During the event, we’ll discuss both Michelle’s book and her learning process, as well as explore how we can apply her insights to our own lives, particularly in making connections we may have hesitated to pursue before but that could strengthen our community.

About the Author:
Michelle Kuo is an author, educator, and human rights advocate. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Taiwanese immigrant parents, she studied Social Studies and Gender Studies at Harvard College and earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Michelle's book Reading with Patrick is a meditation on race, incarceration, and the transformative power of reading. She has worked as an attorney for undocumented immigrants and incarcerated people, and has been a teacher in prisons across the U.S., France, and Taiwan. Now based in Taiwan, she manages Books from Taiwan and is an associate visiting professor at National Chengchi University. She teaches at the Taipei juvenile detention center and volunteers for the Taiwan Innocence Project and the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and other major outlets. She and her husband Albert Wu also write a Taiwan-based weekly newsletter, A Broad and Ample Road, that explores politics, culture, and acts of creation and solidarity.

• Date: Sunday, 23 November 2025
• Time: 2:30 – 4:30pm
• Location: Human Space Roosevelt 人性空間, 臺北市中正區羅斯福路三段286巷4弄1-1號