The Diverse Baseline: April 2025 Newsletter

We want to start by sharing some glimmers and gratitude:

Thank yall for being part of our TDB community - the first quarter of the year has been tough, but it’s been lovely getting to know yall in the Discord especially.

There is no *set* April prompt this year. This challenge is fully up to you :) You can choose whichever book you want for each month, as long as it fits one of the ~90 prompts we’ve listed and is written by a racialized author.

We included a definition of this:

We have a virtual little free library thread on the Discord now! If you are finished with a book and have the financial freedom to simply ship it to another book lover in the server, you can post a picture in the thread and see if there are any takers :) We’ll leave it up to the shipper/receiver on who will pay for shipping, but we love the generosity we are seeing on that thread :)

Brittany is hosting Fable & StoryGraph book clubs for the following books:

If you’ve read the above books & know of more prompts they can fulfill, please comment below & let us know :)

Any of the above books could also potentially fill the following prompts, depending on what you’ve read, what is on your TBR, and your lore:

Brittany is hosting her first ever synchronous Zoom book club on May 2nd at 6:00pm Pacific Time. Be warned, she loves corny, cheesy icebreakers; you only have to participate in them if you want, but the questions will be posed! You were warned!

Here is a time zone converter to check how this aligns with your time zone.

Join her Storygraph book club here for more details.

We are sharing a few reviews each month and we thank you for sharing your reviews on socials.

Remember to use #TheDiverseBaseline2025 when posting your reviews, and/or tagging us (only if you want to/feel comfortable doing so), so we can find & spotlight them here.

If you click the below photos, they are hyperlinked to take you to their social media pages :)

In the carrd, you will find links to Canva templates for your Instagram feed and Instagram stories, as well as some fun stickers you can use in your posts.

If you have any templates that you have made and would like us to spread the word about, please email us with links to your templates and we will share in the Discord and the next newsletter!

We now both have official recommendation lists, as well as general lists of books we’ve read for the challenge, on libro.fm and bookshop.org. If you would like highly recommended books from us, check out our links and support local/indie bookstores in the process (if it’s an accessible option for you).

Brittany’s Libro FM playlist | Margherita’s Libro FM playlist

Brittany’s Bookshop.org list | Margherita’s Bookshop.org list

Brittany is a reader and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She can be found here. She also hosts the SF Bay Area chapter of Cassie’s Walking Club on Strava.

Margherita is a reader and indie author from Italy. Xe can be found on instagram, tiktok and substack. Xyr website with links to xyr books, author services, and more is linked here.