Chapter and Verse

Northeastern Law graduates are shaping policy and conversations on justice, philanthropy, migration, history, aging, viniculture and so much more. Check out these great books written by our graduates and get inspired!

Ken Allen ’75
HiTek JD: Memoir of a Silicon Valley Patent Lawyer

For over four decades, veteran patent lawyer Ken Allen of Palo Alto, Calif., served, represented and encountered pioneering technology companies, universities and inventors in Silicon Valley and around the world during an extraordinary period in modern history. His book, HiTek JD: Memoir of a Silicon Valley Patent Lawyer (Amazon, 2025) is both educational and entertaining, offering rare behind-the-scenes glimpses into the legal battles, breakthrough innovations and colorful personalities that shaped the digital age and touched billions of lives. As one reviewer said of those interested in intellectual property law or technology, this book is well worth reading from cover to cover.

Peter Orner ’96
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter 

In The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, award-winning writer Peter Orner brings to life Chicago writer and professor Jed Rosenthal — obsessed with the 1963 unsolved murder of Hollywood starlet Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet, daughter of legendary gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet and close friends of Jed’s grandparents. As Jed investigates the decades-old case through family documents, crime reports and photographs, he seeks to understand both Cookie’s mysterious death and the subsequent rift between the families, while confronting his own personal failures and stalled career. Orner is the author of seven books including Esther Stories, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. A Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize recipient, he chairs the English and creative writing department at Dartmouth College. According to The New York Times, Orner has constructed “a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago. A memorable novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.”

Dovie King ’99
Survivor at Law: A Lawyer’s Memoir of Trauma, Narcissistic Abuse and Weaponized Divorce

Dovie King’s memoir, Survivor at Law (SOAR for Justice Publishing, 2025), tells the story of a lawyer who knew how to protect everyone in the courtroom except herself. Dovie spent her career defending others while privately enduring domestic abuse, recounting in the book how she came to understand that the very legal system she relied on could be weaponized against her. Dovie describes the book as “a memoir about trauma, power, and the quiet rebellion of reclaiming your voice,” one that blends lived experience with legal critique “to reveal how abuse thrives behind closed doors — and how the law becomes its cruelest accomplice.”

Dovie’s story was featured as the cover piece of the American Bar Association Journal and has drawn praise from trauma researchers, law professors and fellow survivors. Endorsers have called it both a lifeline for survivors and a call for law reform. “The story is honest, sharp and unapologetically funny because sometimes you either laugh or lose your mind,” says Dovie.

Urvashi Vaid ’83
The Dream of a Common Movement (posthumously published)

The Dream of a Common Movement (Duke University Press, 2025) collects essays, interviews and speeches by the late feminist and civil rights activist Urvashi Vaid, whose pioneering writing and organizing over the course of four decades fundamentally shaped the LGBTQ+ movement. Whether she was focused on the Donors of Color Network, the 22nd Century Initiative, the Lesbian Political Action Committee or other initiatives she launched, Urvashi was steadfast in her vision of a more just society and believed deeply in the power of people coming together to effect change. Offering a window into the breadth of her progressive vision for social change, this volume inspires readers to never stop organizing and marching.

Rishi Reddi ’92
Passage West: A Novel

In this novel, Rishi Reddi explores an enduring question at the heart of American identity: who is welcome in America? Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century California, Passage West brings to vibrant life the largely overlooked history of Punjabi immigrants who came to farm the land — and the forces of law, race and belonging that shaped their lives.

Gail Marlene Schwartz ’92
Boyhood Reimagined: Stories of Queer Moms Raising Sons

Gail Marlene Schwartz has co-edited Boyhood Reimagined: Stories of Queer Moms Raising Sons (Motina Books, 2025), which weaves together interviews and personal essays by LGBTQ+ mothers who seek to dismantle outdated narratives about gender while providing a blueprint for progressive parenting. Gail also has two essays in the collection: “The Salad Spinner Chronicles,” a comical piece about her son’s early obsessions with domestic tools, and “Guy Time,” a more serious reflection on her son’s relationship with her nonbinary partner.

Chanda Ouk Wolf ’10
A Dozen Delicious Donuts: A Sweet Cambodian-American Story

In this children’s book, A Dozen Delicious Donuts: A Sweet Cambodian- American Story (Blackstone Publishing, 2025), Chanda Ouk Wolf tells a story of growing up between cultures, American and Cambodian, and of food bringing communities together. Her book touches on the universal theme of family and has a message of love and resilience that captures the journey of the immigrant experience. Wolf brings young readers an enriching tale that encourages them to foster a sense of self and celebrates the sharing of traditions across generations.

Dimple Abichandani ’02
A New Era of Philanthropy:Ten Practices to Transform Wealth into a More Just and Sustainable Future — How We Fund in Times of Crisis and Opportunity

On the cusp of the greatest wealth transfer in history — with $84 trillion moving between generations in the next 20 years — this book by Dimple Abichandani, former executive director of the General Service Foundation, explores how philanthropy can be transformative and transformed. Can philanthropy be an anti-racist, feminist, relational and joyful expression of solidarity? Abichandani argues that it not only can be — for the future we seek, and for philanthropy to achieve its greatest impact, it must be.

Rebecca Arnold ’04
The Rooted Renegade: Transform Within, Disrupt the Status Quo & Unleash Your Legacy

In this book, Rebecca Arnold, holistic leadership coach and author, offers a practical guide for building resilience and creating lasting impact in a demanding world. Arnold argues that sustainable success begins from within — and that by cultivating internal, existential and relational peace, readers can forge a foundation strong enough to shake up their world for good.

Stephen Casscles ’84
The Wine Grapes of Chungcheongbuk-Do, Korea

Stephen Casscles, a viticulturalist based in Athens, New York, has co-authored a groundbreaking new book on Korean and North American cool climate grape varieties. The Wine Grapes of Chungcheongbuk-Do, Korea is the first winemaking grape book devoted to Korean and American native grape varieties published in Korea.

M.T. Connolly ’84
The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money and Meaning Later in Life

Writer, lawyer, researcher, policy expert and elder justice pioneer M.T. Connolly offers a sweeping and intimate portrait of the elder justice movement in The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money and Meaning Later in Life. A founding head of the US Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative and a MacArthur Fellow, Connolly offers a new map of aging, one that helps us understand and navigate practical challenges and fragmented systems while also showing how connection, purpose and awe can protect and enrich us as we age.

Roger Levine ’96
The Borscht-Meister of Babi Yar

Roger Levine, an estate planning and elder law attorney, has penned a historical novel stretching from the Holocaust to the current war in Ukraine. In 1941, two young lovers, Yakov Levin and Katya Luvshenko, living at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv, witness the murder of 35,000 Jews. Yakov, a cooking savant, is soon captured by the Germans and becomes the “Borscht-Meister of Babi Yar” on a journey that takes him to Berlin, the gulags and, finally, Moscow, as a cook privy to Joseph Stalin’s inner circle. Katya, his beautiful Ukrainian wife, follows him every step of the way in a love story encompassing 85 years.

Ragini Shah ’99
Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities

In Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities, Ragini Shah, a clinical professor at Suffolk Law, examines migration from the perspective of Mexican migrant community members, including migrants themselves, their family members and community organizers. These perspectives, gathered over five years and in four diverse geographic areas of Mexico, form the basis of the book’s key insight that migration is part of a larger cycle of colonial extraction from marginalized Mexican communities to benefit Mexican and US elites. Professor Rachel Rosenbloom, who provided expert feedback to Shah in the writing process, calls it a “paradigm-shifting book [that] makes a timely and important contribution to the literature on migration, gender and racial capitalism.”

S. Mayumi “Umi” Grigsby ’15
EmpowHERed Health: Reforming a Dismissive Health Care System

Spurred by her own experience with doctors who dismissed her pain for years, S. Mayumi “Umi” Grigsby examines the link between dismissive medical treatment and health inequity, with a focus on Black women in the United States. Drawing on her own story and interviews with numerous women, she offers a call to action for navigating — and ultimately reforming — a health care system that too often shrugs them off.

Rishi Reddi ’92
Karma and Other Stories

In this award-winning short story collection, Rishi Reddi weaves a multigenerational tapestry of interconnected lives, depicting members of an Indian American community navigating the tensions between tradition and Western life. Set mostly in the Boston area, the stories range from a teenager grappling with religious misunderstanding to a widow reconsidering her place in the world — introducing, in the words of early reviewers, a luminous new voice in American fiction.

Do you have a book in the works? We’d love to hear from you! Let us know about your latest projects.