Common Reading Experience
Every first-year student receives a copy of the selected text at orientation to finish before the school year begins in August.
Are you reading?
The Common Reading Experience began with the 2011-2012 school year, and continues in 2024-2025 with the selection of Conor Knighton’s Leave Only Footprints. Every first-year student receives a copy of the selected text at orientation to finish before the school year begins in August. Instructors from the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, First-year Experience, and others then utilize the text in their classes. The program aspires for an enriched sense of academic community through a communal reading of the text.
Please use this site to locate information about events, the author, or how the book will be used in the university as well as in the community. If you have any questions or would like to get involved, please email umreads@olemiss.edu
Local Community Involvement
If you would like to participate in a local discussion of the book or get your organization involved, please email Melissa Dennis, Head of Research & Instruction Services, University Libraries, at mdennis@olemiss.edu or call 662-915-5861.
Want to add the common read to your reading group? Visit the Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library for more information.
The 2025 Book Selection
When Conor Knighton set off to explore America’s “best idea,” he worried the whole thing could end up being his worst idea. A broken engagement and a broken heart had left him longing for a change of scenery, but the plan he’d cooked up in response had gone a bit overboard in that department: Over the course of a single year, Knighton would visit every national park in the country, from Acadia to Zion.
In Leave Only Footprints, Knighton shares informative and entertaining dispatches from what turned out to be the road trip of a lifetime. Whether he’s waking up early for a naked scrub in a historic bathhouse in Arkansas or staying up late to stargaze along our loneliest highway in Nevada, Knighton weaves together the type of stories you’re not likely to find in any guidebook. Through his unique lens, America the Beautiful becomes America the Captivating, the Hilarious, and the Inspiring. Along the way, he identifies the threads that tie these wildly different places together—and that tie us to nature—and reveals how his trip ended up changing his views on everything from God and love to politics and technology.
Filled with fascinating tidbits about our parks’ past and reflections on their fragile future, this book is both a celebration of and a passionate case for the natural wonders that all Americans share.
The Author
Conor Knighton
Knighton is an Emmy-winning correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, America’s #1 Sunday morning news program. Depending on your cable package, you may have also seen him hosting shows on Current TV, AMC, and The Biography Channel or providing commentary for the likes of MTV, E!, and CNN. He has been to all of America’s national parks and what feels like 40 percent of its Hampton Inns.
Courses Using the Common Read Selection
The following courses will integrate the common read into their curriculum this fall.
EDHE 305: New Transfer Experience
WRIT 100: Introduction to College Writing
WRIT 101: First-Year Writing I
WRIT 102: First-Year Writing II
LIBA 102: First-Year Seminar
- Develop critical thinking, reading, writing, and research skills and abilities
- Gain an emerging sense of confidence as learners, thinkers, readers, and writers
- Develop a sense of community among peers, neighbors, and instructors
- Develop connections among ideas, experiences, disciplines, and academic and personal goals
- Relate the issues raised by the common book to their lives as new or returning students.
EDHE 105, the current academic component of the Freshman Year Experience Program at Ole Miss, was originally introduced in 1963 as Effective Study. EDHE 105 is designed to help our freshman students make a positive transition from high school to college, develop a better understanding of the learning process, enhance their academic skills , acquire essential life skills to ensure their success, and to begin their exploration of the career and major that are best for them.
The common reading book selection is used each year in EDHE 105 courses primarily as a framework for class discussions, projects, and writing assignments that explore social themes and/or issues from the book. EDHE 105 instructors use the text (with a focus on those themes and issues) to teach students how to explore their personal reactions, to understand and appreciate both the things that make them different from their peers and the things that they have in common, and to effectively and respectfully voice their own opinions and viewpoints.
For more information, visit the Center for Student Success & First-Year Experience page on EDHE 105 and the DWR Common Read Resource Guide section for using the common read in EDHE 105.
Previous Book Selections
2023 – Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work by Dave Isay
2022 – The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
2021 – World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
2020 – What the Eyes Don’t See by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha
2019 – Evicted by Matthew Desmond
2018 – Collected Stories by William Faulkner
2017 – Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
2016 – Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
2015- The Education of a Lifetime by Robert Khayat
2014- The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Won World War II by Denise Kiernan
2013- The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education by Craig Mullaney
2012- Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
2011- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot