Through novels, memoirs, essays, and poems that hit shelves this year, we’ve taken journeys both near and far and learned more about our world and city.

We uncovered secret, historical letters sent to and from Baltimore, and we took quiet walks through Pennsylvania forests while watching the natural ecosystem change each year. We traveled alongside the much-talked-about figure Wallis Simpson to lavish parties at Buckingham Palace, and we dove head-first into the depths of heroin addiction in a 1990s Baltimore spun out of control.

We learned more about systemic racism, mass incarceration, the modern-day art world, immigration, and how to make public spaces safer and more inclusive. We also quieted our minds to take in zen-like poetry and moments in nature worth savoring.

Here’s a look back at our favorite reads of the year, all of which have ties to Baltimore.

The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose
Chris Wilson with Bret Witter (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
After reading 400 pages of Chris Wilson’s memoir, one word stands out: endgame. He shares the sometimes heart-wrenching, occasionally heartwarming account of growing up in a violent Washington, D.C. neighborhood, catching a life sentence for murder at 18, and the creation of his “Master Plan.” As he grows from boy to man, we see him check off each item on that list—get a high school diploma, eat no junk food, get an AA degree—while continuing to add bigger dreams. Beating all odds, his sentence is reduced, and he eventually arrives in Baltimore as a free man with the objective to help other “returning citizens.” We see him go from sleeping on a friend’s couch, traveling by borrowed bike, and mowing lawns for a living, to starting his own business (Barclay Investment Corporation), sharing his story with people all over the country, and becoming an active, positive member of his community. It’s a story of perseverance, hope, and redemption. And he also sets forth a challenge for readers: what is our endgame? And how are we going to get there?

The Real Wallis Simpson: A New History of the American Divorcee Who Became the Duchess of Windsor
Anna Pasternak (Touchstone)
This colorful biography peels away the layers of one of the most talked-about—and perhaps misunderstood—figures in modern history: Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced Baltimore native who stole the heart of the Prince of Wales and, so it’s been said, ultimately caused his abdication of the throne after he became King of England. Anna Pasternak aims to set the record straight and, in some ways, rewrites history. What people call a fairytale love story between WE (Wallis and Edward’s shorthand for themselves) was, in many ways, a tragedy, and though Wallis was often blamed for King Edward’s abdication, it’s evident—through letters, as well as testimonies of close friends—that Wallis did everything in her power to stop him. Details about Wallis—her impeccable sense of style, her sensitivity and nervous temperament behind a cool and confident exterior—bring us closer to the reality of who she was. The book also tells us a good bit about Edward—that he had a secret love of crocheting, that both he and Wallis struggled with insecurities about their sexual identities. A touching moment comes in the epilogue, when we see Pasternak’s personal connection to the story and the lives of both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
John Waters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
John Waters’ flair for writing and his laugh-out-loud humor had us flying through his “tarnished wisdom.” And what wisdom it is: Learn public speaking; “go Hollywood,” if given the chance; be willing to change everything, he tells us. Juicy anecdotes from his career—fighting in court for his Pecker film title; possibly being the only director who didn’t cast Brad Pitt after an audition, people whispering “demented forever” when passing him on the street, how he was asked to be celebrant for Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder’s wedding but convinced them not to wed—run alongside his thoughts on religion, politics, gay rights, art, sex, drugs, even death. And what his restaurant would be like, were he to open one. This collection of essays is a must for all John Waters fans but also for young, aspiring filmmakers and artists who could use a little help from this larger-than-life personality.

Snowballs for Severance
Richie Frieman (The Omnibus Publishing)
This picture book would be great fun for readers of any age, were it simply about a 9-year-old boy who changed a century-old law in his hometown to allow snowball fights. But this story is even more remarkable because it’s true. Through research and interviews with town hero Dane Best and his family, Richie Frieman wrote and illustrated this quirky tale, complete with direct quotes and cartoonish versions of the characters who make up Severance, Colorado. He includes a short questionnaire with Dane and photos at the end, though Dane is written so true to character, by that point, we feel like we already know this child activist.

Fake Like Me
Barbara Bourland (Grand Central Publishing)
Baltimore-based Barbara Bourland raises a magnifying glass to the contemporary art world in this brilliant satire. A cast of familiar-yet-eccentric characters plays out multiple storylines—a bizarre mystery (why did the young and famous New York artist Carey Logan drown herself in a lake?), a love story (really, a few), an artist’s coming of age—but at its core, it’s a penetrating, insightful discourse into what it means to be a practicing artist navigating the cut-throat art world. It’s a must-read for art scholars and students, who will appreciate all the practical and existential questions the narrator faces—from taking on an impossible deadline after two years’ worth of paintings are lost in a studio fire, to pondering the gray area between being an artist and being a commodity. And your jaw will drop more than a few times throughout Bourland’s story, which is painted with rich imagery, exquisite details, and sensual delight.

We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America
D. Watkins (Atria Books)
D. Watkins is a master at his craft and has seemingly endless stories to share about Baltimore and the wisdom he’s gleaned from living here. The New York Times best-selling author of The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America and The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir is back with another fresh take on life in East Baltimore and how his own life has changed since he’s seen success as a writer. Here, the University of Baltimore professor aims to round out the stories being told about black culture in America. His down-to-earth, casual writing style allows us to easily enter his world, and his sense of humor tends to balance some of the heavy subject matter. Some passages—including one in which he repeats the phrase “black lives don’t matter” alongside horrifying examples to prove his point—are painfully chilling. This book transcends memoir when Watkins offers solutions, including a checklist that breaks down systemic racism and allows us to think more deeply about how we can effect positive change in our communities.

Intrusive Beauty
Joseph J. Capista (Ohio University Press)
Contemporary poetry rarely has a melodic cadence, as rhythmic poetry is somehow considered unsophisticated. But Joseph J. Capista doesn’t shy away from the joys of rollicking through language’s innate richness of sound, as he weaves narratives about Baltimore, life as a husband and father, and the elegance of the natural world. The Towson University professor has the ability to see beauty in all places, and through his observations, he allows us to see it, too.

The Long Blink
Brian Kuebler (Behler Publications)
In WMAR News’ investigative journalist Brian Kuebler’s first book, he delves much deeper into the true story of a Baltimore family torn apart by tragedy after a trucker falls asleep at the wheel and kills Ed Slattery’s wife and leaves his son disabled. We watch as a stunned Ed grapples with his new life in the wake of such a horrific event and how he moved through his grief to help heal not just those closest to him but others affected by trucking accidents. He rises from victim to activist, going to Capitol Hill to fight for safer trucking laws. But underneath his fight change, this is a story about how one man survived devastating trauma and used his pain to help others. The Long Blink is the epitome of a page-turner. Once you pick it up, don’t expect to put it down until you’ve reached its very shocking and explosive end.

Chasing a Flawed Sun
Daniel McGhee (Phoenix Rising Publishing)
Perhaps you’re thinking we don’t need another memoir about the opioid crisis. But each experience through addiction is unique, yet universal themes connect all these stories. From page one, Daniel McGhee races down to the depths of hell on Earth and drags the reader along with him, every inch of the way. As painful as this memoir is to read—one horrifying, self-destructive story after the next—one can only imagine how painful it must’ve been to write, much less live. McGhee grew up a white, middle-class kid in Baltimore County, and in this gut-wrenchingly honest narrative, he takes us down the rabbit hole into his heroin addiction—but not before years of drinking every day and getting high on cocaine, Special K, and ecstasy (and selling them all, too), while constantly instigating fights, jumping people, pulling guns on people (seemingly nothing was off limits) and finding himself in and out of rehab—and prison. When retelling his story, he sometimes interrupts his own train of thought to comment on how ashamed he is, how lost and clueless he once was. Many addicts don’t find themselves living the happy ending, but this book serves as some hope. It’s a story every addict must know deeply, and this book would certainly resonate with them. But perhaps its greater gift lies in showing people who have not experienced addiction firsthand what it’s like—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—and why addicts keep “chasing a flawed sun.”

Father’s Day Creek: Flying fishing, fatherhood and the last best place on Earth
Dan Rodricks (Apprentice House Press)
Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks’ writing seems at ease in this collection of anecdotes and reflections on years spent fly fishing at a magical stream in Pennsylvania that he’s named Father’s Day Creek, in honor of visits with his father-in-law each year for the holiday and stopping by the natural respite while there. It’s a place he calls his “spirit-home,” and he insists that everyone should have one. As its subtitle suggests, Rodricks provides spectacular notes on the art of fly fishing, the devastation and regeneration of natural waterways because of various ecological factors, as well as the complexity of fatherhood, including father figures whom he calls “male mothers” and cultural changes that have altered the role of fathering. He also inevitably weaves together the connection between fatherhood and fishing. Worth noting: the forward was written by fly fishing legend Lefty Kreh just a few weeks before he died. In all, the book is a tribute to the simple yet sacred moments in life, and his honest, laid-back style of introspective storytelling feels reminiscent of a day spent in the woods, casting a line into the water, and forging a connection—be it with fathers, sons, nature, or yourself.

The Long Blink: The True Story of Trauma, Forgiveness, and One Man’s Fight for Safer Roads

Brian Kuebler (Behler Publications)

In his debut book, WMAR News’ investigative reporter Brian Kuebler pens the true story of a Baltimore family torn apart by tragedy, after a trucker falls asleep at the wheel and kills Ed Slattery’s wife and leaves his son disabled. We watch as a stunned Ed grapples with his new life in the wake of such a horrific event and how he moved through his grief to help heal not just those closest to him but others affected by trucking accidents. He rises from victim to activist, going to Capitol Hill to fight for safer trucking laws. But underneath his fight change, this is a story about how one man survived devastating trauma and used his pain to help others. The Long Blink is the epitome of a page-turner. Once you pick it up, don’t expect to put it down until you’ve reached its very shocking and explosive end.

The Hidden Heart of Charm City: Baltimore Letters and Lives

Katherine Cottle (Apprentice House Press)

Perhaps the best way to understand a place is through firsthand accounts of those who have lived there—and specifically letters, which often reveal not just moments in time but truths that might not otherwise be stated aloud. In this fascinating book, author Katherine Cottle outlines centuries of letter-writing to and from Baltimore that help to define the city and its inhabitants, which have included some of America’s most fascinating minds—among them Scott and Zelda, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Edgar Allan Poe.

From political tactics to unrequited love, anecdotes within these correspondences reveal the complexity of such figures as Eleanor Roosevelt—who exchanged thousands of passionate letters with friend and journalist Lorena Hickok. Other letters reveal Baltimore as seen through the lens of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of whom saw both its appeal and detriment and wrote about its contradictory nature. The only drawback to such descriptions is that they might leave the reader wanting to read the actual letters in their entirety, and they are not included here. Rather, through Cottle’s detailed synthesis to provide a survey of the historical context and importance of various letters, the book includes short excerpts and serves as a great jumping-off point to understand the lifeblood of this city.

What drew you to investigative reporting?
I actually wanted to be a feature reporter in the beginning of my career. I wanted to tell life stories. I ended up getting a job in Memphis and spent six years there. Memphis is kind of like a smaller Baltimore in the sense that it’s crime, it’s every day, it’s hard news, and I worked for a really tough news director who wanted tough news told. So I had this narrative writing style. I’ve always loved the writing part of reporting, and I’m thrown into this cauldron of like, hard, breaking news. Eventually I melded into this hard news reporter. I covered these horrific stories all the time, but I always tried to find characters that drove the story. You can experience the stories through their narrative. That’s how I went about developing my narrative style through broadcast news, which I continued in Baltimore in the same way. After a while the investigative reporter moniker just kind of developed organically.

What was it like transitioning to writing a book? Did the length ever become overwhelming?
I had no idea what I was doing. When Ed asked me to write the book, I said, “You’re crazy. The longest thing I’ve written is a seven-minute piece about a serial killer. I don’t know what a book is. No.” But he really liked the way I’d been telling his family’s story and said that I should challenge myself and really think about it. I took a couple months to think about it and did some research, trying to understand the publishing industry, which I knew nothing about. After a while, I thought, ‘What if I just treated each chapter as a long-form investigative piece that I’d do several times a year anyway?’ So I wrote an outline, storyboarded all my chapters, figured out what interviews I’d needed, and finally I thought, ‘I think I can do this if I can digest it as one chapter at a time, if I looked at it through that prism.’ That’s how I got it done.

In your book, one traumatic event dramatically changes the life of so many people. How did covering the story affect you?
Well, I’m still friends with Ed. He and his son Matthew were at my wedding, and my wife fell in love with them, too. Anyone who meets them are really just enamored by this family and the strength that they show. They’re just this electric group of people that you can’t help but be impressed by when you start talking to them. They’ve become friends to me. I’m constantly in awe of how Ed handled everything. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal. He’s very humble about it because he doesn’t know how not to be humble about it. If that had happened to me, god forbid, I don’t know that I’d have the fortitude to be able to do what he did. I think I would’ve crawled up and hated the world for a good part of my life. I’m in awe of the strength that he has.

Every reporter, through the course of their career chasing down stories, will always come across one of two that they’ll put in their back pocket and think, “Oh, that’ll make a great book.” I have like five or six of them over the course of my career, where I’d love to go back and write a book about them. The one thing that is the common thread in all of those stories is how the main character kind of pivoted from real trauma and was able to use that to do good. I don’t know that I possess those skills as a human being, but I can definitely see it in other people, and when I do, it’s super special to me. I feel like I want to spend more time telling that person’s story.

Without giving away the end of the book, I wanted to talk about the interview you facilitated between Ed and the trucker who killed his wife. Had you ever experienced an interview that was that intense?
I will tell you without any hesitation, I have done thousands of interviews throughout my career, and some of them have been huge news-makers with presidents and important people where you have to sit down and prepare and all of that stuff, but this interview, by far, was the most challenging, emotionally explosive, volatile, and fascinating interview I’ve ever done in my life. Period. End of story.

I had no idea it was going to end up that way. It was Ed’s idea. When I was writing the book, he wanted this man’s side of the story, and I completely agreed. The key to any story is to get to the real heart of it and expose what’s down and dirty about it. We need to know what his deal is, beyond the court documents and beyond the court records and all that stuff that was public record. Let’s get to him and see what he actually thinks. Ed and him had developed some sort of relationship, with the letters back and forth, so he set up the interview. I had no idea it was the anniversary of the crash until I landed there in Cleveland. I had no idea that it was the time of day that it [the crash] happened when we were sitting on his porch. All that was just circumstance.

Yeah, that was chilling to me, reading that.
Nuts. And it just developed that way because Ed went back for the family reunion, which they always have that time of year, so it had made sense.

It seemed like at one point you just threw off your reporter cap and just melded into this crazy scene as it unfolded. How do you strike a balance between being a professional and being a human when you’re in a situation like that?
Well I’m conducting an interview between these two men and I tried to keep it on the rails as much as I could because you could tell that both of these men had things to say to each other that were not gonna wait for a journalist to help facilitate. Once I got what I thought I needed to tell his side of the story, there was nothing that I could do other than let these men have their moment, so I just basically shut up. At that point, I was a spectator as much as I hope the readers are, going, “What in the f— is happening right now?” And it got a little dicey there at the end, screaming and yelling and I’m packing up a microphone, trying to put my shit in my bag and get off the porch. I had no idea what was gonna happen next. It was nuts. My heart was beating through my chest for like five minutes as we were driving away from that. It was honestly one of the most incredible interviews I’ve ever conducted in my career. And that’s when I knew, “Oh, I think we have a book here.”