Koa Beck Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Koa Beck is an author known for her nonfiction work in the Simon & Schuster book White Feminism, which has been touted by feminist writers such as Rebecca Traister and Gloria Steinem.

She has also served as editor-in-chief for Jezebel, has worked at Vogue.com as an executive editor, and has been the senior features editor for MarieClaire.com. She has been praised by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who called her work ‘emotionally intelligent’, and a ‘visionary’ by the Boston Globe. Beck was also a guest editor for The New York Times’ special Pride section in 2019, which commemorated the Stonewall Riots’ 50th anniversary.

Koa has also reported on and analyzed such topics as culture, race, identity, gender, and more. Her thoughts have been published in TIME, Out magazine, the Massachusetts Review, TheAtlantic.com, The Globe and Mail, TheGuardian.com, Esquire.com and more.

Koa has also spoken at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Times, Harvard Law School, Columbia Journalism School, and more. The BBC has also interviewed Beck on the topic of American feminism.

Beck also writes short stories and they have been published in places such as Apogee Journal, Kalyani Magazine, and Slice. Beck is on the art and literary magazine Nat.Brut’s board of directors and is on the advisory board for GALECA. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Beck was given the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship in 2019 at the Harvard Kennedy School. She was given the Alan Jutzi Fellowship at The Huntington in 2022. Her essay “Nanny of the State” was featured in the Massachusetts Review’s 50th anniversary of Revisiting Woman: An Issue in 2023.

Beck has also served as the co-host of WNYC’s The Takeaway’s “The #MeToo Memos’. She is married to her wife and they live together in Los Angeles, California, with her wife and their foster children.

Sam is her first fictional novel. It was published in 2009. If you have been searching for something unique to pick up, sink your teeth into this interesting debut from Koa Beck!

The main character in this book and the one that the book is named for is Sam. Sam is a young boy who is half American and half French, and is currently residing in the city of Paris. He likes to go out at midnight and wander through the city, and his meanderings are narrated upon by a young American girl who has gotten lost in the city and meets him one night while they are both in an ally.

The narrator goes along with Sam as he goes through different bars, apartments, and nightclubs, all while telling about how he is reluctant to incorporate the half American part of him into his identity. Through red wine and more, Sam talks about how he has to contend with the expectations of his family with the two passports while also wanting deep down to stay in France. He also thinks that he simply never is going to be able to become the son that he thinks that his American father wants him to be.

The story is mixed in with stories from Sam’s childhood of speaking English and French and is the portrait of an adolescence that is carried out on different continents that focuses on not only Sam’s life but the lives of his young counterparts. The narrator is attempting to understand Sam and what he is going through while also dealing with trying to communicate to other people while in another country while feeling like a foreigner and trying to understand her personal identity.

Read along and find out more about Sam’s world and what will happen to him and the friends he has made along the way!

Koa Beck’s second novel to come out is White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind. It was published in 2021. This is an inquest into the process of how feminism has been racialized and commodified as well as going into the way of thinking that could revolutionize things to get a new movement going.

This book focuses on a variety of topics relating to feminism. Feminism in its fourth wave is all about empowerment for women, which focuses on an intersectionality that has been gone from the start. Before the Lean In phenomenon came about and conferences about empowerment that are full of branding, women were still being encouraged to go out and find their power and know their own value, all while fighting sexism in the institution.

Women have also been funding patriarchal institutions along the way that have not been making a difference in the lives of women they are proclaiming to lift up but have somehow been able to cash in on the concept regardless.

Ranging from a century’s back formation of the suffragette movement to the 2017 Women’s March, feminism in the mainstream has been defined partly by ‘parameters’ that have been sanctioned and dictated by the white women that benefit the most from them.

Koa Beck goes into the conventions that marginalized gendered people have had to take on so that they can be recognized. Along the way, women that are disabled, transgender, black, brown, and undocumented, and other disenfranchised women, have been looked over so that a different type of narrative for feminism. With different insights about things such as the girl boss movement to a pandemic’s civil unrest, this author shows how white feminism adopts a political strategy that is able to take struggle and commercialize it while reinforcing Western supremacy.

Putting together her own witty commentary with historical research, the author has taken from years of her own experience working in the media to show how racial prejudice, privilege, and elitism goes far. She also puts out a call to action for her readers, urging them to reinvent feminist ideas and to look at the paradigms that white feminism has taken on. Get a copy of this book and see how Beck calls for a new feminist landscape that is takes inclusivity and visibility into account.