In honor of Sexual Assault Awareness & Prevention Month, The Blue Bench partners with local businesses to help spread awareness of our vital services, provide educational resources, and fundraise for our support services.
Petals & Pages of Denver, one of our 2025 partners, curated an essential reading list for readers to gain insight into the experiences of survivors of sexual assault and the societal structures that reinforce victim-blaming and lack of accountability for perpetrators.
For every purchase throughout April, 20% will be donated back to The Blue Bench.
About Petals & Pages:
Petals & Pages is a queer and feminist independent bookstore and community space in Denver, CO. Petals & Pages was voted the Best Bookstore in Denver in 2024 by 5280 Magazine!
Location: 956 Santa Fe Dr DENVER, CO
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday: 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM; Closed Monday
Website: https://www.petalsandpagesofdenver.com/
Contact/Request a book: https://www.petalsandpagesofdenver.com/contact-us
SAAPM Book List:
Book titles linked to Petals & Pages website!
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
- Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. It also introduces readers to an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. Entwining pain, resilience, and humor, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.
Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope by Amanda Nguyen
- A deeply affecting memoir of grief, survival, and hope, Saving Five details Nguyen’s winding journey of recovery and action, which ultimately led her to create the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, one of the only unanimously passed laws in the history of the United States. Both a tribute to resilience and a lesson on healing, Saving Five is an inspirational story for the ages.
The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice Is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence by Meg Stone
- Sharing stories from a Black transgender woman building a grassroots group to defend her community, to a would-be Taekwondo Olympian fighting back in the courts, to a pharmaceutical scientist fighting back in the lab, Stone argues there are two opposing philosophies of how to make people safer, one of which exacerbates victim-blame (safety through compliance) and the other challenges it (safety through resistance).
Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the Secret System That Protects Them, and the Women Who Blew the Whistle by Lise Olsen
- The accounts of the women and their allies who are still fighting for reforms are moving, intimate, and inspiring—including whistleblowers and law professors like Leah Litman, Emily Murphy, and novelist Heidi Bond, who emerged to denounce Kozinski in 2017. A larger group of women—and men—banded together to form a group called Law Clerks for Accountability, which is continuing to push for more reforms to the courts’ secretive complaint review system.
Written on the Body: Letters from Trans and Non-Binary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence by Lexie Bean
- Written by and for trans and non-binary survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, Written on the Body offers support, guidance and hope for those who struggle to find safety at home, in the body, and other unwelcoming places.
Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates
- Men Who Hate Women examines the rise of secretive extremist communities who despise women and traces the roots of misogyny across a complex spider web of groups. It includes eye-opening interviews with former members of these communities, the academics studying this movement, and the men fighting back.
#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching About Sexual Violence and Rape Culture by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett
- Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature.
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement by Tarana Burke
- Tarana's debut memoir explores how to piece back together our fractured selves. How to not just bring the me too movement back to empathy, but how to empathize with our past selves, with out bad selves, and how to begin to love ourselves unabashedly. Healing starts with empowerment, and to Tarana empowerment starts with empathy. This is her story of finding that for herself, and then spreading it to an entire world.
I'm Saying No! Standing Up Against Sexual Assault, Sexual Harassment, and Sexual Pressure by Beverly Engel
- In spite of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, many women are still afraid to say no to unwanted sexual advances and reluctant to report sexual violations. Far too many college students are being raped and are afraid to report it. Bold and timely, I’m Saying No! offers women the encouragement, support, and guidelines they need in order to become the powerful women they are—women who believe in themselves and stand up for themselves.
Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life After Sexual Assault by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee
- Through the voices of twelve diverse female writers, Whatever Gets You Through offers a powerful look at the narrative of sexual assault not covered by the headlines--the weeks, months, and years of survival and adaptation that women live through in its aftermath.
Book description from Good Reads.
