Sen. Kamala Harris, a rising star in the Democratic Party who is sometimes cited as a possible presidential contender in 2020, has a book deal.
Penguin Press announced that Harris’ “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey” will come out Jan. 8, 2019. According to Penguin, Harris will write about “the core truths” in American life and how to learn what they are.
The 53-year-old Harris was formerly California’s attorney general. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.
For politicians, books have long been a standard part of developing a national profile, from John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” to Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.”
Scott Moyers, vice president and publisher of Penguin Press, according to the Times praised Harris’s “authentic” voice, and said her back story was especially compelling, including her “fascinating and formidable” mother.
The memoir and current-events primer, in a mixture well-known to campaign books, will include sketches of both Ms. Harris’s upbringing and her governing principles.
It’s the second book by Harris. The first, “Smart on Crime,” was published in 2009 — the year before she was elected California attorney general. Harris won her Senate seat in 2016.
Publishing books is a rite of passage for presidential prospects. Harris is the latest possible Democratic contender to publish a book since the 2016 presidential election. She joins former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro’s book is expected this fall, and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who published a book last year, has another one — titled “Where We Go From Here” — due after November’s midterm elections.
Penguin said that in the book Harris is “reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her.”
“Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values,” Penguin said. “In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come.”