Read about the works, including a book about weight that a School of Medicine alumna co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, in “CATALYST” magazine.
Geoffrey L. Greif, PhD, MSW, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland School of Social Work (UMSSW); Victoria D. Stubbs, MSW, former full-time clinical instructor, UMSSW; and Michael E. Woolley, PhD, MSW, retired professor, UMSSW. “Interracial Marriage: How Diverse Couples Navigate Relationships in a Divided Time” (Columbia University Press, 2026).
The rate of interracial marriage in the United States has steadily increased: One in six new marriages now crosses racial or ethnic lines. Yet these partnerships are not always embraced or even accepted by families, friends, and society. Within families, issues ranging from food and holiday traditions to parenting approaches and beliefs about gender roles sometimes must be negotiated between cultures. In a time of national division, questions of race and identity have become deeply fraught. The way these couples navigate differences is a model for how Americans, despite their differences, can come together. This book — based on interviews with and surveys of hundreds of people and informed by the authors’ many decades of experience as therapists and researchers — explores how intermarried couples build lives together. People of varied backgrounds describe how they navigate a world where others wonder about their relationship, question the parentage of their children, and treat them differently from their partner based on their appearance. Spouses relate their experiences forming fulfilling relationships in the face of potential disapproval, and they speak candidly about the joys and challenges of raising mixed-race children. Many of these couples have strengthened their relationships by learning to communicate across cultural barriers, and they share strategies for overcoming misunderstandings. At once large scale and intimate, this book offers practical advice and timely insight into the triumphs and struggles of love across lines of difference.
Ania M. Jastreboff, MD, PhD, University of Maryland School of Medicine alumnus, co-author. “Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like to Be Free” (Simon & Schuster, 2026).
For her adult life, co-author Oprah Winfrey has struggled with her weight. She never thought in her lifetime that medicines would provide hope, health, and healing for people like her. But as her conversations with Ania Jastreboff from the Yale School of Medicine reveal, we’ve learned that having obesity is not a choice. It’s not a question of willpower. Obesity is a disease. It’s a question of biology, created by our bodies’ need to survive and the environment we created and now live in. And it’s treatable. The new medications can lower our body fat set point (our brain’s “Enough Point”) so that we lose weight without battling biology with willpower. Jastreboff describes strategies to optimize health and manage side effects all with the reassuring perspective of decades of experience treating patients with obesity and leading studies with these medications.
Read more of the Book Roundup in the spring issue of CATALYST.
The latest issue of "CATALYST" magazine celebrates the students and alumni who represent the future of Maryland’s health, law, and social work professions. Read about a School of Nursing alumna who turned her 2023 Grid Pitch idea into Ryan’s Place, a health care center in Gaithersburg, Md.; how Maryland Carey Law’s Law and Health Care Program prepares students to serve; a School of Dentistry graduate who studies gene therapies to prevent and treat cleft lip; a School of Social Work graduate who has been appointed to Maryland’s Commission on LGBTQIA+ Affairs; the School of Pharmacy’s newly launched, one-of-a-kind MS in Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development program; and what’s on the desk of Courtney Jones Carney, assistant vice president of student success, leadership, and engagement.