Black History Month calls upon the American public to honor and take notice of the often overlooked achievements of Black Americans. This reading list is a sampling of Black writers who bear witness to the struggles of being Black in this country and gives voice to those Black writers who celebrate being Black in this country. Beginning with poetry the list moves on to fiction, non fiction, cooking, and books for YA, middle readers and young children. Many of these titles are new & noteworthy 2022 releases.
The most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present.
This collection offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere.
Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, opens up vast questions. Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems.
Award-winning poet Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for Black men shot by police, then turns to desire and the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood and a positive HIV diagnosis. This is an astonishing and ambitious collection, confronting where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
In these tender, sensual, and bracing poems Teri Ellen Cross Davis reclaims the experience of living and mothering while Black in contemporary America, centering Black women’s pleasure by wresting it away from the relentless commodification of the White gaze.
Claudia Rankine's bold poems recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
An archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
Komunyakaa’s masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality.
The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power.
A complete collection of over 300 poems from one of the country's most influential Black/lesbian poets.
A sustained meditation on that which goes away - loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it - that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard.
This debut novel is a riveting page-turner about a Black classical musician’s desperate quest to recover his lost violin, the Stradivarius gifted to him by his grandmother, on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world.
Meet Yinka: a thirty-something, Oxford-educated, British Nigerian woman with a well-paid job, good friends, and a mother whose constant refrain is “Yinka, where is your huzband?”
Set in 1920s Mississippi, this debut Southern novel weaves a beautiful and harrowing story of two teenage girls, a white girl who ran away from her hard life and hard father on the swamp and the other a black daughter of a sharecropper, cast in an unlikely partnership through murder. As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.
In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven.
From popular political leader and lawyer Stacey Abrams comes a reissue of her romantic suspense novel, Never Tell, written under the name Selena Montgomery.
The Mirror: Shattered Midnight is the second novel in the four-book fairy-tale quartet, following one family over several generations, and the curse that plagues it.
Discover the world of African magic that draws on Nigerian folk beliefs and rituals.
An unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
From the author of The Mothers, this novel is about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds: one black and one white.
An epic milestone of American literature, originally published in 1952, in which a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," before retreating amid violence and confusion.
“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” — Zadie Smith
The story of two Nigerians making their way in the U.S. and the UK raises universal questions of race, belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for identity and a home.
An enthralling literary tour-de-force that pays tribute to Detroit's legendary Black Bottom neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics. This novel is a powerful blend of fact and imagination.
A page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
The visionary author’s masterpiece story pulls us, along with her Black female herom through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now
Octavia E. Butler’s bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, in graphic novel format.
The the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children, the violent and capricious separation of families, and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved.
In this debut novel, two estranged siblings deal with their mother’s death and her hidden past, a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake.
A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel.
The Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
A satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone Black salesman at a mysterious, cult-like, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems. The novel explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.
From the bestselling author of Deacon King Kong comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade, and who must pass as a girl to survive. An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride's meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival.
In seventeenth-century Peru, St. Martin de Porres was torn from his body after death. His bones were pillaged as relics, and his spirit was said to inhabit those bones. Four centuries later, amid the havoc of Hurricane Katrina, nineteen-year-old Ham escapes New Orleans with his only valued possession: a pendant handed down from his foster mother, Miss Pearl. There’s something about the pendant that has always gripped him, and the curiosity of it has grown into a kind of comfort. Lyrical, riveting, and haunting from its opening lines, None But the Righteous is an extraordinary debut.
An incisive and exhilarating debut novel following three Anglo-Nigerian best friends and the lethally glamorous fourth woman who infiltrates their group.
Paying homage to prominent Black female figures from Zora Neale Hurston to Whitney Houston and Toni Morrison, Breath Better Spent invites you to walk through this landscape and explore the spaces that Black girls occupy in the national imagination, taking in the communal breath of girlhood, and asking yourself: In a country like America, what does active love and protection of Black girls look like?
Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. This richly researched biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine.
From the bestselling and Booker Prize–winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism.
A brilliant debut by lawyer and critic Hawa Allan on the paradoxical state of black citizenship in the United States. Her literary voice underscores her paradigm-shifting reflections on the presence of fear and silence in history and their shadowy impact on the law. Throughout, she draws revealing insight from her own experiences as one of the only black girls in her leafy Long Island suburb, as a black lawyer at a predominantly white firm during a visit from presidential candidate Barack Obama, and as a thinker about the use and misuse of appeals to law and order.
Social critic bell hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must go hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race. These speak to this imbalance and are written from a black and feminist perspective, tackling the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it.
Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author.
"This is a narrative that describes the urgency that compels me and millions more to push for a different American story than the one being told today. It's a story that is one part danger, one part action, and all true. It's a story about how and why we fight for our democracy and win." - Stacey Abrams
A Black mother bumps up against the limits of everything she thought she believed - about science and medicine, about motherhood, and about her faith—in search of the truth about her son.
An exploration of Alice Walker’s critically acclaimed and controversial novel The Color Purple.
“This remarkable story of how the cervical cells of the late Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman, enabled subsequent discoveries from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization is extraordinary in itself; the added portrayal of Lacks’s full life makes the story come alive with her humanity and the palpable relationship between race, science, and exploitation.” — Paula Giddings, Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor, Afro-American Studies, Smith College
First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, this 2022 edition featuring a new introduction by the author is a powerful and commanding account of political activist Angela Davis’ early years in the Black Liberation struggle and the feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements.
A bold graphic history of the revolutionary Black Panther Party that brings to light the major events, people, and actions of the Party that was founded in Oakland, California in 1966, and the cultural and political influences and enduring legacy of the Party.
Filled with relatable pedagogy on the history of abolition, a reimagining of what reparations look like for Black lives and real-life anecdotes from Cullors, this handbook offers a bold, innovative, and humanistic approach to how to be a modern-day abolitionist, asking us to lead with love, fierce compassion, and precision.
Author of Writing My Wrongs, Shaka Senghor, invites men everywhere on a journey of honesty and healing through this book of moving letters to his sons—one whom he is raising and the other whose childhood took place during Senghor's nineteen-year incarceration.
American literary critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is known for his pioneering theories of African and African American literature. History of the Black church in American is the story of the Black community's abiding rock and fortress, church.
President Barack Obama's beautifully written and powerful book captures his conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.
The epic, award-winning biography of Malcolm X that draws on hundreds of hours of personal interviews and rewrites much of the known narrative.
Thirty diverse, award-winning authors and illustrators invite you into their homes to witness the conversations they have with their children about race in America today in this powerful call-to-action that invites all families to be anti-racists and advocates for change.
“A firsthand, eye-opening story of a prosecutor that exposes the devastating criminal punishment system. Laura Coates bleeds for justice on the page.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of "Stamped from the Beginning" and "How to Be an Antiracist"
"The Black Agenda mobilizes top Black experts from across the country to share transformative perspectives on how to deploy anti-racist ideas and policies into everything from climate policy to criminal justice to healthcare. This book will challenge what you think is possible by igniting long overdue conversations around how to enact lasting and meaningful change rooted in racial justice." ―Ibram X. Kendi, author of "How to Be an Antiracist" and "Stamped From the Beginning"
Kendi weaves a combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism in this an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.
Filled with relatable pedagogy on the history of abolition, a reimagining of what reparations look like for Black lives and real-life anecdotes from Cullors, this handbook offers a bold, innovative, and humanistic approach to how to be a modern-day abolitionist, asking us to lead with love, fierce compassion, and precision.
Author of Writing My Wrongs, Shaka Senghor, invites men everywhere on a journey of honesty and healing through this book of moving letters to his sons—one whom he is raising and the other whose childhood took place during Senghor's nineteen-year incarceration.
Literary critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. is regarded for his pioneering theories on African and African American literature. His new book is a history of the American Black church as the Black community's abiding rock and fortress.
The epic, award-winning biography of Malcolm X that draws on hundreds of hours of personal interviews and rewrites much of the known narrative.
Thirty diverse, award-winning authors and illustrators invite you into their homes to witness the conversations they have with their children about race in America today in this powerful call-to-action that invites all families to be anti-racists and advocates for change.
“A firsthand, eye-opening story of a prosecutor that exposes the devastating criminal punishment system. Laura Coates bleeds for justice on the page.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of "Stamped from the Beginning" and "How to Be an Antiracist"
"The Black Agenda mobilizes top Black experts from across the country to share transformative perspectives on how to deploy anti-racist ideas and policies into everything from climate policy to criminal justice to healthcare. This book will challenge what you think is possible by igniting long overdue conversations around how to enact lasting and meaningful change rooted in racial justice." ―Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and “Stamped From the Beginning”
A group of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present. Edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and Keisha N. Blain, author of “Set the World on Fire
The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.
March is the first book of the graphic trilogy account of Congressman John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights. Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins.
Book Two of the graphic book March brings the lessons of history to vivid life for a new generation, urgently relevant for today’s world.
Book Three is the conclusion of the graphic March trilogy.
In this inspirational memoir about the intersection of race, fame, and food, reknowned Black chef Kwame Onwuachi shares the remarkable story of his culinary coming-of-age.
Chef, author, and Harlem restaurant owner Marcus Samuelsson gathers together an unforgettable feast of food, culture, and history to highlight the diverse deliciousness of Black cooking today.
Historian Michael Twitty’s memoir, The Cooking Gene, is a look at an extremely important, often painful, Black history. Tracing his family’s history from pre-enslavement in Africa to postcolonial freedom through food, the author provides an intimate and candid examination of the roots of Southern food, Southern identity, and who gets to claim ownership over both.
![Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora [A Cookbook] Cover Image](https://images.booksense.com/images/books/723/859/FC9781984859723.JPG)
In this heartfelt tribute to Black culinary ingenuity, Bryant Terry captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food. With contributions from more than 100 Black cultural luminaires from around the globe, the book moves through chapters exploring parts of the Black experience, from Homeland to Migration, Spirituality to Black Future, offering delicious recipes, moving essays, and arresting artwork.
Throughout her career, Toni Tipton-Martin has shed new light on the history, breadth, and depth of African American cuisine. She’s introduced us to Black cooks, some long forgotten, who established much of what’s considered to be our national cuisine.
Granny teaches her grandson to cook the family meal in this picture book for kids that celebrates of food, traditions, and gathering together at the table
A biography in which novelist Ibi Zoboi illuminates the young life of the visionary storyteller Octavia E. Butler in poems and prose. Born into the Space Race, the Red Scare, and the dawning Civil Rights Movement, Butler experienced an American childhood that shaped her into the groundbreaking science-fiction storyteller whose novels continue to challenge and delight readers fifteen years after her death.
Prepare yourself for something unlike anything: a smash-up of art and text for teens that viscerally captures what it is to be Black. In America. Right Now. Written by #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning YA author Jason Reynolds.
Who do you see when you look in the mirror? One mother’s account of her experience as the only Black child in school serves as an empowering message to her own daughter and children of color everywhere.
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world.