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Spotlight on Black Writers & Poets |
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fiction, ADICHIE. Separated by respective ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America while exploring new concepts of race, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland 15 years later, where they face the toughest decisions of their lives. By the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Fiction, BALDWIN. First published in 1953, this is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
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The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty
Fiction, BEATTY. Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens, smack in the middle of downtown L.A., the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in psychological studies, classic experiments revised to include a racially-charged twist. He also grew up believing this pioneering work might result in a memoir that would solve their financial woes. But when his psychologist father is killed in a shoot out with the police, all that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral and some maudlin what-ifs. Fueled by this injustice, he sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident--the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, our narrator initiates a course of action--one that includes reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school--destined to bring national attention. The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
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The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
Fiction, BENNETT. Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.
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Ruby: A Novel
by Cynthia Bond
Fiction, BOND. Loving the beautiful but damaged Ruby all of his life, Ephraim is torn between his dutiful sister and a chance for a life with Ruby when the latter returns to their small East Texas home and confronts the dark forces that traumatized her early years. A first novel.
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Speaking of Summer: A Novel
by Kalisha Buckhanon
Fiction, BUCKHANON. A woman's desperate search for her missing twin is complicated by their mother's recent death, police indifference, her relationship with her twin's boyfriend and a growing obsession that tests the limits of her sanity. By the award-winning author of Solemn.
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Everywhere You Don't Belong
by Gabriel Bump
Fiction, BUMP. Raised by a civil-rights activist grandmother on the South Side of Chicago, Claude McKay Love searches for a sense of belonging before a riot compels his departure for college, where he discovers he cannot escape his past.
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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Science Fiction, BUTLER. Dana, a black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
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People Person
by Candice Carty-Williams
Fiction, CARTY-WILLIAMS. Dimple Pennington knows of her half siblings, but she doesn't really know them. Five people who don't have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad's gold Jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about. She's thirty, and her life isn't really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, Dimple's life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small but loyal following, she's never felt more alone in her life. That is, until a dramatic event brings her half siblings Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie, and Prynce crashing back into her life. And when they're all forced to reconnect with Cyril Pennington, the absent father they never really knew, things get even more complicated.
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The Water Dancer: A Novel
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Fiction, COATES. A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery. By the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me.
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Fiction, ELLISON. A milestone in American literature, this book has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel 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", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
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Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison
Fiction, ELLISON. In Washington D.C., in the 1950s, Senator Sunraider is mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet. From his deathbed, he calls out for Hickman, an old black minister. As the two men relive their memories of a shared history, they gradually reveal the secrets of their past.
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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
by Ernest J. Gaines
Fiction, GAINES. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.
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A Lesson Before Dying
by Ernest J. Gaines
Fiction, GAINES. Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.
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Difficult Women
by Roxane Gay
Fiction, GAY. A collection of stories by the award-winning author of Bad Feminist explores the hardscrabble lives, passionate loves and quirky human connections experienced by diverse protagonists, including a woman who pretends she does not know that her husband and his identical twin switch places with her.
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Fiction, GYASI. Two half sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations.
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Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s
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Fiction, HARLEM. Leads off with Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), a unique fusion of fiction, poetry, and drama rooted in Toomer's experiences as a teacher in Georgia. Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), whose freewheeling, impressionistic, bawdy kaleidoscope of Jazz Age nightlife made it a best seller, traces the picaresque adventures of Jake, a World War I veteran, within and beyond Harlem. Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) is the psychological portrait of a woman caught between the two worlds of her mixed Scandinavian and African American heritage. Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun (1928) is richly detailed account of a young art student's struggles to advance her career in a society full of obstacles both overt and insidiously concealed; and Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929), with its provocative look at prejudice and exclusion, tells of a new arrival in Harlem searching for love.
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Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s
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Fiction, HARLEM. Celebrates the diversity and race issues of the 1930s in a collection that includes Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter, George S. Schuyler's Black No More, Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder.
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The Sweetness of Water
by Nathan Harris
Fiction, HARRIS. In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys. Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos, including a murder, unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community.
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Someone Knows My Name
by Lawrence Hill
Fiction, HILL. Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white.
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Cotton Comes to Harlem
by Chester B. Himes
Fiction, HIMES. Set in Harlem's underside in the 1950s, a fast-paced tale of mystery and intrigue unfolds as Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones work to halt the theft of thousands of dollars marked for the Back-to-Africa movement.
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The Rib King: A Novel
by Ladee Hubbard
Fiction, HUBBARD. Exploited by the white family that took him in as a servant 15 years earlier, a Black orphan becomes tragically enraged by how his employers mindlessly profit from the talents of a hired black cook.
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Novels and Stories
by Zora Neale Hurston
Fiction, HURSTON. Features the novels Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Moses Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, and selected stories. Includes a newly researched chronology of Hurston's life, detailed notes, and a brief essay on the texts.
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Black Leopard, Red Wolf
by Marlon James
Fiction, JAMES. Hired to find a mysterious boy who disappeared three years before, Tracker joins a search party that is quickly targeted by deadly creatures, in the first novel of a trilogy from the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings.
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Fiction, JEFFERS. To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family's past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.
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The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Fiction, JONES. The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues.
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An American Marriage: A Novel
by Tayari Jones
Fiction, JONES. When her new husband is arrested and imprisoned for a crime she knows he did not commit, a rising artist takes comfort in a longtime friendship only to encounter unexpected challenges in resuming her life when her husband's sentence is suddenly overturned. By the author of Silver Sparrow.
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Passage: A Novel
by Khary Lazarre-White
Fiction, LAZARRE-WHITE. Navigating the snowy streets of 1993 Harlem and Brooklyn, secure in the love of his family but confronted constantly by human and supernatural reminders about prejudice, a young black man struggles to graduate from an underprivileged school while becoming increasingly subject to the spirits of his oppressed ancestors.
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Bluebird, Bluebird: A Novel
by Attica Locke
Fiction, LOCKE. Forced by duty to return to his racially divided East Texas hometown, an African-American Texas Ranger risks his job and reputation to investigate a highly charged double murder case involving a black Chicago lawyer and a local white woman. By the award-winning author of Pleasantville.
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by Ayana Mathis
Fiction, MATHIS. In 1925, 15-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees her native Georgia and settles in Philadelphia. By age 16, she's stuck in a disappointing marriage to an unreliable man as she bitterly mourns the deaths of her firstborn twins. Although Hattie goes on to bear and raise nine more children, her determination to prepare them for the worst that the world has to offer takes precedence over maternal tenderness. Unfolding in 12 interlinked sections, each from the point of view of a different character, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the (mis)fortunes of one African-American family through the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Era, and into the latter years of the 20th century.
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The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
Fiction, MCBRIDE. Mistaken for a girl on account of his curly hair, delicate features, and sackcloth smock, 12-year-old slave Henry Shackleford realizes that his accidental disguise affords him greater safety and decides to remain female. Dubbed "Little Onion" by his liberator, abolitionist John Brown, Henry accompanies the increasingly fanatical Brown on his crusade to end slavery -- a picaresque journey that takes them from Bloody Kansas to Rochester, New York, where they attempt to enlist the support of such notables as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman before embarking on the infamous, ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
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The Book of Harlan
by Bernice L McFadden
Fiction, MCFADDEN. Lured across the Atlantic Ocean to perform at a popular cabaret in the Parisian enclave of Montmartre during World War II, African-American musician Harlan and his best friend, Lizard Robbins, are thrown into a concentration camp when the City of Light falls under Nazi occupation, which changes the course of both their lives.
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Waiting to Exhale
by Terry McMillan
Fiction, MCMILLAN. Four African-American women console and support one another in a complex friendship that helps each of them face the middle of their lives as single women. Savannah Jackson is single, and weary of men who can't make the transition from boyfriend to husband. Bernadine Harris is suddenly single - her husband has left her for a 24-year-old white woman. Marilyn Stokes is on the rebound, regretting the years she wasted on a dead-end relationship and mourning her recent miscarriage. And Gloria Matthews, a single mother whose 16-year-old son has just discovered sex, has spent most of her adult life driving men away with her none-too-subtle hunger for marriage.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Fiction, MORRISON. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Fiction, MORRISON. The story of Pecola Breedlove profiles an eleven-year-old Black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted
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Nightcrawling
by Leila Mottley
Fiction, MOTTLEY. When a drunken altercation with a stranger turns into a job she desperately needs, Kiara, who supports her brother and an abandoned 9-year-old boy, starts nightcrawling until her name surfaces in an investigation exposing her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
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The Women of Brewster Place
by Gloria Naylor
Fiction, NAYLOR. Once the home of poor Irish and Italian immigrants, Brewster Place, a rotting tenement on a dead-end street, now shelters black families. This novel portrays the courage, the fear, and the anguish of some of the women there who hold their families together, trying to make a home. Among them are: Mattie Michael, the matriarch who loses her son to prison; Etta Mae Johnson who tries to trade the 'high life' for marriage with a local preacher; Kiswana Browne who leaves her middle-class family to organize a tenant's union.
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The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
by Henry Louis Gates
Non-Fiction, 810.80896 N821. An anthology of the work of 140 writers covering three centuries, this book covers the earliest known work by an African American, Lucy Terry's poem "Bars Fight", to the writing of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Poet Laureate Rita Dove. It begins with blues, gospel, spirituals, rap, sermons, prayers, testimonies and speeches, and continues with writing of all genres: poetry, short fiction, novels, drama, autobiography, journals and letters, including the full text of 11 major works.
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Take My Hand
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Fiction, PERKINS-VALDEZ. In 1973 Montgomery, Alabama, Civil Townsend, a young black nurse working for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, grapples with her role when she takes two young girls into her heart and the unthinkable happens, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.
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Such a Fun Age: A Novel
by Kiley Reid
Fiction, REID. Seeking justice for a young black babysitter who was wrongly accused of kidnapping by a racist security guard, a successful blogger finds her efforts complicated by a video that reveals unexpected connections.
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Push
by Sapphire
Fiction, SAPPHIRE. A courageous and determined young teacher opens up a new world of hope and redemption for sixteen-year-old Precious Jones, an abused young African American girl living in Harlem who was raped and left pregnant by her father. This modern classic was the inspiration for the film Precious. To continue the story, check out the sequel, The Kid.
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The Revisioners: A Novel
by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Fiction, SEXTON. The author of the National Book Award-nominated A Kind of Freedom explores the impact of racism and interracial relationships between women through the story of an early 20th-century farmer and her unemployed single mother descendant.
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Fiction, WALKER. Reading this novel, which is written as a series of letters, is much like reading someone's diary, so personal are the entries and so complete the writer's transformation. Fourteen when the book opens, Celie is a young black teen abused (physically, sexually, and emotionally) by her father, who takes away her children and marries her off to a man who doesn't treat her much better. It is through this man's mistress, however, that Celie finds the courage to educate herself, to stand up for herself, and to demand to be treated as a human being. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple is a difficult but nevertheless inspiring read.
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Jubilee
by Margaret Walker
Fiction, WALKER. A novel based on the life of the author's great-grandmother follows the story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, through the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward
Fiction, WARD. Winner of the 2011 National Book Award. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch, fourteen and pregnant, and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
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Memorial
by Bryan Washington
Fiction, WASHINGTON. Japanese-American chef Mike and Black daycare teacher Benson begin reevaluating their stale relationship after Mike departs for Japan to visit his dying father and Benson is suddenly stuck with his visiting mother-in-law, who becomes an unconventional roommate.
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No One is Coming to Save Us: A Novel
by Stephanie Powell Watts
Fiction, WATTS. A tale inspired by The Great Gatsby is set in the contemporary South and follows the difficulties endured by an extended black family with colliding visions of the American dream.
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The Wedding
by Dorothy West
Fiction, WEST. Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community. With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.
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The Underground Railroad: A Novel
by Colson Whitehead
Fiction, WHITEHEAD. The award-winning author of The Noble Hustle chronicles the daring survival story of a cotton plantation slave in Georgia, who, after suffering at the hands of both her owners and fellow slaves, races through the Underground Railroad with a relentless slave-catcher close behind.
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Another Brooklyn: A Novel
by Jacqueline Woodson
Fiction, WOODSON. Torn between the fantasies of her youth and the realities of a life marked by violence and abandonment, August reunites with a beloved old friend who challenges her to reconcile her past and come to terms with the difficulties that forced her to grow up too quickly.
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Native Son
by Richard Wright
Fiction, WRIGHT. Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what it means to be black in America.
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African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song
by Kevin Young
Non-Fiction, 811.008 AF83. A wide-ranging anthology of black poetry represents 250 famous and less-recognized poets from the colonial era to the present who used their powerful words to illuminate such issues as racism, slavery and the threatened African Diaspora identity.
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Light for the World to See
by Kwame Alexander
Non-Fiction, 811.608 AL27L. From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events.
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The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
by Maya Angelou
Non-Fiction, 811.54 AN43C. Presents a definitive collection of poetry from Angelou's previous anthologies--Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water, Oh Pray my Wings Gonna Fit Me Well, And Still I Rise, I Shall Not Be Moved, On the Pulse of Morning, and Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?
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The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks: Selected Poems
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Non-Fiction, 811.54 B791E. A selection of the influential African-American poet's works reflects her modernist style and includes numerous definitive World War II poems as well as pieces about the social and political upheavals of the 1960s.
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The Tradition
by Jericho Brown
Axis 360 eBook. Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill.
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Collected Poems: 1974–2004
by Rita Dove
Non-Fiction, 811.54 D751C. An unabridged collection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and U.S. poet laureate's work includes 30 years of her prose and verse, covering seven books, including poems that touch upon adolescence, love stories, war, industrialization and civil rights.
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The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968-1998: 1968-1998
by Nikki Giovanni
Non-Fiction, 811.54 G439C. Representing three decades of work, an omnibus of poetry by the author of the award-winning Blues and Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea features pieces written between 1968 and 1998 and includes the contents of five previously published volumes.
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Black Oak: Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Men
by Harold Green
New Non-Fiction, 811.6 G822B. As he did for Black women in Black Roses, Harold Green III, poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living, now honors the Black men he most admires-groundbreakers including Tyler Perry, Barry Jenkins, Billy Porter, Chance the Rapper, LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and John Legend-and celebrates their achievements which are transforming lives and making history.
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One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance
by Nikki Grimes
Juvenile Non-Fiction, 811.54 G882O. The Coretta Scott King Award-winning author of What Is Goodbye? presents a collection of poetry inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and complemented by full-color artwork by such esteemed artists as Pat Cummings, Brian Pinkney and Sean Qualls.
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Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood
by DaMaris B. Hill
Non-Fiction, 811.6 H551B. From the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing comes a new book of narrative in verse that takes a personal and historical look at the experience of Black girlhood.
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The Weary Blues
by Langston Hughes
Non-Fiction, 811.52 H874W. Presents Hughes' first poetry collection, published when the author was just twenty-four, that captures the experiences of African Americans in the early twentieth century.
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Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Non-Fiction, 811.54 K836E. A collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet includes selections from the past 20 years as well as new work which help convey his experiences growing up in the South, his service in Vietnam and the violence of racism in America.
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And We Rise: The Civil Rights Movement in Poems
by Erica Martin
YA Non-Fiction, 811.6 M363A. This debut poetry collection walks readers through the Civil Rights Movement, introducing lesser-known figures and moments just as crucial to the Movement and our nation's centuries-long fight for justice and equality.
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The Big Smoke
by Adrian Matejka
Non-Fiction, 811.6 M415B. A finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in Poetry--a collection that examines the myth and history of the prizefighter Jack Johnson.
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Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin
by Phil Cushway
Non-Fiction, 811.008 OF1. Illuminates the black experience in America today through selected writings by forefront poets, from Pulitzer Prize winners Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa to luminaries Ismael Reed and Sonia Sanchez, in a collection complemented by personal essays on race and iconic images from the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Magical Negro: Poems
by Morgan Parker
Non-Fiction, 811.6 P227M. Explores black American womanhood through evocative themes ranging from self-conception and loneliness to objectification and ancestral trauma.
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New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006
by Ishmael Reed
Non-Fiction, 811.54 R251N 2006. Culled from four decades of writing, a volume of multicultural poetry offers insight into the MacArthur fellow's spiritual and political beliefs as well as his journeys throughout America, Japan, Africa, and other regions, in an anthology that includes pieces on such topics as war, prejudice, and George W. Bush.
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Best Barbarian: Poems
by Roger Reeves
Non-Fiction, 811.6 R259B. An incandescent collection that interrogates the personal and political nature of desire, freedom, and disaster. In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity -- climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss.
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Ain't Burned All the Bright
by Jason Reynolds
New YA Fiction, REYNOLDS. This smash-up of art and text visually captures what it is to be Black in America--and what it means to really breathe.
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Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems
by Ntozake Shange
Non-Fiction, 811.54 SH18W. In a collection of more than 60 original and selected poems in both English and Spanish, a poet, novelist and award-winning playwright, drawing from her experience as a feminist black woman in America, shares her utterly unique, unapologetic and deeply emotional writing that has made her one of the most iconic literary figures of our time.
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Book of Hours
by Kevin Young
Non-Fiction, 811.54 Y85BO. An award-winning poet presents a searing collection of emotional poems that acknowledges life's passages, including the tragic death of his father and the birth of his son.
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Essays, Histories and Social Criticism
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Collected Essays
by James Baldwin
Non-Fiction, 814.54 B193C. A comprehensive compilation of Baldwin's previously published, nonfiction writings encompasses essays on America's racial divide, the social and political turbulence of his time, and his insights into the poetry of Langston Hughes and the music of Earl Hines.
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Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up
by Remica Bingham-Risher
Non-Fiction, 811.54 B513S. Interweaving personal essays and interviews with 10 distinguished Black poets, an acclaimed essayist explores the impact of identity, joy, love and history on the artistic process, bringing to life the historical record of Black poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the early decades of the 21st.
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We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Non-Fiction, 973.932 C632W. A compelling portrait of the historic Barack Obama era, combining new and annotated essays from the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, includes the articles, "Fear of a Black President" and "The Case for Reparations" as well as two new pieces on the Obama administration and what is coming next.
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The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Non-Fiction, 973.0496 D852S. This 1903 classic is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literary history. It helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. Du Bois drew from his own experiences to develop this groundbreaking work on being African-American in American society. Souls justified the pursuit of higher education for Negroes and thus contributed to the rise of the black middle class. By describing a global color-line, Du Bois anticipated pan-Africanism and colonial revolutions in the Third World.
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Writings
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Non-Fiction, 973.0496 D852W. Historian, sociologist, novelist, editor, and political activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. Here are his essential writings, spanning a long, restless life dedicated to the struggle for racial justice. "The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade" recounts how Americans tolerated the traffic in human beings until taught by bloody civil war the consequences of moral cowardice; the essays in "The Souls of Black Folk" celebrate the strength and pride of black America, pay tribute to black music and religion, assess the career of Booker T. Washington, remember the death of an infant son; the autobiography "Dusk of Dawn" moves from a Massachusetts boyhood to the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. and emerging Pan-African consciousness. Essays and speeches from 1890 to 1958--angry and satiric, proud and mournful--show Du Bois at his freshest and most trenchant.
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Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America
by Michael Eric Dyson
New Non-Fiction, 305.800973 D995L. From the New York Times best-selling author of Tears We Cannot Stop issues a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to redemption.
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Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature
by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Non-Fiction, 810.9896 G875R. Farah Jasmine Griffin's beloved father died when she was nine, bequeathing her an unparalleled inheritance in closets full of remarkable books and other records of Black genius. In Read Until You Understand--a line from a note he wrote to her--she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that framed the United States Constitution and that inspired Malcolm X's fervent speeches, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the artistry of Romare Bearden, and many others. Having taught a popular Columbia University survey course of Black literature, she explores themes such as grace, justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, and mercy to help readers grapple with the ongoing project that is American democracy.
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Just Us: An American Conversation
by Claudia Rankine
New Non-Fiction, 305.896073 R167J. A collection of essays, poems, and images examine the power of whiteness in everyday interactions and urges readers to begin the conversation and discover what it takes to breach the silence and violence.
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Non-Fiction, 305.5122 W652C. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day.
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Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest
by Terrion L. Williamson
Non-Fiction, 977.0496 B561. Black Americans have been among the hardest hit by the rapid deindustrialization and accompanying economic decline that have become so synonymous with the Midwest. Since the 2016 election, many traditional media outlets have renewed attention on the conditions of "Middle America," but the national discourse continues to marginalize the Black people who live there. Black in the Middle brings the voices of Black Midwesterners front and center.
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
Non-Fiction, 812.54 H198R. First produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only a pioneering work by an African-American playwright - Lorraine Hansberry's play was also a radically new representation of black life, resolutely authentic, fiercely unsentimental, and unflinching in its vision of what happens to people whose dreams are constantly deferred. In her portrait of an embattled Chicago family, Hansberry anticipated issues that range from generational clashes to the civil rights and women's movements. She also posed the essential questions - about identity, justice, and moral responsibility - at the heart of these great struggles. The result is an American classic.
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Choir Boy
by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Non-Fiction, 812.6 M137C. Follows Pharus, a choir member at a prep school, as he deals with the animosity and homophobia of his classmates, in a drama from the 2009 winner of the New York Times' Outstanding Playwright Award.
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The Plays
by Ishmael Reed
Non-Fiction, 812.54 R251P. An anthology of the Otto-winning writer's plays offers insight into his use of historical, political, and social satire, in a collection that includes such works as "Body Parts," "Mother Hubbard," and "The Preacher and the Rapper."
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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf
by Ntozake Shange
Non-Fiction, 811.54 SH18F. From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing . . . every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” this groundbreaking dramatic prose poem is written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
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Fences
by August Wilson
Non-Fiction, 812.54 W691F. The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilsons ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.
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Gem of the Ocean
by August Wilson
Non-Fiction, 812.54 W691G. Gem of the Ocean is the play that begins it all. Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century--an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Aunt Esther, the drama's 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life.
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The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
by Maya Angelou
Biography, ANGELOU. A single volume omnibus edition featuring Angelou's celebrated autobiographies contains I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, and A Song Flung Up to Heaven.
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Autobiographies
by Frederick Douglass
Biography, DOUGLASS. The great American reformer of the nineteenth century recounts his life from a slave to a leader in the movements for emancipation and Black labor.
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Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir
by Nikki Grimes
YA Non-Fiction, 811.54 G882OR. Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduring companions. In this accessible and inspiring memoir that will resonate with young readers and adults alike, Nikki shows how the power of those words helped her conquer the hazards - ordinary and extraordinary - of her life.
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Selected Letters of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes
Non-Fiction, 816.52 H874S. A comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the canonical African-American author reflects his private struggles, intellectual relationships and extraordinary achievements in a segregated America.
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Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings
by Zora Neale Hurston
Non-Fiction, 818.5409 H946F. The second of a two-volume collection follows a theme of African-American heritage and folklore and includes Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, and Hurston's controversial autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road.
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I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives
by
Non-Fiction, 920.009296 I1. Between 1760 and 1902, more than 200 book-length autobiographies of ex-slaves were published; together they form the basis for all subsequent African American literature. I Was Born a Slave collects the 20 most significant “slave narratives.” They describe whippings, torture, starvation, resistance, and hairbreadth escapes; slave auctions, kidnappings, and murders; sexual abuse, religious confusion, the struggle of learning to read and write; and the triumphs and difficulties of life as free men and women. This unprecedented anthology presents them unabridged, providing each one with helpful introductions and annotations, to form the most comprehensive volume ever assembled on the lives and writings of the slaves.
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Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird
by Gene Andrew Jarrett
New Biography, DUNBAR. This biography explores the life of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), a major nineteenth-century American poet and one of the first African American writers to garner international attention and praise in the wake of emancipation. While Dunbar is perhaps best known for poems such as "Sympathy" (a poem that ends "I know why the caged bird sings!") and "We Wear the Mask," he wrote prolifically in many genres, including a newspaper he produced with his friends Orville and Wilbur Wright in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Before his early death he published fourteen books of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels, and also collaborated on theatrical productions, including the first musical with a full African American cast to appear on Broadway.
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How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir
by Saeed Jones
Biography, JONES. The award-winning poet and author of Prelude to Bruise documents his coming-of-age as a young, gay, black man in an American South at a crossroads of sex, race and power.
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Black Folk Could Fly
by Randall Kenan
New Non-Fiction, 813.54 K33B. A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction. Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies and in small journals, revealing countless facets of Kenan's life and work. Flying under the radar, these writings were his most personal and autobiographical: memories.
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Twelve Years a Slave
by Solomon Northup
Biography, NORTHUP. Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841. He spent the next twelve harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and often afraid for his life. After regaining his freedom in 1853, Northup decided to publish this gripping autobiographical account of his captivity. As an educated man, Northup was able to present an exceptionally detailed and accurate description of slave life and plantation society. Indeed, this book is probably the fullest, most realistic picture of the 'peculiar institution' during the three decades before the Civil War.
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Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
by Imani Perry
Biography, HANSBERRY. A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black intellectuals of the 20th century traces the extraordinary life of Lorraine Hansberry, a force of nature who died at age 34 and is known primarily for her work, A Raisin in the Sun.
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Men We Reaped: A Memoir
by Jesmyn Ward
Biography, WARD. Author Jesmyn Ward, whose Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction, grew up in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi. DeLisle offers few opportunities for young people to occupy themselves -- except for using and dealing in alcohol and drugs. The hopeless atmosphere in the town (which Ward escaped when she went off to college) leads to an unusually high number of deaths, including those of five young men close to Ward. In this vivid, forthright memoir, Ward paints a heart-rending picture of the social issues, especially racism and poverty, that oppress people in her hometown. Kirkus Reviews calls Men We Reaped "beautifully written, if sometimes too sad to bear."
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Black Boy: American Hunger: A Record of Childhood and Youth
by Richard Wright
Biography, WRIGHT. Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. This powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment—a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.
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Michigan City Public Library
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Michigan City, Indiana 46360
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