Browse

A genre-defying work combining poetry, prose, and images to document racial microaggressions, police killings, and the experience of being Black in America. Received every major American poetry prize.

Pulitzer Prize-winning collection meditating on the universe, David Bowie, her father's work on the Hubble Space Telescope, and mortality. Space becomes a lens for examining grief and wonder.

Lorde's 'biomythography' of growing up Black, female, and queer in 1950s New York, through her relationships with women, her political awakening, and the Caribbean inheritance of her mother.

Roy is wrongfully imprisoned shortly after his marriage to Celestial. The years of separation change both of them. A love story about mass incarceration, Black ambition, and what prison does to a people.

Laymon writes a letter to his mother about the violence of his childhood in Mississippi, his body, gambling, food, and the ways Black families carry America's weight. One of the most honest memoirs in American literature.

In antebellum Virginia, a free Black man owns slaves. After his death, his plantation unravels while the county sheriff — also a former slave — struggles to maintain order. A profound meditation on freedom and its perversions.

Tashi, a character from The Color Purple, agrees to undergo female genital mutilation as an act of African solidarity — and spends her life dealing with the physical and psychological consequences.

Asante's foundational text of Afrocentrism — the argument that African people must center their own cultural and historical perspectives rather than viewing themselves through a Eurocentric lens.

One of the defining works of the Black Arts Movement, using jazz rhythms, Black vernacular, and political rage to celebrate Black identity and demand liberation. Sanchez's voice is unlike any other.

Giovanni's debut collection, written during the summer after King's assassination. Angry, playful, tender — a young Black woman's direct address to her community and to America.

Gilroy argues that Black Atlantic culture — crossing Africa, Europe, America, and the Caribbean — cannot be reduced to any single national or ethnic tradition. Music, literature, and politics form a hybrid culture.

Lauren Olamina continues building Earthseed as a theocratic American government called 'Christian America' rises to power under a president who promises to 'Make America Great Again.' A deeply disturbing sequel.

A landmark collection of African American folktales — animal stories, supernatural tales, and the title story of enslaved Africans who remember how to fly and escape their bondage.

Twelve Native American characters converge on the Big Oakland Powwow with different intentions — some to perform, some to rob it. A polyphonic novel about urban Native American identity.

Noted for comparison: a novel of house arrest and elegant confinement — interesting as contrast to how African writers depict confinement and surveillance without access to the elegance Towles describes.

Freire's radical educational philosophy, developed working with illiterate peasants in Brazil, argues that education must be a practice of liberation, not a 'banking' system that deposits knowledge into passive students.

Three Black families in Philadelphia and New York navigate ambition, love, and racial identity in the early 20th century. Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis, was the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance.

King's theological essays on what it means to be fully human — the spiritual, intellectual, and social dimensions of human dignity. The philosophical foundation of his civil rights advocacy.

Essays written from Folsom Prison — on race, sexuality, America, and the Black liberation movement. One of the defining texts of the Black Power era, brutal in its self-examination.

Three plays by Caryl Phillips exploring Black British experience — Strange Fruit (a family's conflict over racial identity), Where There is Darkness, and The Shelter.

An African father who sold his children into slavery 250 years ago watches their descendants scatter across the Black Atlantic — a missionary in Africa, a slave in America, a GI's wartime companion in England.

Two Americans try to give away $32,000 cash to strangers around the world in a week following a friend's death. Though by an American author, this novel portrays African countries with unusual honesty about Western projection.

Morrison's landmark essays examining how Black presence shaped the white American literary imagination — how canonical American authors like Poe, Cather, and Hemingway wrote about and around Blackness.

Morrison's final Harvard Norton Lectures, examining how literature constructs the 'Other' — how we narrativize race, how foreignness is produced, and how literature can counter othering.

Included as a comparison text — on an island, objects disappear and the memory of them fades. A profound meditation on forgetting, colonization, and cultural erasure relevant to African memory studies.