Identity

First book of poetry published by an African American, written while Wheatley was enslaved in Boston.

Douglass's first autobiography detailing his life as a slave and his escape to freedom, becoming a powerful abolitionist text.

Douglass's expanded second autobiography with deeper analysis of slavery and his development as an intellectual.

Jacobs's account of her life as a slave and her escape, focusing on sexual exploitation of enslaved women.

Final autobiography covering Douglass's entire life including post-Civil War period and diplomatic career.

Pioneering sociological study of African-American community in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward.

Seminal work on race in America introducing the concept of 'double consciousness' and arguing for the importance of higher education for Black Americans.

Novel about a light-skinned Black man who passes as white, exploring racial identity and 'passing'.

Essays, sketches, and poems on race, gender, and labor including famous 'The Souls of White Folk'.

Poetry collection including militant sonnet 'If We Must Die' written after Red Summer of 1919.

Experimental work combining poetry, prose, and drama depicting Black life in the rural South and urban North.

Collection of Garvey's speeches, essays, and philosophy on Black nationalism and African redemption.

Argument for African-American contributions to American civilization.

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.

First poetry collection including famous poems 'Heritage' and 'Incident' exploring race and identity.

Hughes's first poetry collection capturing the rhythms of jazz and blues with poems celebrating Black life.

Second poetry collection continuing exploration of race and romanticism in classical verse forms.

Poetic renditions of traditional Black folk sermons capturing oratory power of Black preachers.

Jake, a Black soldier returning from WWI to Harlem, navigates the vibrant nightlife and working-class life.

Helga Crane, biracial woman, searches for identity across Harlem, Copenhagen, and the rural South.

Black men from across the diaspora gather in Marseilles, exploring pan-African identity and Black internationalism.

Two light-skinned Black women reunite, one passing as white, exploring race, identity, and desire.

Coming-of-age story of Sandy Rogers growing up in a small Kansas town, exploring Black middle-class life.

History of African Americans in New York City from colonial times through the Harlem Renaissance.

Critique of American education system's failure to teach Black history and its psychological effects.

Story of John Pearson, a Baptist preacher whose gifts are undermined by his weakness for women, inspired by Hurston's father.

Collection of African-American folklore from Florida and hoodoo practices from New Orleans.

Marxist analysis of Reconstruction challenging racist historiography, arguing for Black agency in rebuilding South.

Janie Crawford's journey through three marriages in search of love and self-discovery in rural Florida.

History of the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the only successful slave revolt that led to the founding of an independent state.

Collection of novellas depicting racial oppression and violence in the Deep South.

Epic poem marking the birth of Negritude movement, exploring Black identity, colonialism, and the poet's return to Martinique with revolutionary fervor.

Long surrealist poem about returning to Martinique, coining 'négritude' and celebrating Black identity.

Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in 1930s Chicago, accidentally kills a white woman, exposing the brutal reality of racism.

Hughes's autobiography covering his childhood, travels, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Autobiography subtitled 'Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept' exploring race and ideology.

Hurston's autobiography from her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, to her career as a writer and anthropologist.

Poetry collection celebrating African culture, identity, and the concept of Negritude, blending French verse with African rhythms and imagery.

Memoir of Wright's childhood and young adulthood in the Jim Crow South, depicting poverty, racism, and hunger.

Analysis of colonialism and democracy arguing that democracy cannot coexist with imperialism.

First poetry collection depicting everyday life of Black residents in Chicago's South Side.

History of Africa's role in world civilization, challenging Eurocentric historiography.

Poetry collection reflecting on African soldiers' experiences in WWII and colonialism's impact, celebrating African resilience and culture.

Poetry sequence following Annie Allen from childhood to womanhood in Chicago.

Long poem sequence capturing Harlem life in jazz-inspired rhythms, including famous 'Harlem' poem.

Analysis of the psychology of racism and dehumanization inherent in colonial domination, examining how colonized people internalize the colonizer's view.

An unnamed Black narrator recounts his journey from the South to Harlem, exploring invisibility and identity in American society.

Semi-autobiographical novel exploring race, religion, and family in Harlem through the story of John Grimes coming of age on his fourteenth birthday.

Existentialist novel about Cross Damon who fakes his death and reinvents himself, exploring freedom and morality.

Novel-in-vignettes following a Black woman's ordinary life in Chicago, examining colorism and dignity.

West Indians on a ship to England, exploring the immigrant experience and post-colonial identity.

Collection of essays on race in America and Europe, combining personal reflection with social analysis.

Set in Paris, an American man grapples with his sexual identity and his relationship with an Italian bartender named Giovanni.

Lectures on colonialism, racism, and the psychology of oppression delivered in Europe.

King's account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and development of his nonviolent philosophy.

Career-spanning collection of Hughes's most important poems celebrating Black American life.

The Younger family in Chicago's South Side dreams of moving to white neighborhood with insurance money.

Selina Boyce comes of age in Brooklyn's Barbadian immigrant community, navigating between cultures.

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 on Caribbean identity, colonialism, and the Prospero-Caliban relationship in Shakespeare's Tempest.

Short poem about seven pool players at the Golden Shovel, capturing young Black male life and mortality.

A young Senegalese man from the Diallobé region studies in France and struggles between traditional Islamic faith and Western materialistic culture.

A seminal work on decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization, arguing that decolonization is inherently violent and analyzing the role of class, race, and culture in liberation movements.

Essays on writers, civil rights, and living as a Black American in Europe and the American South.

Samba Diallo, a young Senegalese man of the Diallobé people, is sent to French colonial schools, then Paris, where he loses his spiritual center. A profound meditation on colonialism and identity.

Set in Greenwich Village and Harlem, explores interracial and same-sex relationships in 1950s New York following the suicide of jazz drummer Rufus Scott.

Two essays examining race relations in America, blending memoir with social criticism, warning of explosive racial tensions.

Open letter written while imprisoned for protesting segregation, defending nonviolent civil disobedience.

Speech delivered during March on Washington calling for civil and economic rights and end to racism.

Speech distinguishing 'Negro revolution' from true revolution, critiquing civil rights leadership.

Amy Jacques Garvey's account of the Garvey movement and her husband's legacy in Pan-African thought.

Memoir combining cricket, colonial politics, and Caribbean identity; 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'

Groundbreaking history of African-American music as expression of Black American experience.

Essays on literature, music, and Black American culture, including reflections on writing Invisible Man.

Account of Birmingham campaign of 1963 and the broader civil rights movement.

Speech advocating Black nationalism and self-defense, delivered after leaving Nation of Islam.

One-act play about violent confrontation between Black intellectual and white woman on subway.

Poetry collection marking Baraka's transition from Beat poet to Black nationalist voice.

Ghana's first published play by an African woman. An African American woman marries a Ghanaian and returns with him to Africa, where she is caught between two worlds, belonging fully to neither.

Malcolm X's life from childhood to his transformation from criminal to Nation of Islam minister to independent leader.

Collection of speeches from Malcolm's last year including 'The Ballot or the Bullet' and 'Message to the Grassroots'.

A young man returns to his village in Sudan after studying in Europe and encounters Mustafa Sa'eed, a mysterious stranger with a dark past in England, exploring themes of colonialism and identity.

Long poem in which Lawino, a rural Acholi woman, laments her husband's rejection of traditional ways for Western culture, defending African identity.

Novel about poet who must decode alien language that may be weapon, exploring how language shapes thought.

Play about Makak, a charcoal burner who dreams of becoming an African king, exploring colonialism and identity.

King's final book analyzing the future of civil rights movement and calling for economic justice.

Manifesto defining Black Power as political and economic self-determination for Black communities.

Radical poetry collection establishing Giovanni as voice of Black Arts Movement.

Militant poetry collection addressing Black power and revolutionary consciousness.

Space opera about quest for rare element in dying star, exploring mythology and economics.

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.

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.

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.

First of seven autobiographies chronicling Angelou's childhood in the segregated South and her coming of age.

Story of Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl who prays for blue eyes, exploring internalized racism and beauty standards.

Three generations of a Black sharecropping family in rural Georgia, examining cycles of violence and oppression.

Collection of speeches and interviews from Malcolm's final period after pilgrimage to Mecca.

First major anthology of Black women's writing including Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker.

Seale's account of founding Black Panthers, written while imprisoned.

The companion poem to Song of Lawino, giving voice to Ocol, the Westernized husband. His contemptuous monologue dismissing Africa as backward becomes an unwitting self-indictment, exposing the psychological damage of colonial education.

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.

Analysis of how European colonialism systematically exploited Africa's resources and labor while blocking African development, creating underdevelopment.

Satirical novel set in 1920s Harlem about a plague of joy called Jes Grew spreading across America.

Short story collection including 'The Lesson' and 'Raymond's Run' about Black urban life.

Ngũgĩ's early essays on African literature, the crisis of African identity, and the role of the writer in a post-colonial society. His first major critical work.

The story of two Black women friends in Ohio whose lives take vastly different paths, exploring good and evil, community, and independence.

Trilogy of poetry (Rights of Passage, Masks, Islands) tracing African diaspora experience across Middle Passage.

Poetry for young readers including the iconic 'Ego Tripping' celebrating Black women's power.

Newton's autobiography explaining Black Panther Party philosophy and his political evolution.

Collection of poems written during Portuguese colonial rule expressing longing for freedom and Angolan identity, becoming anthems of the independence movement.

Love story set in Harlem about Tish and Fonny, whose plans are derailed when Fonny is falsely accused of rape.

Second autobiography covering Angelou's young adult years as single mother navigating post-WWII America.

Davis's account of her life, FBI most wanted status, imprisonment, and political activism.

Adah follows her husband to London only to find exploitation, racism, and domestic abuse. She writes a novel; he burns it. A fierce, semi-autobiographical account of immigrant life, motherhood, and the will to survive.

A Yoruba community converts to Islam, and the conflicts that arise between generations, between the new faith and old customs, form the backbone of this quiet, thoughtful novel.

Blues singer Ursa Corregidora deals with family trauma descended from slavery in Brazil.

Massive experimental novel set in mysterious American city cut off from world.

Novel following a civil rights worker's spiritual journey and political awakening in the 1960s South.

Choreopoem of 20 poems performed by seven women exploring Black women's experiences with love, abandonment, and empowerment.

Tracing Haley's family from Kunta Kinte's capture in Gambia through slavery to Civil War and beyond.

Eva Medina recounts her life and crime from psychiatric prison, exploring violence and sexuality.

Satirical neo-slave narrative mixing antebellum setting with contemporary anachronisms.

Milkman Dead's journey of self-discovery tracing his family history, blending myth with African-American experience.

A formally innovative novel blending prose and poetry, following Ghanaian student Sissie through Europe. A fierce critique of neo-colonialism, the African brain drain, and the seductions of Europe.

Poetry collection drawing on African mythology and goddess traditions to explore Black womanhood.

Poetry collection including the iconic title poem celebrating Black resilience and triumph.

Poem celebrating Black womanhood and female confidence, rejecting conventional beauty standards.

Modern Black woman is transported to antebellum Maryland, confronting slavery firsthand.

Lorde's account of her breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy, politicizing the illness.

Novel about a Black woman's healing after suicide attempt, blending traditional and modern medicine.

Poetry collection in Jamaican patois ('dub poetry'), confronting racism in Thatcher's England, police violence, and the resilience of Black British communities. LKJ's most celebrated collection.

A love story set on a Caribbean island exploring class, race, and culture through the relationship between Jadine and Son.

Essays developing theory of Antillanité (Caribbeanness) and exploring Caribbean identity beyond Negritude.

Examination of sexism's impact on Black women during slavery through modern feminism's failures.

Historical analysis of racism and sexism in America from slavery through women's suffrage movement.

Epistolary novel following Celie, a Black woman in rural Georgia, who finds her voice through relationships with other women.

Biomythography of Lorde's coming of age as Black lesbian in 1950s New York.

Philosophical slave narrative following Andrew Hawkins from slavery to passing as white.

Play about unlicensed cab drivers in 1970s Pittsburgh facing urban renewal displacement.

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.

Collection of essays introducing the term 'womanist' and exploring Black women's creativity and spirituality.

Avey Johnson, affluent Black widow, rediscovers her cultural roots on Caribbean island cruise.

A sequence of poems tracing the Middle Passage, slavery, and survival through the voice of a Caribbean woman. Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

Collection of essays and speeches on racism, sexism, homophobia, and difference, including 'The Master's Tools.'

Critique of mainstream feminism's exclusion of women of color and working-class women.

Play set in 1927 Chicago recording studio exploring tensions between blues musicians and white management.

Play about Troy Maxson, former Negro League player, and his strained family relationships in 1950s Pittsburgh.

A Moroccan merchant registers his eighth daughter as a son. Narrated in a Marrakech storytelling circle, the novel follows Ahmed/Zahra's journey through a life lived between genders, questioning identity, faith, and desire.

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.

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.

First novel in the Blood in the Sun trilogy, exploring identity and belonging through the story of Askar, an orphan raised by a woman during the Ogaden War.

Essays on American culture, race, and identity, continuing themes from Shadow and Act.

Play set in 1911 Pittsburgh boarding house where former slave searches for his wife.

Sethe, an escaped slave, is haunted by the ghost of her daughter whom she killed to save from slavery, exploring trauma's legacy.

First of Xenogenesis trilogy; Lilith awakens on alien ship after nuclear war to breed human-alien hybrids.

Play about siblings fighting over family piano carved with their ancestry during slavery.

Shakur's account of her life, Black Liberation Army membership, and escape to Cuba.

Sequel to The Sand Child; the protagonist, raised as a boy, is now free after her father's death to discover her true female identity — a journey into her own body, desire, and freedom.

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.

A theoretical framework rooting African-American literature in the West African tradition of the trickster Esu-Elegbara, showing how Black writers signify on one another and on white literary tradition through double-voiced discourse.

Two women share a prison cell in Cameroon — Tanga, a teenage prostitute dying of AIDS, and Anna-Claude, a French woman of Algerian origin. As Tanga tells her story, Anna-Claude assumes her identity.

Essays on coming to voice as Black feminist intellectual, challenging white supremacy and patriarchy.

Landmark essay coining 'intersectionality' to describe how Black women face compounded discrimination.

Philosophical work developing 'Relation' as framework for understanding creolization and global identity.

Freed slave Rutherford Calhoun stows away on slave ship, blending adventure with philosophy.

Systematic analysis of Black feminist thought and the 'matrix of domination'.

Play set in 1969 Pittsburgh diner during Black Power era, examining community and change.

Set in 1920s Harlem, a married couple's story following Joe's shooting of his young lover, written in jazz-like rhythms.

Essays examining how white American writers construct Blackness in their work and what this reveals about whiteness.

Analysis of how Black people are represented in media and the 'oppositional gaze'.

Philosophical exploration of African identity and critique of racial essentialism.

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.

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.

In 2020s dystopian California, Lauren Olamina develops new religion Earthseed amid societal collapse.

Poem written for President Clinton's inauguration, calling for unity and facing history honestly.

A Guyanese engineer working on a sea-wall project in an English village becomes obsessed with his landlady's past, uncovering layers of colonial history and longing, a meditative novel about memory, belonging, and empire's weight on daily life.

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.

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.

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.

Short story collection including Hugo and Nebula-winning title story about humans in alien symbiosis.

Play about blues guitarist Floyd Barton's final days in 1948 Pittsburgh.

Magical realist tale of Oscar Kahn, a 'colored' Muslim architect passing as Jewish in post-apartheid South Africa, exploring identity and racial categorization.

Story of an all-Black town in Oklahoma and the convent of women nearby that the town's men attack, exploring purity and exclusion.

Analysis of everyday violence of slavery and its afterlife in American society.

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.

Novel about first Black female elevator inspector in alternate world, exploring race and progress.

Play about ex-con trying to rebuild life in 1985 Pittsburgh Hill District.

Sammar, a Sudanese woman working as a translator in Aberdeen after the death of her husband, falls in love with a Scottish academic studying Islamic politics. A quiet, luminous novel about faith and belonging.

Three families in multicultural North London over several decades, exploring immigration and identity.

Exploration of love as practice and political force, defining love through care, commitment, trust.

Two parallel stories of Xhosa people separated by 150 years — the 1856 cattle-killing prophecy that destroyed the Xhosa nation, and a contemporary village debating whether to allow a casino and tourism resort.

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.

Argument for prison abolition and analysis of prison-industrial complex.

Play set in 1904 about 285-year-old Aunt Ester and her spiritual cleansing of troubled man.

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.

Though set in Afghanistan, this novel about Amir and Hassan crosses the lines of ethnicity (Pashtun vs. Hazara) and explores guilt, redemption, and the destruction of a country. Included as a North African/Middle Eastern diaspora text.

Vikram Lall, an Asian Kenyan, narrates his family's history through Kenya's independence and its descent into corruption, placed between Black, white, and Asian communities — belonging fully to none.

Two Jamaican immigrants — Hortense and Gilbert — arrive in London in 1948 and rent a room from Queenie, a white woman whose husband has just returned from the war. A rich, humane novel about the Windrush generation.

Two academic families in New England navigate race, politics, and aesthetics.

Final play of Cycle about Black mayoral candidate and gentrification in 1990s Pittsburgh.

Hartman's journey to Ghana tracing the slave route and grappling with African-American identity.

A memoir about Danticat's father and uncle, two brothers separated by migration, and their parallel deaths in 2004, one from illness, the other in US immigration detention after Hurricane Ivan. A profound meditation on family and American policy toward Haiti.

Sepha Stephanos, a refugee from Ethiopia who fled a military coup, runs a failing grocery store in a gentrifying Washington D.C. neighborhood. A quiet, devastating novel about displacement and belonging.

Set in 1680s America, explores the origins of slavery and racism through multiple voices on a farm in New York.

A legal scholar's argument that mass incarceration has replaced Jim Crow as a system of racial control, targeting Black men through the War on Drugs, stripping rights, and creating a permanent undercaste within the formal law.

Julius, a Nigerian immigrant and psychiatry student in New York, wanders Manhattan reflecting on identity, immigration, history, and alienation.

Novel following poor Mississippi family in 12 days before Hurricane Katrina.

Wainaina's memoir of growing up in Kenya, finding his voice as a writer, and the country's transformation. Lyrical, restless, and formally inventive — as much a portrait of post-colonial African identity as autobiography.

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.

Coming-of-age story of Darling, first as a child in Zimbabwe navigating chaos and poverty, then as a teenager in the American Midwest, exploring diaspora experiences.

Ifemelu and Obinze's love story spanning Nigeria and America, exploring race, immigration, identity, and what it means to be Black in America versus Africa.

Memoir about five young Black men from Ward's Mississippi community who died in five years.

Barry, a 74-year-old Antiguan man living in London, has been secretly in love with his best friend Morris for 60 years while maintaining his marriage and reputation. A joyful, heartbreaking novel.

A Ghanaian-American family navigates the first generation's dreams against the second generation's realities — identity, assimilation, and return.

Set in Croatia after the Balkan wars — though by a Sierra Leonean author, the novel's examination of memory, silence, and war's aftermath directly draws on Forna's experience of Sierra Leone's civil war.

The Sai family — Ghanaian father, Nigerian mother, four children scattered across continents — reassembles when the patriarch dies. A lyrical examination of the African immigrant family's fracture and possible healing.

Atlantic essay arguing for reparations by chronicling housing discrimination and its lasting effects.

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.

An examination of how Muslim youth in the diaspora — from Harlem to Paris to Dakar — use hip-hop, gnawa, and protest music to forge a global identity that connects Islamic and Black Atlantic traditions.

Letter to son about being Black in America, exploring fear, police violence, and the Black body.

Satirical novel about Black man who reinstates slavery and segregation in Los Angeles suburb.

First book of Broken Earth trilogy set on supercontinent plagued by catastrophic seismic events.

Spanning 300 years from 18th century Ghana to contemporary America, tracing two family lines descended from half-sisters—one sold into slavery, one who marries a British slaver.

Two brown girls in London dream of becoming dancers, exploring friendship, race, and ambition.

Collection of essays connecting Ferguson, Palestine, and global freedom struggles.

Novel reimagining the Underground Railroad as actual railroad beneath the Southern soil.

Second book of Broken Earth trilogy continuing Essun's search for daughter amid apocalypse.

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.

Essays from Obama era exploring race, history, and the limits of progress.

Road novel about Mississippi family haunted by ghosts of past, exploring race and incarceration.

Conclusion of Broken Earth trilogy as Essun must choose between saving or destroying the world.

Generation ship novel where Black passengers live in lower decks under plantation-like conditions.

Twelve short stories blending the fantastical and the real, spanning Nigeria, diaspora, and invented futures — women who knit grief out of the bereaved, scientists who calculate human emotion, mothers and daughters across generations.

A Syrian narrator tells their dying partner stories from their shared queer life in Damascus and as refugees in Canada — love, war, displacement, and memory. Included as a North African/Middle East queer diaspora text.

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.

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.

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.

Ada is an ogbanje — a spirit child in Igbo cosmology — and her multiplicity of selves inhabit her body and narrate her life. A devastating examination of identity, trauma, and Nigerian spiritual belief.

A Kenyan woman travels to China after learning of her Chinese heritage, exploring themes of loss, discovery, and identity along the ancient trade routes.

Intimate histories of Black women in early 20th century Philadelphia and New York, using 'critical fabulation'.

Novel about enslaved man with photographic memory who discovers supernatural power of Conduction.

Novel based on true story of abusive Florida reform school and its Black victims.

Essays on race, identity, diaspora, and representation including 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora'.

Novella about underwater people descended from pregnant African women thrown from slave ships.

Twelve characters — mostly Black British women — whose lives intersect in modern Britain. Evaristo's formally inventive prose-poetry creates a chorus of voices spanning generations and social classes.

Second in the Wormwood Trilogy, expanding the alien biodome world as Rosewater declares independence from Nigeria. An increasingly complex examination of consciousness, identity, and alien intervention.

Novel about Ghanaian-American neuroscientist studying addiction while caring for depressed mother.

A debut poetry collection by a Ghanaian-American poet exploring inherited trauma, Blackness in America, and the body as site of racial and gendered violence.