In celebration of Black History Month, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite books written by Black writers. Tweet us @curatormagazine and tell us your favorites.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The narrator–a black woman living in Los Angeles in the 1970s–keeps getting pulled back in time to repeatedly rescue the white scion of a pre-Civil War, slaveholding family in Maryland. The book’s matter-of-fact approach to this fantastical scenario illustrates a clear-eyed recognition of America’s past and ongoing racism. It’s also a riveting page-turner.
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Brown writes with formal precision and devastating insight.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A black father writes letters to his young son, following the example of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and documents the struggle to exist as a black body in a white supremacist world.
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
A memoir about grief that highlights systemic racism and poverty. Ward writes interconnected vignettes of her childhood in rural Mississippi and the stories of five young men she lost in the span of four years.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Spanning decades, continents, and the range of human emotions, Smith builds a world brimming with dance, dreams, conflict, and friendship.
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is a must-read for anyone, and Go Tell It on the Mountain is simply one of the best novels I’ve ever read — a moving story, beautifully written.
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
I’ve read this book three times, each time discovering something new in it. Rankine combines short, narrative prose poems, cultural essays, visual art, documentary photography, and lyric to illuminate an America my own limited perspective has largely kept hidden from me. Few books I’ve read in recent years have affected me as profoundly as this one.
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
A search for a place of belonging, this memoir asks what it means to live in a black body. Laymon examines abuse, racism, addiction, family, and education with raw, honest, and powerful prose.
Hunger by Roxane Gay
One black woman’s exploration of her large body and the culture that makes “fat” a bad word.
We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
The re-segregated future Ruffin creates, of an America slipping slowly into injustice, is frighteningly near.
Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing
Ewing weaves poetry with prose, visual art with text, and realism with fantasy in a one-of-a-kind journey into Black girlhood and womanhood.
Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib
I couldn’t have named a song by Tribe before I picked this up after hearing Abdurraqib read at AWP in 2019. But this combination of musical biography and memoir is incredible.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
This novel pairs a haunting story with rich characters who tell it in their own unique voices, and it’s beautifully crafted.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A novel about living between worlds as an African immigrant and about what happens when lovers get separated by states, distance, and other powers beyond them. Also, some of the best writing I’ve encountered in a long time!
The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton
Clifton’s compact poems manage to be intimate, dense and powerful.
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
An intimate portrait of the relationship between a young schoolteacher and a man sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. Gaines’ book belongs alongside the great works about American society in the mid-20th century.
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