Picture book
A is for Affrilachia
Frank X Walker
An illustrated alphabet introduces places, people, and traditions in Black Appalachia.
Explore books
Explore the collection
Search the shelves by title, writer, subject, period, or connection to the Lyric.
138 books
Fiction
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Multiple voices illuminate a household in the unsettled world of seventeenth-century colonial America.
Drama
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
A Chicago family debates how to use an inheritance and faces resistance to moving into a new home.
Poetry
Affrilachia
Frank X Walker
Walker’s poems insist on the visibility of Black lives in the language and geography of Appalachia.
Essays
All About Love
bell hooks
hooks examines love as a practice that can shape personal relationships and public life.
Picture book
Alvin Ailey
Andrea Davis Pinkney
A picture-book biography introduces Ailey’s childhood and the movement language he brought to the stage.
Picture book
Amazing Grace
Mary Hoffman
A child determined to play Peter Pan challenges the limits others place on her imagination.
Memoir
Assata
Assata Shakur
Shakur recounts her upbringing, political organizing, imprisonment, and experiences with the legal system.
Oral history
Barracoon
Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston records Cudjo Lewis’s account of captivity, the Atlantic crossing, and life in Africatown.
Essays
Belonging: A Culture of Place
bell hooks
Essays on place, race, land, and return connect hooks’s Kentucky roots with a wider ethic of belonging.
Fiction
Beloved
Toni Morrison
A mother and daughter reckon with the afterlife of slavery in a house haunted by a child’s return.
History
Black Against Empire
Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin Jr.
A history of the Black Panther Party follows its organizing strategies and the pressures that weakened it.
Biography
Black Ballerinas
Misty Copeland
Illustrated profiles introduce dancers whose careers expanded possibilities for Black ballet artists.
History
Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970
Lynne Fauley Emery
A historical survey traces Black dance across social, theatrical, and professional settings.
History
Black Reconstruction in America
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois centers Black workers and political participation in an account of Reconstruction and its overthrow.
Music history
Blues People
Amiri Baraka
Baraka reads changes in Black music alongside changes in work, migration, and social life.
Memoir
Bone Black
bell hooks
Fragmentary memories trace the making of a writer in a Black Southern family.
Memoir
Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson
Woodson remembers growing up between South Carolina and New York in verse attentive to family stories.
Fiction
Bud, Not Buddy
Christopher Paul Curtis
A boy in Depression-era Michigan follows clues he hopes will lead him to his father and a jazz band.
Poetry
Buffalo Dance
Frank X Walker
A sequence of poems imagines the perspective of York, the enslaved participant in the Lewis and Clark expedition.
History
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson compares inherited hierarchies across societies to examine how inequality is made durable.
Fiction
Clotel
William Wells Brown
Brown’s novel follows women navigating slavery and family separation in the early United States.
Fiction
Conjure Women
Afia Atakora
A mother and daughter practice healing in a community struggling through the transition from slavery to freedom.
Biography
Dream Boogie
Peter Guralnick
A biography follows Cooke from gospel performance into popular music and independent business ventures.