Poetry
Perfect Black
Crystal Wilkinson
Poems consider color, family, girlhood, and the landscapes that shaped Wilkinson’s sense of home.
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138 books
Memoir
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts
Crystal Wilkinson
Recipes and recollections connect Appalachian foodways with the stories of Black women across generations.
Biography
Princess Noire
Nadine Cohodas
The book follows Simone’s musical education, performance career, and political commitments.
Fiction
Quicksand
Nella Larsen
Helga Crane moves between institutions, cities, and countries in search of a place she can inhabit freely.
Biography
Respect
David Ritz
A biography examines the gospel inheritance and recording career behind Franklin’s public sound.
Music history
Respect Yourself
Robert Gordon
Stax Records offers a vantage point on Memphis soul, collaboration, and the pressures surrounding the label.
Poetry
Rice
Nikky Finney
Rice ties family stories and foodways to Black Southern histories of labor and survival.
Fiction
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Mildred D. Taylor
Cassie Logan watches her Mississippi family defend the land and independence they have worked to hold.
Fiction
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
A family in coastal Mississippi prepares for Katrina as a teenage narrator pieces together what it means to care for others.
History
Schooling the Freed People
Ronald E. Butchart
A history of the teachers and institutions that helped build schools in the first decades after emancipation.
History
Self-Taught
Heather Andrea Williams
The book follows Black people’s pursuit of reading and schooling before, during, and after the Civil War.
Fiction
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
A Mississippi family road trip brings the living into contact with histories that refuse to stay buried.
Fiction
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Milkman Dead follows family stories south in a novel about inheritance, naming, and flight.
Essays
South to America
Imani Perry
Perry travels across the South to consider how the region’s places and contradictions shape the nation.
History
Stamped from the Beginning
Ibram X. Kendi
Five historical figures provide points of entry into changing ideas about race and their political uses.
Fiction
Sula
Toni Morrison
Two childhood friends take divergent paths in a hillside Ohio neighborhood.
Picture book
Sulwe
Lupita Nyong'o
A girl’s encounter with a story about night helps her see her own skin differently.
Music history
Sweet Soul Music
Peter Guralnick
Musicians, producers, and studios tell the story of Southern soul across a network of regional scenes.
Memoir
Taking Flight
Michaela DePrince, Elaine DePrince
DePrince recalls her path from Sierra Leone to ballet training and professional performance.
Picture book
Tar Beach
Faith Ringgold
A child flying above a Harlem rooftop turns the city into a map of wishes for her family.
Essays
Teaching to Transgress
bell hooks
hooks brings classroom experience to questions about freedom, authority, and participation in education.
History
The 1619 Project
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Essays, poems, and fiction explore slavery’s place in American institutions and historical memory.
History
The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era
Jonathan Shandell
A history of Harlem’s American Negro Theatre traces artists, audiences, and a new space for Black theatre.
Memoir
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, Alex Haley
Malcolm X recounts the institutions, encounters, and journeys that transformed his political and religious life.