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Reading List

Black History Month

Reading List

 

    At Literacy Minnesota we are committed to elevating BIPOC voices in the literacy community. Here is our reading list from Black History Month highlighting black writers and educators. We at Literacy Minnesota hope you enjoy!

     

    Black History Month Reading List

    James Baldwin: 

    • Notes of a Native Son (1955)
    • Nobody Knows My Name (1961)
    •  The Fire Next Time (1963)
    • Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
    • Giovanni’s Room (1956)
    • Another Country (1962)
    •  If Beale Street Could Talk (1974; film 2018)
    •  The Amen Corner (1955)
    •  Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)

    DC Edwards:

    • Bright City

    Tanahesi Coates: 

    • Between the World and Me
    • The Beautiful Struggle
    • Black Panther (Comics)
    • We Were Eight Years In Power
    • The Water Dancer

    Briana Lawrence:

    • I am Magical (MagnifiqueNOIR)
    • Treat Me Kindly
    • Beneath the Chapter
    • Seeking the Storyteller

    Alred Tatum: 

    • Reading for their Life: Reading and Writing for Resilliency
    • Black Boy
    • The Autobiography of Malcom X
    • A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
    • Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males.

    Marlon James: 

    • John Crow's Devil (2005)
    • The Book of Night Women (2009)
    • A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
    • Black Leopard Red Wolf (2019)

    Andre M. Carrington: 

    • Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016)
    • Audiofuturism

    Eyenga Bokamba: 

    • The Language of Possibility (2010)

    De'Vonna Pittman: 

    • My Pretty and Its Ugly Truth
    • A Memoir by De'Vonna Pittman

    Junauda Petrus: 

    • The Stars and The Blackness Between Them

    Taylor Aaron Cisco:

    • Dragon Variation (2017)
    • The Preternaturalist, Teleportality (2016)
    • The Future is Yesterday (2011)
    • Minneapolis South (2010) 

    Roxanne Battle:

    • Pockets of Joy

    Nicole Pacini: 

    • Not a Cloud in the Sky

    Maya Angelou: 

    • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    • Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die
    • Still I Rise

    Amiri Bakara:

    • A good girl is hard to find, Preface to a twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961)
    • Home: Social Essays (1966)
    • Dutchman (1964)
    • The Dead Lecturer (1964)
    • The System of Dante's Hell (1965)
    • Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963)
    • Black Music (1968)
    • The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987)

    Octavia Butler: 

    • Kindred, Dawn
    • Adulthood Rites
    • Imago
    • Lilith's Brood
    • Parable of the Sower
    • Parable of the Talents 
    • Wildseed
    • The Evening and the Morning and the Night

    W.E.B. DuBois: 

    • The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870
    • The Souls of Black Folk
    • Crisis

    Ralph Waldo Ellison:

    • Shadow and Act (1964)
    • Invisible Man (1952)
    • Juneteenth (1999)

    Alex Haley:

    • The Autobiography of Malcom X
    • Roots
    • The Saga of an American Family

    Langston Hughes: 

    • The Weary Blues (1926)
    • Not Without Laughter (1930)
    • Famous American Negroes (1954)
    • Black Nativity (1961)
    • Popo and Fifina (1932) 

    Zora Neale Hurston: 

    • Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
    • Their Eyes Were Watching God
    • Mules and Men
    • Dust tracks on the Road

    Richard Wright: 

    • Uncle Tom's Children (1938)
    • Native Son (1940)
    • Black Boy (1945)
    • The Outsider (1953)

    Toni Morrison:

    • Beloved
    • The Bluest Eye
    • Song of Solomon
    • Sula

    Bell Hooks:

    • Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981)
    • Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)
    • Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)
    • All About Love: New Visions (2000)
    • We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004