Featured Books

Fiction

  1.  Push - Sapphire
  2.  The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas
  3.  The Spook Who Sat By the Door - Sam Greenlee
  4.  The Blacker the Berry - Wallace Thurman
  5.  Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward
  6.  The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
  7.  Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker
  8.  The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates
  9.  The Coldest Winter Ever - Sister Souljah
  10.  The Travelers - Regina Porter
  11.  Devil In a Blue Dress - Walter Mosley
  12.  The Vanishing Half: A Novel - Brit Bennett
  13.  The Good Lord Bird - James McBride
  14.  The Twelve Tribes of Hattie - Ayana Mathis

History

  1.  The Gift of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois
  2.  Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - Isabel Wilkerson
  3.  Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers- Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All - Marth Jones
  4.  Overground Railroad: The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America - Candacy Taylor
  5.  Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots - Morgan Jerkins
  6.  The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration - Isabel Wilkerson
  7.  Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present - Harriet A. Washington
  8.  The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation - Anna Malaika Tubbs
  9.  On Juneteenth - Annette Gordon-Reed
  10.  All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake - Tiya Miles
  11.  Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” - Zora Neale Hurston
  12. The 1619 Project - Nikole Hannah-Jones

Classics

  1.  Roots - Alex Haley
  2.  Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
  3.  Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
  4.  The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
  5.  Passing - Nella Larsen
  6.  The Color Purple - Alice Walker
  7.  Beloved - Toni Morrison
  8.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
  9.  Native Son - Richard Wright
  10.  Up From Slavery - Booker T Washington
  11.  Iola Leroy - Frances E.W. Harper
  12.  A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry
  13.  Black No More - George S. Schuyler

Poetry

  1.  Maya Angelou – The Complete Poetry - Maya Angelou
  2.  The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country - Amanda Gorman
  3.  The Rose That Grew From Concrete - Tupac Shakur
  4.  The Collected Poems - Langston Hughes
  5.  Citizen: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine
  6.  Some of Us Did NOT Die - June Jordan
  7.  Splay Anthem - Nathaniel Mackey
  8.  Don’t Call Us Dead - Danez Smith

Science/Science Fiction

  1.  Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - Neil deGrasse Tyson
  2.  Babel-17 - Damual R. Delayney
  3.  Kindred - Octavia Butler
  4.  Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora edited - Sheree Thomas
  5.  The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another - Ainissa Ramirez
  6.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
  7.  How Long Til Black Future Month - N.K. Jemisin
  8.  Bloodchild and Other Stories - Octavia Butler
  9.  The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred - Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
  10.  Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly
  11.  Sisters in Science - Diann Jordan
  12.  Children of Blood and Bone - Tomi Adeyemi
  13.  The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemison
  14.  Black Faces- White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors

Short Story

  1.  Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales - Virginia Hamilton
  2.  The Short Stories of Langston Hughes - Langston Hughes
  3.  Heads of Colored People - Nafissa Thompson-Spires
  4.  Insurrections - Rion Amilcar Scott
  5.  Lot - Bryan Washington
  6.  Damned If I Do - Percival Everett
  7.  Friday Black - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
  8.  What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky - Lesley Nneka Arimah
  9.  Great Short Stories - African American Writers - Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell
  10.  Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories edited - Juliette Harris and Pamela Johnson
  11.  A Lucky Man - Jamel Brinkly
  12.  Feel Free: Essays - Zadie Smith

Biography/Autobiography

  1.  Becoming - Michelle Obama
  2.  Just as I Am - Cicely Tyson
  3.  Go Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin
  4.  The Yellow House - Sarah M. Broom
  5.  Dreams from my Father - Barack Obama
  6.  I Put A Spell on You - Nina Simone
  7.  Soul on Ice - Eldridge Cleaver
  8.  Assata: An Autobiography - Assata Shakur
  9.  Invisible: the forgotten story of the black woman lawyer who took down America's most powerful mobster - Stephen L. Carter
  10.  Shout- sister- shout! : the untold story of rock-and-roll trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Gayle Wald
  11.  Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court nomination that changed America - Wil Haygood
  12.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
  13.  Fire Shut Up in My Bones - Charles M. Blow
  14.  The Last Holiday: A Memoir - Gil Scott Heron

Nonfiction

  1.  The Mis-Education of the Negro - Carter G Woodson
  2.  The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois
  3.  Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
  4.  The Black History of the White House - Clarence Lusane
  5.  Black Fortunes - Shomari Wills
  6.  Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America - Stokely Carmichael & Charles V. Hamilton
  7.  The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
  8.  Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority - Tom Burrell
  9.  How to be An Antiracist - Ibram X. Kendi
  10.  Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria - Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD
  11.  Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde
  12.  Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America - Ibram X. Kendi
  13.  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander