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Work by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and less established authors ... |
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Darktown by Thomas Mullen, 2016, is set in 1948 when the Atlanta Police Department is forced to hire its first Black officers |
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Daughters of Jubilation by Kara Lee Corthron, 2020, is a young adult romance novel set in South Carolina in 1962, that addresses issues of racism, white supremacy, and sexual abuse; the author reads from her book during this interview with the Contemporary American Theater Festival |
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Dear Martin by Nic Stone, 2017, is a young adult novel in which Justyce writes diary-like letters to the imagined Martin Luther King, Jr., as he navigates his experiences at an elite Atlanta boarding school and of racial profiling by the Atlanta police; in this NPR interview, the author discusses the 2020 sequel, Dear Justyce, in which her protagonist receives letters from a childhood schoolmate, now accused of killing a police officer and incarcerated |
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Everyday People (2001) by Stewart O’Nan, a Pittsburgh author, who set this novel in 1998 East Liberty |
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, 2017, is a young adult novel credited for teaching—without preaching—about police abuse of power, the American justice system, and the structural racism in which they participate, and about growing up smart, insecure, and code-switching; NPR “It’s Been a Minute” interview with the author about this and her 2019 novel On the Come Up |
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The Known World by Edward P. Jones, 2003, set in antebellum Virginia, uses the little-known fact that some free Black people owned slaves to examine slavery as an “entrenched evil,” “a morally bankrupt social institution”; NPR interview with the author |
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Lightning Men by Thomas Mullen, 2017, following on the author’s book, Darktown, set in 1950 Atlanta |
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Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, 2017, was described by The Boston Globe as “a pointed and persuasive social critique, teasing out the myriad forms of privilege and predation that stand between so many people and their achievement of the American dream”; the author’s interview at the 2018 National Book Festival |
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Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas, 2007, is described as a “quietly passionate novel [that] is unapologetically autobiographical” in a review entitled “A Black Gatsby who also does drywall” |
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Members Only by Sameer Pandya, 2020, depicts the experience of its Indian-American protagonist who says something racist during an interview of a Black couple seeking to join a tennis club and who almost simultaneously comes under attack by White pride groups who find one of his lectures anti-American; related NPR interview |
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The Mothers by Brit Bennett, 2016, is noted for presenting Black families and friendships “where racism and suffering are present in the story but not the entire story”; NPR review by Annalisa Quinn |
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Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens, 2019, explores the power dynamics of racial prejudice and social class in a small town in Missouri |
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The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, 2019, traces one family across four generations from slavery to the present; NPR interview with the author |
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Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, 2011, set in Bois Sauvage, a predominantly black Mississippi bayou town, and spanning the 12 days leading up to and just after Hurricane Katrina that “unmade the world” as the author knew it |
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Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, 2017, interweaves stories of characters both living and dead to present the realities of life in impoverished rural Mississippi and to explore what it means to be a Black American in the rural South today and in decades past; related PBS interview |
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Stateway’s Garden by Jasmon Drain, 2020, is a collection of stories featuring residents of one of Chicago’s housing projects, so near and yet so far, from Chicago’s Gold Coast; available in the SoundCloud read by Guy Lockard, Shayna Small, and Sullivan Jones |
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The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett, 2020, explores racism through the lives of twin sisters, one living as White, the other as Black; NPR interview with the author and NPR review by Heller McAlpin |