Black History Month Reads

... Read A Brave And Startling Truth Summary

... Read All That She Carried Summary

... Read A Master of Djinn Summary

... Read American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight ...”] Summary

Another Brooklyn is a 2016 novel by Jacqueline Woodson. After the narrator, August, returns home to care for her dying father, she runs into her former friend Sylvia. This encounter leads her to reflect on her childhood in Brooklyn in the 1970s and the way she coped with her mother’s death. The novel unfolds in fragments: each chapter moves between August’s girlhood memories and adult life as an ivy-league educated anthropologist who studies cultural rituals... Read Another Brooklyn Summary

Apex Hides the Hurt, a 2006 novel by American author Colson Whitehead, follows a nameless, emotionally muted nomenclature consultant, or an expert in creating brand names. The novel toggles between the protagonist’s memories of success at his company, and his current consulting assignment—renaming a town. The novel satirizes contemporary American consumer culture and features themes of race and identity. Whitehead uses humor and revelation as key narrative techniques in this story about a man who... Read Apex Hides the Hurt Summary

... Read A Promised Land Summary

When Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun premiered in 1959, it was the first play by a Black woman to open on Broadway, as well as the first play with a Black director. The title comes from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” Content Warning: The play and this guide discuss themes of racism and slavery.The play tells the... Read A Raisin in the Sun Summary

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid is a work of creative nonfiction originally published in 1988. Kincaid shares memories of her home country, Antigua, both while it was under colonial rule and self-governance. She illustrates how life has and hasn’t changed for Antiguan citizens because of government corruption, the legacies of slavery, and the preoccupation with tourism over public welfare. Though the book won no awards, Kincaid has won a plethora of awards for her... Read A Small Place Summary

“Aubade” is a contemporary love poem by American poet Major Jackson. Published in 2017 in Jackson’s fourth collection of poetry Roll Deep, the poem first appeared in The New Yorker in 2015. The title of the poem references a form of love song or poem that marks the dawn—the time of day when lovers must separate. Aubades were popular in medieval times, and unlike a serenade, which accompanies the evening and nightfall, an aubade evokes... Read Aubade Summary

Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published in 1987. It is inspired by the real story of an African American woman named Margaret Garner, who, while attempting to liberate herself and her children from enslavement, killed her own daughter to prevent her capture and enslavement. It tells the story of Sethe, a self-liberated, formerly enslaved woman who kills her daughter in the same manner. This daughter later returns to haunt the family. The novel is widely classified... Read Beloved Summary

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction book Between the World and Me was published 2015. The book takes the form of a long letter to Coates’s son Samori at age 15, and the title borrows from a poem by famed Black author Richard Wright. The text focuses on the psychological and physical trauma of racial violence that haunts generations of Black people, considering themes like The Precarity of the Black Body in the United States, The Danger of... Read Between the World and Me Summary

Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), by Timothy B. Tyson, is a nonfiction work of history centered on the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow Jr. in Oxford, North Carolina. The killing occurred after Marrow, a 23-year-old Black Army veteran, husband, and father of two, allegedly made a flirtatious remark in the direction of a 19-year-old married white woman. The woman’s husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law chased Marrow down the street, shot him from behind... Read Blood Done Sign My Name Summary

Marilyn Nelson is part of a coterie of writers who published in the late-1970s and 1980s after the revolutionary fervor of the Black Arts Movement. Though the period during which Nelson wrote is less acknowledged than those aforementioned, it was a time when diverse Black poetic talents emerged. Nelson’s contemporaries included Afaa Michael Weaver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Melvin Dixon, and Essex Hemphill. Their work grappled with the aftermath of the Vietnam War... Read Chosen Summary

... Read Concrete Rose Summary

Deacon King Kong was published in 2020 and written by American author James McBride. It is an example of near-historical fiction written about American cities and social issues. McBride’s 1995 memoir about growing up in a mixed-race family in Brooklyn, The Color of Water, was both a commercial and critical success, and his own life experience aligns with some of the narratives and issues in Deacon King Kong.McBride’s novel The Good Lord Bird won the... Read Deacon King Kong Summary

... Read Emancipation Proclamation Summary

Nigerian author Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief is a work of autofiction originally published in Nigeria in 2007 and published in the US in 2014. The novel unfolds in picaresque style from the first-person perspective, as a narrator who closely resembles the author returns to Nigeria after 15 years in the US to reckon with Nigerian national identity and his own legacy. Surprised to find that he feels less comfortable in his... Read Every Day Is for the Thief Summary

... Read Faces at the Bottom of the Well Summary

The poem “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa is a meditation on the first time Komunyakaa visited the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Komunyakaa served in the Vietnam War as an Army journalist for the military newspaper, Southern Cross, until he was discharged in 1966. He began writing about the war approximately 14 years after coming home from Vietnam.Prior to this, he had only written one poem about his experience in the war, and... Read Facing It Summary