Black History Month

Updated February 2, 2024
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The vanishing half
Bennett, Brit
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * NPR * PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR  ...
The blue clerk : ars poetica in 59 versos
Brand, Dionne
On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages--the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard. In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a...
The tradition
Brown, Jericho
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic--no, it's...
When we say Black lives matter
Clarke, Maxine Beneba
In a powerful, poetic missive, award-winning author-illustrator Maxine Beneba Clarke celebrates the meaning behind the words Black Lives Matter. Little one, when we say Black Lives Matter, we're saying Black people are wonderful-strong. That we...
Octavia E. Butler's Kindred
Duffy, Damian
Now a FX/Hulu Original Series from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Darren Aronofsky and starring Mallori Johnson and Micah Stock #1 New York Times Bestseller Winner of the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium Octavia E. Butler's...
Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race
Eddo-Lodge, Reni
Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for January/February 2018 Sunday TimesBestseller Winner of the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year Winner of the Jhalak Prize "This is a book that...
Washington Black : a novel
Edugyan, Esi
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST * "A gripping historical narrative exploring both the bounds of slavery and what it means to be truly free." --Vanity Fair Eleven-year-old George Washington...
Soul of a nation : art in the age of Black power
Godfrey, Mark
African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers In the period of radical change that was 1963-83, young black artists at the beginning of their careers confronted difficult questions about art, politics and racial identity. How to make art that would...
Aminata : roman
Hill, Lawrence
Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom--and of the knowledge she needs to get home. Sold to an indigo trader who recognizes her intelligence, Aminata is torn from her husband and child and thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War....
The book of Negroes
Hill, Lawrence
Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom--and of the knowledge she needs to get home. Sold to an indigo trader who recognizes her intelligence, Aminata is torn from her husband and child and thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War....
The Illegal
Hill, Lawrence
Lawrence Hill spellbound readers with Someone Knows My Name (made into the television mini-series, The Book of Negroes), hailed as "transporting" (Entertainment Weekly) and "completely engrossing" (Washington Post). The Illegal is the gripping story of Keita Ali, a refugee--like the many in today...
Salvation : Black people and love
hooks, bell
"A manual for fixing our culture...In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process."--Black Issues Book Review New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed visionary and cultural...
Stamped from the beginning : the definitive history of racist ideas in America
Kendi, Ibram X.
 The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more...
Beloved : a novel
Morrison, Toni.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison's Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio,...
The secret lives of church ladies
Philyaw, Deesha
The kid
Sapphire
The Kid brings us deep into the interior life of Abdul Jones, son of Sapphire's unforgettable heroine, Precious. A story of body and spirit, rooted in the hungers of flesh and of the soul, The Kid is a story of survival and awakening, and of one young man's remarkable strength.   We...
Real life
Taylor, Brandon
Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is studying for a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, he has kept a distance even from his own friends - some dating each other,...
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black liberation
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta
The author of Race for Profit carries out "[a] searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order" (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow).   In this winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for...
Piecing me together
Watson, Rene?e
Tired of being singled out at her mostly-white private school as someone who needs support, high school junior Jade would rather participate in the school's amazing Study Abroad program than join Women to Women, a mentorship program for at-risk girls
The nickel boys : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. * "One of the most gifted novelists...
The underground railroad : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but...

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