Black History Month 2026

Borrow these books from your local SCLS branch.

Updated February 4, 2026
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In every mirror she's Black : a novel
Akinmade-Akerström, Lola
Paper Book
A Good Morning America Buzz Pick! As seen in Vulture, Essence, Good Morning America, The Independent, Goodreads, PureWow, and many more! "A sexy, surprising, searing debut about love, loss, desire, and the many dimensions of Black womanhood."--Deesha Philyaw, 2020 National Book...
I know why the caged bird sings
Angelou, Maya
Paper Book
Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself....
Honey & spice
Babalola, Bolu
Paper Book
⭐ A REESE'S BOOK CLUB AND TIKTOK BOOK CLUB PICK ⭐ 'Hilarious, hot and heartfelt' MEG CABOT 'Gorgeously written and heart-meltingly romantic' BETH O'LEARY 'Romantic, sexy, fun, delicious and important' MARIAN KEYES __________ ...
Felix ever after
Callender, Kacen
Paper Book
A Stonewall Honor Book * A Time Magazine Best YA Book of All Time From Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time. Felix Love has...
Infinity alchemist
Callender, Kacen
Paper Book
Swoony romance meets epic fantasy as Ash Wood racesto find the legendary Book of Source - the debut YAfantasy from the bestselling and award-winning KacenCallender.
Finding me
Davis, Viola
Paper Book
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * A HARPERS BAZAAR BEST BOOK OF 2022 * A PARADE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK * A MARIE CLAIRE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK "It's clear from the first page that Davis is going to serve a more intimate, unpolished account than is typical of the average (often ghost-written)...
Legendborn
Deonn, Tracy
Paper Book
An Instant New York Times Bestseller! Winner of the Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe for New Talent Author Award Filled with mystery and an intriguingly rich magic system, Tracy Deonn's YA contemporary fantasy Legendborn offers the dark allure of...
The reformatory
Due, Tananarive
Paper Book
Jim Crow Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert Stephens Jr., who for a trivial scuffle with a white boy is sent to The Gracetown School for Boys. But the segregated reformatory is a chamber of horrors, haunted by the boys that have died there. In order to survive the school...
James
Everett, Percival
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view * In development as a feature film to be...
Call us what we carry : poems
Gorman, Amanda
Paper Book
The breakout poetry collection by Sunday Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Including 'The Hill We Climb,' the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, this luminous...
Homegoing
Gyasi, Yaa
Paper Book
A BBC Top 100 Novels that Shaped Our World Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to...
The 1619 Project : a new American origin story
Hannah-Jones, Nikole
Paper Book
The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that the American story is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and...
Black AF history : the un-whitewashed story of America
Harriot, Michael
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE * AMAZON'S TOP 20 HISTORY BOOKS OF 2023 * B&N BEST OF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY * THE ROOT'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 * CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023 From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot,...
All about love : new visions
hooks, bell
Ebook
A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about...
Their eyes were watching God
Hurston, Zora Neale.
Audiobook
"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century,...
The love songs of W.E.B. Du Bois : a novel
Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne
Ebook
The house of Eve : a novel
Johnson, Sadeqa
Paper Book
"Amazing...I was completely surprised by the ending of this beautifully told and written book." --Reese Witherspoon "A triumph of historical fiction" (The Washington Post), an instant New York Times bestseller, and a Reese's Book Club pick, set in 1950s...
Hood feminism : notes from the women that a movement forgot
Kendall, Mikki
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers a feminism rooted in the livelihood of everyday women." --Ibram X. Kendi,...
Lone women : a novel
LaValle, Victor
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Blue skies, empty land--and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an "absorbing, powerful" (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of...
The memory librarian : and other stories of dirty computer
Monaae, Janelle
Paper Book
In The Memory Librarian music, fashion, film and futurist icon Janelle Monáe returns to the Afrofuturistic world of her critically acclaimed album, Dirty Computer, to explore how different threads of liberation - queerness, race, gender plurality, love - become tangled in a totalitarian landscape...
The bluest eye : a novel
Morrison, Toni.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME * From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner--a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace. * With a new introduction by Jacqueline...
The girls who grew big
Mottley, Leila
Paper Book
When Adela Woods tells her parents she's pregnant, they immediately send her a thousand miles away to stay with her grandmother in Padua Beach. The intention is that she will leave her baby in 'the forgotten Panhandle of Florida'. and resume her suburban life nine months later as though nothing...
Nightcrawling
Mottley, Leila
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK * A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice "bursts at the seams of every page and...
Becoming
Obama, Michelle
Paper Book
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States   #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WATCH THE EMMY-NOMINATED NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER * ONE OF...
River sing me home
Shearer, Eleanor
Paper Book
" Rare. Moving. Powerful. This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery is a remarkable debut. Her search begins with an ending...<...
Hidden figures : The untold story of the African American women who helped win the space race
Shetterly, Margot Lee
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times bestseller The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory history essential to our understanding of race...
How to say Babylon : a memoir
Sinclair, Safiya
Paper Book
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! A Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Shelf Awareness<...
Symphony of secrets
Slocumb, Brendan
Paper Book
A riveting page-turner about a determined professor who uncovers a shocking secret about the most famous American composer of all time--that his music was stolen from someone else, a young Black woman. Bern Hendricks has just received the call of a lifetime. One of the world's...
The violin conspiracy
Slocumb, Brendan
Paper Book
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK! * Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise--undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world--when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather's heirloom violin...
Did you hear about Kitty Karr? : a novel
Smith Paul, Crystal
Paper Book
REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK BOOK OF THE MONTH PICK A multigenerational saga that traverses the glamour of old Hollywood and the seductive draw of modern-day showbiz When Kitty Karr Tate, a White icon of the silver screen, dies and bequeaths...
Grand union : stories
Smith, Zadie
Paper Book
In the summer of 1959, an Antiguan immigrant in north-west London lives the last day of his life. A mother looks back on her early forays into matters of the human heart, considering the destructive nature of desire. A disgraced cop stands amid the broken shards of his life...
The color purple
Walker, Alice
Paper Book
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick Winner of the Pulitzer Prize * Winner of the National Book Award   Published to unprecedented acclaim,The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in...
Let us descend a novel
Ward, Jesmyn
Paper Book
From Jesmyn Ward--the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow--comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. "'Let...
Memorial
Washington, Bryan
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, O, the Oprah Magazine...
Black girl you are Atlas
Watson, Renée
Paper Book
A Coretta Scott King Honor Book Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award A thoughtful celebration of Black girlhood by award-winning author and poet Renee Watson. In this semi-autobiographical collection of poems, Renee Watson writes about her experience...
Black cake
Wilkerson, Charmaine
Paper Book
Eleanor Bennett won't let her own death get in the way of the truth. When her estranged children - Byron and Benny - reunite for her funeral, they discover a puzzling inheritance. First, a voice recording in which everything they ever knew about their family is upended. Their mother tells a...
Good dirt
Wilkerson, Charmaine
Paper Book
Ebby Freeman's life has always been marked with tragedy. First, the death of her brother Baz, killed in an anonymous armed robbery when they were teenagers. Then her perfect fiance Henry deserting her on the day of their wedding, without an explanation. When Ebby arrives in a...
American spy :
Wilkinson, Lauren,
Paper Book
"American Spy updates the espionage thriller with blazing originality."--Entertainment Weekly "There has never been anything like it."--Marlon James, GQ "So much fun . . . Like the best of John le Carré, it's extremely tough to put down."--NPR
The other mistress
Williams, Shanora
Paper Book
Adira Smith-Cortez knows how to turn around a troubled past. Now she's a self-made multi-millionaire who takes exquisite care of herself and her only true love: her husband, Gabriel. Adira has it all - except the answer to one tormenting question: why is attentive, affectionate Gabriel cheating on...
Master slave husband wife
Woo, Ilyon
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller, the incredible true story of a couple that escaped slavery in the South and eventually made their way to the UK, Africa and beyond.

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