Books for black history month
Recommendations for great reads
Gentle reader,
In honor of black history month, I’ve got some amazing book recommendations for you.
I’ve been shaped by African American literature since I first read Alice Walker when I was a freshman in high school, and in recent years I’ve been transformed by calls to be intentional about reading beyond one’s own culture and sphere. For examples of work in that direction, check out We Need Diverse Books, Intervarsity Press’s #Readwomen campain, the annual Book Riot Read Harder Challenge, or the teacher/student resources at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
I also recommend the substack
from .In today’s post, I’m sharing some of the books by black authors that I’ve found most beautiful or profound or life changing.
Tolle Lege!1
Many thanks to at for recommending Church Blogmatics. I’m grateful and honored. If you don’t already subscribe at The Priory, go check it out!
All quoted book descriptions are from official copy at Amazon. Note, going in, that many of these books cover painful content including assault, abuse, slavery, racism, and disordered eating.
Recommendations in theology
, Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Your Faith More Whole and JustHow great to have a pastor help us to read literature! Atcho also has a substack at
.“Pastor and teacher Claude Atcho offers a theological approach to 10 seminal texts of 20th-century African American literature. Each chapter takes up a theological category for inquiry through a close literary reading and theological reflection...”
Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
I was blessed to have Jennings as a teacher in graduate school, and his work changed me deeply, as he taught me to remember that I’m a Gentile, grafted in to the people of God.
“Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity’s highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.”
This may be a hard book to navigate, so let me also recommend this excellent guide to the book from my friend Keith Johnson.
“The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity.” — Willie Jennings
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree
Cone’s final masterpiece integrates lyrics from spirituals into a theology for the American context.
“Reconciling the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression and suffering during the lynching era.”
, The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial WorldBrian asks us to deal with difference and how we use it for sin, when it is intended by God for beauty.
“Bantum argues that our attempts to heal racism will not succeed until we address what gives rise to racism in the first place: a fallen understanding of our bodies that sees difference as something to resist, defeat, or subdue.”
, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and BeingI’ve taught Copeland’s book many times, and students find it challenging and eye-opening.
“Black women's historical experience and oppression cast a completely different light on our theological ideas about being human. Copeland argues that race, embodiment, and relations of power reframe not only theological anthropology but also our notions of discipleship, church, Eucharist, and Christ.”
Julia Foote, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch
Foote’s incredible story of her life as an evangelist is not to be missed.
“I have written this little book after many prayers to ascertain the will of God—having long had an impression to do it. I have a consciousness of obedience to the will of my dear Lord and Master. My object has been to testify more extensively to the sufficiency of the blood of Jesus Christ to save from all sin.”
Recommendations in contemporary fiction and poetry
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Rankine’s work is an accessible, beautiful, gut-punch.
“Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time.”
“because white men can't
police their imagination
black men are dying” — Claudia Rankine
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
I love a book that deals with faith and its nuance, and Gyasi is an honest story teller.
“Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.”
Kiley Reed, Such a Fun Age
This book seems light, but it also uncovers the devastating racism of nice white people.
“A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.”
N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became
Jemisin writes extraordinary fantasy, and in this book, she personifies cities to tell a story of grand scale good and evil.
“Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six.”
Tayari Jones, An American Marriage
This is one hard love story, but it’s well worth the read.
“Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit.”
Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
This is a beautifully executed work, which uses themes from fairy tales in a story about a mother’s painful task of loving in a world which will not love her daughters properly.
“A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.”
“…it's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.” — Helen Oyeyemi
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
I also love an academic novel, and this one pokes fun at lots of fun things. It’s also a family story of great depth.
“On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political.”
Tyehimba Jess, Olio
This book is a miracle. It’s hard to believe it exists. Read it.
“Tyehimba Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.
So, while I lead this choir, I still find that
I'm being led...I'm a missionary
mending my faith in the midst of this flock...
I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see
these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God
speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;
they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.”
Recommendations in nonfiction
, The Book of DelightsThese micro-essays invite us to find joy, even and especially in this broken world.
“In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room.”
“Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone...” — Ross Gay
Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir
This book is also a miracle. Just read it. Also, check out Laymon’s odd and wonderful novel, Long Division.
“In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. Heavy … combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse.”
Patrice Gopo, All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way
I interviewed Patrice about her second book here, and I’d also encourage readers to go to this, her first book, and its beautiful prose about borders and crossing them.
“Patrice seamlessly moves across borders of space and time to create vivid portraits of how the reality of being different affects her quest to belong. In this poetic and often courageous collection of essays, Patrice examines the complexities of identity in our turbulent yet hopeful time of intersecting heritages. As she digs beneath the layers of immigration questions and race relations, Patrice also turns her voice to themes such as marriage and divorce, the societal beauty standards we hold, and the intricacies of living out our faith.”
Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir
This heart wrenching story defies the potential narcissism of memoir by centering it on Ward’s lost loved ones.
“In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life―to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth―and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.”
Recommendations in children and ya
Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orisha Book 1)
Adeyemi takes high fantasy into a West African idiom. It’s grand fun.
“Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls.
But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope.
Now Zélie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. With the help of a rogue princess, Zélie must outwit and outrun the crown prince, who is hell-bent on eradicating magic for good.
Danger lurks in Orïsha, where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters. Yet the greatest danger may be Zélie herself as she struggles to control her powers and her growing feelings for an enemy.”
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
Thomas’s book invites readers to cross between worlds, as does her young protagonist, Starr.
“Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.”
Ezra Jack Keats, Whistle for Willie
Picture books with dogs are a win.
“Now the story of Peter, who longs to whistle for his dog, is accessible to even the youngest child in a durable board book edition.”
Debbie Allen, Dancing in the Wings, illustrated by Kadir Nelson
Dancers will love the beautiful illustrations and hope filled story.
“Sassy is a long-legged girl who always has something to say. She wants to be a ballerina more than anything, but she worries that her too-large feet, too-long legs, and even her big mouth will keep her from her dream.”
Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee, Please, Baby, Please, illustrated by Kadir Nelson
My babies loved this book, and I give it as a gift at every baby shower.
“Vivid illustrations from celebrated artist Kadir Nelson evoke toddlerhood from sandbox to high chair to crib, and families everywhere will delight in sharing these exuberant moments again and again.”
Esau McCaulley, Josie Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit, illustrated by LaTonya Jackson
When New Testament scholars write picture books, there’s fun to be had.
“Josie is spending the day with Dad―getting her hair braided at Monique's Beauty Shop, and picking out a new red dress for Sunday. Because Sunday is Pentecost! In the process, she learns to celebrate the differences she sees all around her as part of God's plan for his creation.”
I hope you find something here that sparks your interest and you’ll be encouraged to intentional reading. Words open doors and help work the miracle of knowing others.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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Tolle Lege is Latin for “take up and read;” Augustine heard the words from a mysterious voice when he converted to Christian faith, and he obeyed by opening his bible.