fedupblackwoman:
Half of a Yellow Sun- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s
impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in
southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this
tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a
thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university
professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful
young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and
her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with
Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a
tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of
the Biafran war. (Sources)
The New Jim Crow- Michelle Alexander
Our Black Year: One Family’s Quest to Buy Black in America’s Racially Divided Economy- Maggie Anderson
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings- Maya Angelou
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient
grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey,
endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local
“powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St.
Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age–and has to live with
the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya
learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong
spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with
William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. (Source)
Bitch Is the New Black: A Memoir- Helena Andrews
Ugly Ways- Tina McElroy Ansa
The bestselling tale-powerful, compassionate, humorous-of the three
Lovejoy sisters reunited in their hometown of Mulberry, Georgia, on the
occasion of their mother’s death. As the emotionally scarred Lovejoys
prepare for their mother’s funeral, the spirit of the selfish and
manipulative Mudear hovers above them, complaining about her daughters’
“ugly ways” in death as she did in life. (Source)
Those Bones Are Not My Child: A Novel- Toni Cade Bambara
Daughter : A Novel- asha bandele
At nineteen, Aya is a promising Black college student from Brooklyn who
is struggling through a difficult relationship with her emotionally
distant mother, Miriam. One winter night, Aya is shot by a white police
officer in a case of mistaken identity. Keeping vigil by her daughter’s
hospital bed, Miriam remembers her own youth: her battle for
independence from her parents, her affair with Aya’s father, and the
challenges of raising her daughter. But as Miriam confronts her past –
her losses and regrets – she begins to heal and discovers a tentative
hopefulness. (Source)
Kindred- Octavia Butler
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday
with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in
California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son
of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save
him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters,
and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous
until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before
it has a chance to begin. (Source)
Parable of the Sower- Octavia Butler
When unattended environmental and economic crises lead to social chaos,
not even gated communities are safe. In a night of fire and death Lauren
Olamina, a minister’s young daughter, loses her family and home and
ventures out into the unprotected American landscape. But what begins as
a flight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling
vision of human destiny… and the birth of a new faith. (Source)
32 Candles: A Novel- Ernessa T. Carter
The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir- Staceyann Chin
Unbought and Unbossed- Shirley Chisholm
Unbought and Unbossed is Shirley Chisholm’s account of her remarkable
rise from young girl in Brooklyn to America’s first African-American
Congresswoman. She shares how she took on an entrenched system, gave a
public voice to millions, and sets the stage for her trailblazing bid to
be the first woman and first African-American President of the United
States. By daring to be herself, Shirley Chisholm shows us how she
forever changed the status quo. (Source)
Babylon Sisters: A Novel- Pearl Cleage
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 - Lucille Clifton
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment - Patricia Hill Collins
Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns- J. California Cooper
J. California Cooper’s irresistible collection of new stories explores
the universal themes of romance, family, and the hopes that propel
people’s dreams. In “As Time Goes By” a young woman singlemindedly
pursues material wealth, only to suffer from an empty heart. “Catch a
Falling Heart” tells of a slyly arranged marriage, and “The Eye of the
Beholder” portrays a plain girl’s search for love and her own brand of
freedom. Wise, earthy and intimate, these stories are moving parables of
the human need to seek some sort of satisfaction, just as a wild star
seeks a midnight sun. (Source)
Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village
of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely
remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know,
and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to
Haiti–to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate
journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by
political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions,
suffering, and wisdom of an entire people. (Source)
The Farming of Bones- Edwidge Danticat
The Farming of Bones begins in 1937 in a village on the Dominican side
of the river that separates the country from Haiti. Amabelle Desir,
Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that
took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant
sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end
of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a
vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who
calls for an ethnic cleansing of his Spanish-speaking country. As
rumors of Haitian persecution become fact, as anxiety turns to terror,
Amabelle and Sebastien’s dreams are leveled to the most basic human
desire: to endure. (Source)
Daughters of the Dust: A Novel- Julie Dash
Women, Race, & Class- Angela Davis
A powerful study of the women’s movement in the U.S. from abolitionist
days to the present that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by
the racist and classist biases of its leaders. (Source)
The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey- Toi Derricote
The Black Notebooks is one of the most extraordinary and courageous
accounts of race in this country, seen through the eyes of a
light-skinned black woman and a respected American poet. It challenges
all our preconceived notions of what it means to be black or white, and
what it means to be human.(Source)
My Soul to Take: A Novel- Tanarive Due
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky - Heidi Durrow
Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American
grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a
mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and
beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It’s there, as she
grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand
how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own
uncertain identity.
The Joys of Motherhood- Buchi Emecheta
Nnu Ego, a hard-working, optimistic Ibo woman, remains fiercely
determined to save her children from the devastation of war, the erosion
of village life, and the breakdown of tradition. (Source)
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self- Danielle Evans
In each of her stories, Danielle Evans explores the non-white American
experience with honesty, wisdom, and humor. They are striking in their
emotional immediacy, based in a world where inequality is a reality, but
the insecurities of young adulthood and tensions within family are
often the more complicating factors. (Source)
Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral- Jessi Redmon Fauset
Head Off & Split: Poems-Nikky Finney
Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we
fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully
evoking both the lawless and the sublime.
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America- Paula Giddings
If It Wasn’t for the Women…: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community- Cheryl Townsend Gilkes
These collected essays examine the roles of women in their churches and
communities, the implication of those roles for African American
culture, and the tensions and stereotypes that shape societal responses
to these roles. Gilkes examines the ways black women and their
experience shape the culture and consciousness of the black religious
experience, and reflects on some of the crises and conflicts that attend
this experience. (Source)
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998- Nikki Giovanni
The Friends- Rosa Guy
Phyllisia eventually recognizes that her own selfish pride rather than
her mother’s death and her father’s tyrannical behavior created the gulf
between her and her best friend. (Source)
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought- Beverly Guy-Sheftall
In this groundbreaking collection of articles, Dr. Guy-Sheftall has
taken us from the early 1830s to contemporary times. Only since the
seventies have black women used the term ‘feminism.’ And, yet, it is
that concept that she uses to bring into the same frame the ideas and
analyses of Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Harper of the
early nineteenth century, and the work of women such as Audre Lourde,
Barbara Smith, and bell hooks, who stand on the threshold of the
twenty-first century. –from the epilogue by Johnnetta B. Cole,
President, Spelman College (Source)
A Raisin in the Sun- Lorraine Hansberry
Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted - Frances E. W. Harper
A striking portrait of black life during the Civil War and
Reconstruction, this 1892 work was among the first novels published by
an African-American woman. It explores issues of race, politics, and
class in the tale of a mixed-race woman who rejects a life of “passing”
and devotes herself to the improvement of black society. (Source)
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America- Melissa Harris-Perry
Nappy Hair- Carolivia Herron
A lively, empowering story about Brenda’s knotted-up, twisted, nappy
hair and how it got to be that way! Told in the African-American “call
and response” tradition, this story leaps off the page, along with
vibrant illustrations by Joe Cepeda. (Source)
All About Love: New Visions- bell hooks
As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explode th
question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart.
In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for
emotional connection and society’s failure to provide a model for
learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is
infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is
sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation.
The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can
Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how
profoundly she can. (Source)
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center- bell hooks
Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self- Pauline Hopkins
Of One Blood is the last of four novels written by Pauline Hopkins. She
is considered by some to be “the most prolific African-American woman
writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of
the twentieth century, though she is one of the lesser known literary
figures of the much lauded Harlem Renaissance. Hopkins tells the story
of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who couldn’t care less about being
black and appreciating African history, but finds himself in Ethiopia on
an archeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost
treasures – which he does find in the ancient land. However, he
discovers much more than he bargained for: the painful truth about
blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told. Hopkins
wrote the novel intending, in her own words, to “raise the stigma of
degradation from [the Black] race.” The title, Of One Blood, refers to
the biological kinship of all human beings. (Source)
Brown Girl in the Ring- Nalo Hopkinson
This is Nalo Hopkinson’s debut novel, which came to attention when it
won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. It tells the story of
Ti-Jeanne, a young woman in a near-future Toronto that’s been all but
abandoned by the Canadian government. Anyone who can has retreated from
the chaos of the city to the relative safety of the suburbs, and those
left in “the burn” must fend for themselves. Ti-Jeanne is a new mother
who’s trying to come to grips with her as- yet-unnamed baby and also
trying to end her relationship with her drug-addict boyfriend Tony. But a
passion still burns between the young lovers, and when Tony runs afoul
of Rudy, the local ganglord, Ti-Jeanne convinces her grandmother
Gros-Jeanne to help out. Gros-Jeanne is a Voudoun priestess, and it’s
clear that Ti-Jeanne has inherited some of her gifts. Although Ti-Jeanne
wants nothing to do with the spirit world, she soon finds herself
caught up in a battle to the death with Rudy and the mother she thought
she lost long ago. (Source)
But Some Of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies- Gloria T. Hull
Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography - Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God- Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story
sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the
captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness,
fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned,
fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through
three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A
true literary wonder, Hurston’s masterwork remains as relevant and
affecting today as when it was first published—perhaps the most widely
read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American
literature. (Source)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs
This autobiographical account by a former slave is one of the few extant
narratives written by a woman. Written and published in 1861, it
delivers a powerful portrayal of the brutality of slave life. Jacobs
speaks frankly of her master’s abuse and her eventual escape, in a tale
of dauntless spirit and faith. (Source)
Silver Sparrow- Tayari Jones
Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel
revolves around James Witherspoon’s two families—the public one and the
secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a
friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a
relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions
shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed
characters—the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the
uncle—she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought
to one another’s lives. (Source)
A Small Place- Jamaica Kinkaid
Quicksand- Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen’s first novel tells the story of Helga Crane, a fictional
character loosely based on Larsen’s own early life. Crane is the lovely
and refined daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father
who abandons Helga and her mother soon after Helga is born. Unable to
feel comfortable with any of her white-skinned relatives, Helga lives in
various places in America and visits Denmark in search of people among
whom she feels at home. The work is a superb psychological study of a
complicated and appealing woman, Helga Crane, who, like Larsen herself,
is the product of a liaison between a black man and a white woman. In
one sense, Quicksand might be called an odyssey; however, instead of
overcoming a series of obstacles and finally arriving at her native
land, Larsen’s protagonist has a series of adventures, each of which
ends in disappointment. (Source)
Small Island: A Novel- Andrea Levy
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches- Audre Lorde
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist
writer Audre Lorde, SISTER OUTSIDER celebrates an influential voice in
twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen
essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia,
and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and
change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting
struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. (Source)
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography- Audre Lorde
ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood
memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of
Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of
women who have shaped her … Lorde brings into play her craft of lush
description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page. (Source)
A Belle in Brooklyn: The Go-to Girl for Advice on Living Your Best Single Life- Demetria Lucas
Unbowed: A Memoir- Wangari Maathai
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her
extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world
stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a
vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment
of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins
with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on
numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save
Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused
with her unique luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable
story of courage, faith, and the power of persistence is destined to
inspire generations to come. (Source)
Brown Girl, Brownstones- Paule Marshall
Hailed by the Saturday Review as “passionate” and “compelling” and by
The New Yorker as “remarkable for its courage,” this 1959 coming-of-age
story centers on the daughter of Barbadian immigrants living in Brooklyn
during the Depression and World War II. A precursor to feminist
literature, this novel was written by and about an African-American
woman. (Source)
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie- Ayana Mathis
Gathering of Waters- Bernice McFadden
How Stella Got Her Groove Back- Terry McMillan
Daddy Was a Number Runner- Louise Meriwether
Coming of Age in Mississippi- Anne Moody
When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down- Joan Morgan
In this fresh, funky, and ferociously honest book, award-winning
journalist Joan Morgan bravely probes the complex issues facing
African-American women in today’s world: a world where feminists often
have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men; where women
who treasure their independence often prefer men who pick up the tab;
and where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds black women
who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality
for less than 40 percent of the African-American population. (Source)
The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison
Beloved- Toni Morrison
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel
transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate
as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to
Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many
memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things
happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who
died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word:
Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope,
Beloved is a towering achievement. (Source)
Song of Solomon- Toni Morrison
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled
himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his
life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined
novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously
as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from
his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison
introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and
assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. (Source)
The Women of Brewster Place - Gloria Naylor
Once the home of poor Irish and Italian immigrants, Brewster Place, a
rotting tenement on a dead-end street, now shelters black families. This
novel portrays the courage, the fear, and the anguish of some of the
women there who hold their families together, trying to make a home.
Among them are: Mattie Michael, the matriarch who loses her son to
prison; Etta Mae Johnson who tries to trade the ‘high life’ for marriage
with a local preacher; Kiswana Browne who leaves her middle-class
family to organize a tenant’s union. (Source)
The Broke Diaries: The Completely True and Hilarious Misadventures of a Good Girl Gone Broke- Angela Nissel
Who Fears Death- Nnedi Okorafor
Who Fears Death, is a magical realist novel that evenly combines
the African literature and fantasy/science fiction. It won the 2011
World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was a Nebula and Locus Award
nominee. The Washington Post said that Who Fears Death is , “Both
wondrously magical and terribly realistic.” (Source)
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere- ZZ Packer
Topdog/Underdog- Suzan-Lori Parks
A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori
Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells
the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to
them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and
resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the
shattering reality of their future. (Source)
Wench: A Novel- Dolen Perkins-Valdez
The Street: A Novel- Ann Petry
THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie
Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son
amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late
1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a
masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry’s first novel, a beloved bestseller
with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still
resonates today. (Source)
Darkest Child: A Novel- Delores Phillips
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision - Barbara Ransby
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty-Dorothy Roberts
Homegirls and Handgrenades- Sonia Sanchez
Push: A Novel- Sapphire
Assata: An Autobiography- Assata Shakur
For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf- Ntozake Shange
Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel - Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza
Award-winning writer Ntozake Shange and real-life sister, award-winning
playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this
epic story of the Mayfield family. Opening dramatically at Sweet
Tamarind, a rice and cotton plantation on an island off South Carolina’s
coast, we watch as recently emancipated Bette Mayfield says her
goodbyes before fleeing for the mainland. With her granddaughter,
Eudora, in tow, she heads to Charleston. There, they carve out lives for
themselves as fortune-teller and seamstress. Dora will marry, the
Mayfield line will grow, and we will follow them on an journey through
the watershed events of America’s troubled, vibrant history–from
Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to
Vietnam and the modern day. Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story
of a family and of America, of songs and why we have to sing them, of
home and of heartbreak, of the past and of the future, bright and
blazing ahead. (Source)
Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth - Warsan Shire
I Put A Spell On You: The Autobiography Of Nina Simone- Nina Simone
The Coldest Winter Ever- Sister Souljah
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology- Barbara Smith
On Beauty- Zadie Smith
White Teeth: A Novel- Zadie Smith
The Taste of Salt- Martha Southgate
Cane River- Lalita Tademy
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