42 African American literature

Molefi Kete Asante is an African-American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.

Assata: An Autobiography is a 1988 autobiographical book by Assata Shakur. The book was written in Cuba where Shakur currently has political asylum.

The BAP Handbook: The Official Guide to the Black American Princess is a humor book released on June 21, 2001. The book was written by Kalyn Johnson, Tracey Lewis, Karla Lightfoot, and Ginger Wilson, and published by Broadway Books.

The Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) is an affiliate of the American Library Association (ALA) that focuses on the needs of African American library professionals by promoting careers in librarianship, funding literacy initiatives, and providing scholarships.

Been There, Done That: Family Wisdom for Modern Times is a 2016 non-fiction book written by real life husband and wife Al Roker and Deborah Roberts.

Binti is an Africanfuturist science fiction horror novella written by Nnedi Okorafor. The novella was published in 2015 by Tor.com. Binti is the first novella in Okorafor's Binti novella series.

Binti: Home is a science fiction novella written by Nnedi Okorafor. The novella was published in 2017 by Tor.com. Binti: Home is the sequel to Okorafor's Binti from 2015, and is followed by Binti: The Night Masquerade, published in 2018.

Binti: The Night Masquerade is a science fiction novella written by Nnedi Okorafor. The novella was published in 2018 by Tor.com, and it is the final novella in Okorafor's trilogy that began with 2015's Binti and 2017's Binti: Home. When the full collection Binti: The Complete Trilogy was published, Okorafor added another short story titled "Binti: Sacred Fire".

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement, active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride.

Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston is a 1992 book edited by Howard Beeth and Cary D. Wintz and published by Texas A&M University Press. It is a collection of thirteen essays about the history of African-Americans in Houston. It was the first scholarly book to provide a comprehensive history of Houston's black community, and the book's dust jacket referred to it as the first such book of any city in the Southern United States.

Black Drama Anthology is a 1971 collection of plays solely written by Black American playwrights. The anthology was edited by Woodie King Jr, a Black American stage producer and Ron Milner, a Black American playwright. Writer Langston Hughes, Jazz musician Archie Shepp and writer Imamu Amiri Baraka appear in this collection, among others. Black Drama Anthology opens with a foreword by the editors King and Milner which outlines the motivations behind this collection, in which they write, "...recognizing all of this, and understanding that if we blacks are to have a theater in our own image, according to our own views, then we blacks will have to say which plays are in those images and of those views, we have here compiled an anthology of works by twenty-two of the best black playwrights...Twenty-three selections from an immensely rich field of talented black artists forging new, unique, and viable theater."

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors is a 2014 book by cultural geographer Carolyn Finney. The book examines the relationship between African Americans and the environment, particularly challenging the notion of the environment and environmentalism as white spaces. Black Faces, White Spaces uses a combination of autoethnographic accounts, discourse analysis of media, interviews, and analysis of artistic forms of expression to contextualize a narrative about environmental policy and race relations in the United States. Finney explores the subject through the lenses of environmental history, feminist and critical race theories. In her discussion of American experiences with the environment, Finney highlights how the legacy of slavery creates disparities in the impact of environmental laws such as the Wilderness Act due to factors such as racial segregation. Black Faces, White Spaces challenges assumptions that the environmental movement makes about universal values, individualism, and agency, arguing that they reflect a class-based and racial power structure that denies participation from people of color.

Black Futures is an American anthology of Black art, writing, and other creative work, edited by writer Jenna Wortham and curator Kimberly Drew. Writer Teju Cole, singer Solange Knowles and activist Alicia Garza, who cofounded Black Lives Matter, are among the book's more than 100 contributors. The 544-page collection was published in 2020, receiving strongly favorable reviews.

Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment is a non-fiction book written by Michael Javen Fortner.

Blake; or The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba is a novel by Martin Delany, initially published in two parts: The first in 1859 by the Anglo-African Magazine (AAM), and the second, during the earlier part of the American Civil War, in 1861-62 by the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine (WAA). The serial novel was left incomplete due to the fact that “there are no extant copies of the May 1862 issues, which probably contain the final chapters.” A book version, edited by Floyd Miller, was published by Beacon Press in 1970, and later a corrected edition, edited by Jerome McGann, was published by Harvard University Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2017.

Blues People: Negro Music in White America is a seminal study of Afro-American music by Amiri Baraka, who published it as LeRoi Jones in 1963. In Blues People Baraka explores the possibility that the history of black Americans can be traced through the evolution of their music. It is considered a classic work on jazz and blues music in American culture. The book documents the effects of jazz and blues on American culture, at musical, economic, and social levels. It chronicles the types of music dating back to the slaves up to the 1960s. Blues People argues that "negro music"—as Amiri Baraka calls it—appealed to and influenced new America. According to Baraka, music and melody is not the only way the gap between American culture and African-American culture was bridged. Music also helped spread values and customs through its media exposure. Blues People demonstrates the influence of African Americans and their culture on American culture and history. The book examines blues music as performance, as cultural expression, even in the face of its commodification. To Baraka, Blues People represented "everything [he] had carried for years, what [he] had to say, and [himself]". The book is deeply personal and chronicles what brought him to believe that blues was a personal history of his people in the United States. The resonance and desperation of this type of music is what compelled Baraka to learn about the history of blues music. He learned through his studies that the "Africanisms" is directly related to American culture, rather than being solely related to Black people. Baraka dedicates the book "to my parents ... the first Negroes I ever met".

Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition is a compilation of literary and cultural works that originated from call and response patterns in African and African-American cultural traditions. The 1997 anthology includes works representing the centuries-long emergence of this distinctly Black literary and cultural aesthetic in fiction, poetry, drama, essays, sermons, speeches, criticism, journals, and song lyrics from spirituals to rap. Writings ranging from Queen Latifah to Phyllis Wheatley and LeRoi Jones are included within this volume.

Citizen: An American Lyric is a 2014 book-length poem and/or a series of lyric essays by American poet Claudia Rankine. Citizen stretches the conventions of traditional lyric poetry by interweaving several forms of text and media into a collective portrait of racial relations in the United States. The book ranked as a New York Times Bestseller in 2015 and won several awards, including the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry Best Collection.

A Dialogue is a 1973 collaborative work featuring a multi-topic conversation between writers James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. The preface was written by Ida Lewis, the afterword by Orde M. Coombs. It was published by J. B. Lippincott & Co.

Difficult Women is a 2017 short story collection by Roxane Gay.

Flyy Girl is young adult/new adult literature and an urban fiction book written by Omar Tyree. The book was originally published by Mars Productions in 1993 and republished by Simon & Schuster for adults in 1996. The novel is regarded to be the genesis of the modern urban-fiction/street-lit movement that would later gain momentum in 1999 with the publication of Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever.

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore is a three-volume set of books published in December 2005 by Greenwood Press. It contains roughly 700 alphabetically arranged entries by more than 100 contributors. It serves as a comprehensive overview of all aspects of African-American folklore, including folktales, music, foodways, spiritual beliefs, and art.

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater and politics centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights for African-Americans that occurred in the wake of civil rights struggles in the then-still-segregated US Armed Forces in WWI and which was further inspired by the NAACP, the Garveyite movement and the Russian Revolution, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, Harlem being the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.

Harriet Tubman Press (HTP) is an imprint of TSEHAI Publishers established in August 2016 while housed at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles. The press was created to be a "new source for African-American literature and academic works". HTP publishes works which represent African-American voices in the United States and throughout the globe, focusing on "uncovering hidden narratives". The press emphasizes publishing African-American literature and scholarship.

Lagoon is an Africanfuturist novel by Nnedi Okorafor. It has drawn much scholarly attention since its publication. In 2014 it was chosen as an honor list title for the James Tiptree Jr. Award.

Life on Mars is a poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith for which she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The collection is an elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble telescope.

Luster is a 2020 debut novel by Raven Leilani. The book follows a Black woman in her twenties who gets involved with a fortysomething white man in an open marriage. Luster was released on August 4, 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It received mainly positive critical reception and won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for fiction. In December 2020, the book was found in Literary Hub to have made 16 lists of the year's best books.

The Mis-Education of the Negro is a book originally published in 1933 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that Blacks of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes blacks to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to become autodidacts and to "do for themselves", regardless of what they were taught:History shows that it does not matter who is in power... those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.

My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir is a memoir by cookbook author and food historian Jessica B. Harris, particularly describing on her life and friendships with major black writers including James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison in New York City in the 1970s.

The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. "The Negro Renaissance" included Locke's title essay "The New Negro," as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.

The Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!, such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.

No Disrespect is a 1994 American memoir written by Sister Souljah.

Nubia: Real One is a young adult graphic novel written by L.L. McKinney and illustrated by Robyn Smith. It centers Nubia, Wonder Woman's twin sister and DC Comic's first Black woman superhero. The book is a coming-of-age story that follows Nubia's attempts to keep her friends safe while keeping her superhuman abilities a secret. Nubia: Real One was released on February 23, 2021.

On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of Straight Black Men Who Sleep with Men is a 2004 New York Times Bestselling non-fiction book by J. L. King. The book was released in hardback on April 14, 2004 through Broadway Books and details the sexual lives of African-American men who are on the "down low" or having sex with men while posing or identifying as heterosexual. When the book was initially released, King denied claims that he was gay in both the book and in the media, but later confirmed that he was gay in 2010.

Passing is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1929. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of "racial passing", and is a key element of the novel; Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack) Bellew, is its most significant depiction in the novel, and a catalyst for the tragic events.

The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism is 2003 book on literary history, criticism and theory by Brent Hayes Edwards.

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a poem and song by Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, on which he recited the lyrics, accompanied by congas and bongo drums. A re-recorded version, with a full band, was the B-side to Scott-Heron's first single, "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", from his album Pieces of a Man (1971). It was also included on his compilation album, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1974). All these releases were issued on the Flying Dutchman Productions record label.

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution is a history book by Simon Schama. It was the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for general nonfiction. A 2007 drama-documentary television programme was based on it.

"Stranger in the Village" is an essay by African-American novelist James Baldwin about his experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland, after he nearly suffered a breakdown. The essay was originally published in Harper's Magazine, October 1953, and later in his 1955 collection, Notes of a Native Son.

The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family is a 2004 photographic poetic narrative by Ntozake Shange and the photography collective Kamoinge Inc. The Kamoinge Workshop was founded in New York in 1963 to support the work of black photographers in a field then dominated by white photographers. The book was first published on October 26, 2004, through Atria Books and was edited by Frank Steward, the president of Kamoinge Inc.

The Voice of the Negro was a literary periodical aimed at a national audience of African Americans which was published from 1904 to 1907. It was created in Atlanta, Georgia in June 1904 by Austin N. Jenkins, the white manager of the publishing company J. L. Nichols and Company. He gave full control of the magazine to the Black editors John W. E. Bowen, Sr. and Jesse Max Barber.

When Washington Was in Vogue is a Harlem Renaissance novel written by Edward Christopher Williams, set in Washington, D.C. in 1922-3. The first epistolary novel written by an African-American, it was originally serialized in the radical magazine The Messenger between January 1925 and July 1926 as "The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair." Largely due to the small circulation of the magazine, When Washington Was in Vogue languished in obscurity until its rediscovery and subsequent publication in 2003. It follows the adventures of Davy Carr, a scholar living amongst the black socialites of the Roaring Twenties.