Black History Month Reading List

 

Books are an important way to learn about diverse experiences and support the labor that authors have put into weaving together these stories.

In honor of Black History Month, we've pulled together a list of books by Black authors who are sharing important pieces of their experience and history. Although this list is heavily nonfiction, there is no time like the present to add Black authors across all genres to your TBR as well (like romance, science fiction, and mystery).

To check out these books, click the links below. They lead to the listings on Bookshop.org, which supports local bookstores through commission-based partnerships and an earnings pool that gets distributed to independent booksellers.  Basically, they make supporting local bookstores easy for the same price as Amazon!

Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose by Nikki Giovanni

March by John Lewis

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Becoming by Michelle Obama 

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne