Black Authors you Should Be Reading Now

I can’t remember when “reader” became a part of my identity, it just seemed like it was always a fact and I had no choice in the matter. As a child books were my entertainment when I found myself surrounded by more adults than children (which was a constant), or when I was in and out of hospitals, doctors offices, or other non-kid friendly places with the old Black Southern ladies who helped raised me. Books were my constant, never forced on me, just readily available to turn to. I can remember weekends spent sitting in the recliner next to my Grandmothers bed, tearing through pages of Sweet Valley High. Getting lost in the adventures of the Wakefield twins was as much fun as going outside and creating my own. Me lost in my book and my Grandmother laying beside me felt precious in a way I couldn’t quite put words to then.

Although I can’t remember when books became a part of who I am, I do remember when black authors were inducted into my pass time. My mom introduced me to the poems of Nikki Giovanni when I was around 13. Nikki wrote about black people, created black narratives and had a black voice that was familiar to me in a way that Sweet Valley High wasn’t. Next it was Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, followed by Fly Girl and by the time I read The Coldest Winter Ever I was hooked.

I believe a good book just is. It has no particular voice, or written by an author of a certain race about a specific subject. If the story grabs my attention that’s “good” enough for me. However, there is something to be said for a book that invites you into a world unlike your own. I’ve become more empathetic because of books with characters living lives unfamiliar to my own, I’ve been able to challenge my belief systems reading authors with perspectives opposite mine. Those Sweet Valley books weren’t complex in any way that’s enlightening now, but they did introduce me to a world so unlike my own I found myself hooked on the escape.

For readers who want the challenge, enlightenment or to introduce themselves to the diversity that is the black experience. I invite you to begin reading some of my favorites below. Click the book cover to purchase.

Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.

With “fresh and honest” (Jojo Moyes) prose, *Queenie* is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today’s world.

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. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

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* is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” (*The New York Times*) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

Whether Samantha Irby is talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets; explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette (she’s “35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something”); detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes; sharing awkward sexual encounters; or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms (hang in there for the Costco loot!); she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.

In this moving collection of thought provoking essays infused with her unique wisdom and deep humor, Union uses that same fearlessness to tell astonishingly personal and true stories about power, color, gender, feminism, and fame. Union tackles a range of experiences, including bullying, beauty standards, and competition between women in Hollywood, growing up in white California suburbia and then spending summers with her black relatives in Nebraska, coping with crushes, puberty, and the divorce of her parents. Genuine and perceptive, Union bravely lays herself bare, uncovering a complex and courageous life of self-doubt and self-discovery with incredible poise and brutal honesty. Throughout, she compels us to be ethical and empathetic, and reminds us of the importance of confidence, self-awareness, and the power of sharing truth, laughter, and support.

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of *The Daily Show* began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. *The Underground Railroad* is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

I get as excited about new book suggestions as I do about a Netflix rec, so what are some black authors you can suggest? Let’s talk about it in the comments.