Black/African American Archives - Page 2 of 18

Inheritance: A Visual Poem by Elizabeth Acevedo, illustrated by Andrea Pippins [in Shelf Awareness]

Elizabeth Acevedo, the author of the multi-award-winning The Poet X and Clap When You Land, is also a National Poetry Slam Champion. Inheritance, her most famously performed poem, is here set in print, enhanced with stupendous art by author/illustrator Andrea Pippins (Young, Gifted and Black). Hair – and how...

The Trees by Percival Everett [in Booklist]

20 May, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost

Murder is rarely something to laugh about, and yet prolific Percival Everett’s (Telephone, 2020) latest will inspire at least a smirk, if not an out-loud snort (or many) as narrator Bill Andrew Quinn deftly evokes characters living and dead. Welcome to Money, Mississippi, where corpses...

Recitatif by Toni Morrison [in Booklist]

04 May, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost, Short Stories

*STARRED REVIEW In addition to 11 novels, Novel Prize-winning Toni Morrison wrote this “one and only short story” in 1980, collected in 1983’s Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka. Posthumously published as a standalone volume, the story is paired...

Yonder by Jabari Asim [in Booklist]

14 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Chameleonic writer Jabari Asim’s second novel after Only the Strong (2015) gets historical with a cast of enslaved Black characters – searingly called the Stolen, their white enslavers rightfully are Thieves – who attempt to survive the atrocities of the antebellum South. “All of...

Ain’t Burned All the Bright by Jason Reynolds, illustrated by Jason Griffin [in Booklist]

07 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Middle Grade Readers, Repost, Verse Novel/Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Virtuoso Jason Reynolds’ latest is another chameleonic masterpiece, brilliantly consumable in various mediums, each providing transporting rewards. The original collaboration, conceived between best friends Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin, works best on the page: Reynolds’ glorious words – cut-out phrases and sentences – laid...

Booklist Backlist: Diverse Debut Story Collections [in Booklist]

21 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Black/African American, Cambodian American, Canadian, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese American, Fiction, Indian American, Korean American, Laotian American, Latina/o/x, Lists, Mexican American, Pakistani American, Repost, Short Stories, South Asian American, Southeast Asian American

Short-story collections can be uneven, but readers will be consistently impressed by these extraordinary, resonant, and exhilarating debuts by a dozen diverse writers. Afterparties. By Anthony Veasna So. 2021. Ecco. So’s nine electrifying stories magnificently create an interconnected Cambodian American community. The most autobiographical is “Human Development,” in...

African Town by Irene Latham and Charles Waters [in Booklist]

14 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Poetry, Repost, Verse Novel/Nonfiction

Fourteen voices (each embodying a specific poetic form!) – enlivened by 14 performers – take turns bearing witness in this novel in verse. Perspectives shift among the enslavers, the enablers to such inhumanity, their victims, and their descendants, revealing decades from capture to post-Civil War...

The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard [in Shelf Awareness]

09 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost, Short Stories

*STARRED REVIEW Ladee Hubbard (The Rib King) showcases the same brilliant, biting insight of her novels in an expert debut short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. She builds an indelible Black community through 13 interlinked stories, mostly set in an unnamed "suburbia of the south." She...

A Tiny Upward Shove by Melissa Chadburn [in Shelf Awareness]

28 Feb, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Black/African American, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Repost

Melissa Chadburn's electrifying debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, opens with gruesome death: "Dying hurts like f*ck-all everything." The description comes from "Aswang," a shape-shifting creature of Filipinx folklore, who knows "about the slow agonies of death" because she reanimates the body of 18-year-old Marina,...

The Bennet Women by Eden Appiah-Kubi [in Booklist]

28 Dec, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost

Among countless Pride and Prejudice adaptations, Eden Appiah-Kubi’s debut might be the only with a transgender co-lead; it certainly has one of the most non-traditional Jane Austen-inspired casts ever. Welcome to Bennet House, Longbourn College’s first and only female residence. Appiah-Kubi’s Bennet sisters here are Black engineering...

Dream Street by Tricia Elam Walker, illustrated by Ekua Holmes [in Shelf Awareness]

16 Dec, by SIBookDragon in Black/African American, Children/Picture Books, Fiction, Repost

Dream Street by cousins Tricia Elam Walker (Nana Akua Goes to School) and Ekua Holmes (Voice of Freedom; Saving American Beach) is a formidable, potent antidote to a world that is often unkind to children, especially children of color. Here, "the children who live and play on...

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story created by Nikole Hannah-Jones [in Booklist]

02 Dec, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW In 2019, Pulitzer Prize–winning, MacArthur “Genius” Nikole Hannah-Jones “made a simple pitch” for a special issue of The New York Times Magazine to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the August 1619 arrival of the White Lion, the ship which carried the first captive Africans...

Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel by David Lester, with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle [in Shelf Awareness]

19 Nov, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Biography, Black/African American, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Benjamin Lay, small in stature with dwarfism, was a monumental historical figure almost lost until historian Marcus Rediker published The Fearless Benjamin Lay (2017), which returned Lay to prominence as "the first revolutionary abolitionist." Canadian artist David Lester energetically distills Rediker's biography into a...

Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes [in Booklist]

12 Nov, by SIBookDragon in Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Middle Grade Readers, Repost, Young Adult Readers

At 4, Adaugo lost both parents and a best friend to fire. Grandma Bibi left Nigeria to raise her. Eleven years later, Grandma sends Addy from their Bronx apartment to Wilderness Adventures, a California summer camp for disadvantaged city youth, insisting, “Daughter of an eagle”...

The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live by Danielle Dreilinger [in Booklist]

05 Nov, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Journalist Danielle Dreilinger resurrects, elevates, and applauds the superwoman, subversive history of “home economics,” a field now more unjustly lampooned than deservedly lauded. Dreilinger’s preface, “Everything You Know about Home Economics Is Wrong,” promises – and veteran narrator Rachel Perry splendidly delivers – 150 years...

Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration by Sofija Stefanovic [in Shelf Awareness]

19 Oct, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, African, Black/African American, Eastern European, European, Latina/o/x, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Pan-Asian Pacific American, Repost, South Asian American, Southeast Asian American

*STARRED REVIEW The expectation of consistent quality among 36 global voices seems daunting, but editor Sofija Stefanovic admirably achieves this in a majority of these stories. Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration began on "one of the best-known stages of New York City" – the "plush...

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi [in Booklist]

21 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Memoir, Nigerian, Nigerian American, Nonfiction, Repost

Just as only Akwaeke Emezi could have narrated their Freshwater debut, no other voice could have manifested their first nonfiction title. Presented as an epistolary mosaic addressed to family, friends, lovers, betrayers, and heroes, Emezi’s raw voice lays bare their unadorned writing. Although the vulnerability, arrogance, and...

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott [in Booklist]

15 Sep, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Thanks to veteran narrator JD Jackson and newbie Ronald Peet, Mott’s fourth novel is also a “hell of an audiobook.” An unnamed writer (impeccably embodied by Jackson) embarks on his inaugural book tour because he’s written Hell of a Book. He’s been coached, trained,...

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue [in Booklist]

26 Aug, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Imbolo Mbue’s PEN/Faulkner-winning Behold the Dreamers unveiled immigrants chasing the American Dream; her searing sophomore title exposes U.S. destruction beyond its borders. In an unnamed African nation, oil giant Pexton has been poisoning the farming village of Kosawa – water, land, air, and people....

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs [in Booklist]

15 Aug, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Nonfiction, Repost

Sociology scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs double debuts as author and narrator in her empowering examination of three mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little, who “have been almost entirely ignored throughout history,” although their sons are renowned: Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and...

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