Category: Black Authors
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Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Rating: 5/5, excellent This book should be required reading—especially for white feminists! Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race & Class is a classic feminist text. It came out in 1981 but it’s just as relevant today, and I think it will be evergreen because of its well-referenced discussion of black history. Women, Race & Class is…
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I Rise: The Transformation of Toni Newman
Rating: 4/5, good I picked up this book because I saw Toni Newman on a Zoom call with Charlie Jane Anders and a lot of other trans and nonbinary authors. There were so many cool authors and good books to pick from it was a little overwhelming (the call included Alok Vaid-Menon, Meredith Talusan, Vivek…
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Rating: 5/5, excellent Diverse Reading Challenge #3 I don’t know why I slept on this book so long. It came out February 8th, 2017 and it was a huge hit, with a movie adaptation that came out in 2018. I’ve heard so many great things about it, and it 100% lives up to the hype!…
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Sula by Toni Morrison
Diverse Reading Challenge #1 Rating: 4/5, good Sula is a modern classic. It was published in 1973 and is Morrison’s second novel after The Bluest Eye. I tried to read Beloved in college (it was assigned for Helene Moglen’s Gothic Imagination class – by the way, there’s a colloquium in her honor happening in March) but…
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Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Rosewater by Tade Thompson Rating: 4/5 This was assigned for my local scifi group. I didn’t finish it in time to make it to the discussion, but I really enjoyed the book. It’s a scifi set in about 2050 in Nigeria after aliens have started to invade Earth. The main character, Kaaro, is one of…
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The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin Rating: 5/5, excellent I loved this book. N.K. Jemisin creates a whole world for readers to explore. The way she obscures secrets to build tension and then reveals them at just the right dramatic moment is nothing short of masterful. N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the first book…
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Diverse Reading Challenge
In my last post, I talked about how writers should read more books by minorities and PoC, and I got inspired to make my own list of books I want to read. I’ve read a couple of books by women and PoC on this blog, but I want to read more, so I’m making a…
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Who Fears Death By Nnedi Okorafor
Rating: 3/5, average Who Fears Death is a science fantasy novel by Nnedi Okorafor, PhD, a Nigerian-American writer and creative writing instructor. Who Fears Death has been optioned for an HBO show directed by George R.R. Martin. I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about this book. I’ve been following Nnedi Okorafor on Twitter since…
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Dawn by Octavia Butler
Rating: 4 Warning: this review contains spoilers! The other characters withhold a lot of information from the main character, so discussing the themes of this book is really difficult to do without spoiling it. I’m just not going to bother here, and assume you’ve either read the book or don’t care about spoilers. Octavia Butler’s…