February 2025 - Our List of Talented Black Writers We All Should be Reading by Fran Joyce
In honor of Black History Month, I’ m listing the names of prominent and upcoming Black authors, poets, and playwrights and the titles of a few of their better-known works.
Making sure you read a variety of authors from all walks of life, different ethnicities, countries, genders, races, religions, and ages is important.
We are and must remain a culturally diverse society. The more we learn about each other, the more we can begin to understand our differences and similarities. Enjoy!
James Baldwin:
Go Tell it on the Mountain
The Fire Down Below
Notes of A Native Son
Giovanni’s Room
Another Country
If Beale Street Could Talk
Just Above My Head
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
Zora Neale Hurston:
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Muttsy
Jonah’s Gourd Vine
Mules and Men
Tell My Horse
Color Struck (Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life) - a play
Toni Morrison:
The Bluest Eye
Sula
Song of Solomon
Tar Baby
Beloved
Jazz
Paradise
God Help the Child
Ralph Ellison:
The Invisible Man
Juneteenth
Flying Home and Other Stories
Three Days Before the Shooting
Terry McMillan:
Waiting to Exhale
Disappearing Acts
Mama
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
Getting to Happy
Alice Walker:
The Coor Purple
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
The Temple of My Familiar
To Hell with Dying
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
Ernest J. Gaines:
A Gathering of Old Men
A Lesson Before Dying
A Long Day in November
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Maya Angelou – Poet:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gather Together in My Name
The Heart of a Woman
All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
Mom & Me & Mom
Jesmyn Ward:
Where the Line Bleeds
Salvage the Bones
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Let Us Descend
Men We Reaped
The Fire This Time
Navigate Your Stars
Richard Wright:
Uncle Tom’s Children (collected stories)
Eight Men
Native Son
The Outsider
12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States
Octavia E. Butler:
Wild Seed
Mind of My Monday
Dawn
Adulthood Rites
Parable of the Sower
Lorraine Hansberry:
A Raisin in the Sun
The Drinking Gourd
The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality
Jasmine Guillory:
The Wedding Date
The Proposal
The Wedding Party
While You Were Dating
Drunk on Love
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
On Beauty
NW
Swing Time
Colson Whitehead:
The Nickel Boys
The Underground Railroad
Harlem Shuffle
The Intuitionist
John Henry Days
Zone One
August Wilson – Playwright best known for the plays in The Pittsburgh Cycle or The Century Cycle
Fences
The Piano Lesson
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
Recycle,
Seven Guitars
Two Trains Running
Tracey K. Smith – Poet:
Life on Mars
The Body’s Question
Duende
Wade in the Water
Ordinary Light: A Memoir
Isabel Wilkerson:
The Warmth of Other Suns
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent
Percival Everett:
James
So Much Blue
I am Not Sidney Poitier
Erasure
James McBride:
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
The Good Lord Bird
The Color of Water
Michelle Obama:
Becoming
The Light We Carry
American Grown
Chasing Light
Go High
Barack Obama:
The Audacity of Hope
Dreams From My Father
Renegades
A Promised Land
Sources:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/books-by-contemporary-black-authors/