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February is Black History Month – and what better way to spend it than commemorating Black authors?
In honor of Black History Month, we have rounded up this list of books by some of the most brilliant Black authors and historical figures to read throughout February. Through these memoirs, fictional tales, and biographies, readers can celebrate the accomplishments of Black people in America, while also reflecting on the inequalities and injustices that they have been forced to endure.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be Black History Month to read these stories. These books would make great reads at any time of the year. From science fiction to memoirs, you will find that these stories are hard to put down. And not only are they entertaining, but they are also powerful works that serve to educate.
If you see a book (or three!) on this list that piques your interest, consider picking up a copy from a Black-owned bookstore. This list from the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC for short) highlights 147 Black-owned bookstores in the United States. If you prefer seeing them sorted by state, check out this list of Black-owned bookstores sorted by state.
The Personal Librarian is a historical fiction centered on Belle da Costa Greene, the real-life librarian of wealthy Gilded Age industrialist J. P. Morgan. She was hired to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for Morgan’s newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Her proximity to Morgan made her a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world. But at the same time, it forced her to hide her true identity as a Black woman.
In this memoir, Kiese Laymon writes about growing up in Jackson, Mississippi. He discusses struggles with weight, abuse, and family, alongside the dynamics of America’s fraught racial history. He invites us to consider the consequences of a nation obsessed with progress yet completely disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where it has been. This exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, family, and a confusing childhood is defiant, insightful, and vulnerable.
Kindred is a science fiction novel by award-winning author Octavia E. Butler. It is 1976 in California, and a young Black woman suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday. She finds herself transported back in time to the 1800s to face the horrors of slavery in America, exploring the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy both then and now. She will discover that her connection to the plantation and its master is closer than she initially thought.
Through a collection of essays, writer Roxane Gay explores her relationship with womanhood and feminism. With humor and insight, Gay takes readers on the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while exploring the state of feminism today and popular culture in the last few years. It’s a look at how the culture we consume becomes who we are and also at all the ways we still need to do better.
Related: The Trick to Setting a Book Challenge You’ll Actually Finish
Brooklyn native Sydney Green has watched her neighborhood rapidly change – with new condos and for sale signs everywhere. Neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. In an effort to hold on to her community, Sydney launches a walking tour to teach the neighborhood’s history. But as she digs into local history with neighbor Theo, it quickly becomes a descent into paranoia and fear. The push to revitalize the neighborhood may have been more… deadly than advertised. Perhaps those neighbors didn’t move to the suburbs after all, as the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood takes on a sinister new meaning.
The Fifth Season is the first installment of the Broken Earth Trilogy. In it, Essun must hide her supernatural abilities. If discovered, she risks discrimination and even death. She is searching for her kidnapped daughter in an apocalyptic world where natural disasters occur regularly and without warning. This sci-fi novel won the Hugo Award, making N. K. Jemisin the first Black woman to receive it. She went on to win the award twice more with The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, the second and third installments in the trilogy.
Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia yet is an outcast among her fellow Africans. When Caesar, a slave recently arriving from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the chance. They embark on a terrifying journey fleeing from state to state along the secret network of tracks and tunnels, engineers and conductors. The Underground Railroad isn’t just a depiction of one woman’s will to find freedom but a powerful medication on the history we all share.
Yinka is an Oxford-educated British Nigerian woman who has a well-paying career, great friends, and independence. But her Nigerian aunties are constantly asking her, “Yinka, where is your husband?” and have started praying for her delivery from singledom. At the same time, her work colleagues think she is too traditional, and her girlfriends think she needs to get over her ex already. As her cousin’s wedding approaches, she commences Operation Find-A-Date, complete with the help of a spreadsheet and her best friend. Will she find her future husband, or does she really need to find herself?
16-year-old Starr Carter lives between two different worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy prep school she attends. But that balance between worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses a police officer shoot her childhood best friend, who was unarmed. As the death becomes a national headline, some are protesting in the streets while some are trying to intimidate Starr and her family. This story depicts the protests, media frenzy, and impact on Starr and her community while emphasizing the need to speak up about injustices, racism, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Take a look inside A Promised Land as America’s first African American president takes you on a captivating journey from his early political career to his time in the Oval Office. The first volume of his presidential memoirs, this highly anticipated book is introspective, intimate, compelling, and powerful. Reflecting on the presidency, Obama reveals his thoughts as he wrestles with a global financial crisis, secures the Affordable Care Act’s passage, authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, and more.
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Les Payne spent nearly thirty years interviewing anyone he could find that had actually known Malcolm X. He spoke to friends and family, classmates, cellmates, FBI and cops, political leaders, and more. He then transformed a hundred hours of interviews into a portrait of Malcolm X like none other. After Les Payne’s death, his daughter and primary researcher Tamara Payne completed the biography.
Narrated by a young, nameless Black man in 1950s America, Invisible Man follows him as he grows up in a small southern town, attends and is expelled from a Black college, and moves to New York. The story takes readers from the South to Harlem, as the protagonist experiences intolerance, cultural blindness, and racial bigotry while searching for truth and self-identity.
Trayvon Martin was an unarmed 17-year-old Florida high school student who was fatally shot in 2012 by a man who was later acquitted of murder. In this newly published essay, his mother, Sybrina Fulton, reflects on her son’s death and the changes that have occurred since. She shares grief, reflections, anger, and hope in the wake of that unforgivable moment that catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement. Trayvon: Ten Years Later has a foreword by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented George Floyd’s family following his death at the hands of a police officer in 2020.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors has experienced firsthand what Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. Black people are subjected to unwarranted and unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality every day. When Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted, it sparked Black Lives Matter. Outraged, Patrisse co-founded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Though championing human rights in the face of violent racism, these women were condemned by some as terrorists. Her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, is an account of strength, resilience, survival, and a call to action to change the current system.
