Happy Wednesday, readers, writers, and shark fans, and Happy Juneteenth!
On June 19, 1865, more than two years after Abraham Lincoln manumitted all enslaved people in the Confederate states, Union Army general Gordon Granger announced the news of freedom to enslaved people in Texas, making them the last in the formerly Confederate South to get word of emancipation. The next year, beginning in the Black churches of Galveston, Texas, Juneteenth began as an observation and celebration of this belated end to bondage. The fine print: This commemoration of slavery’s end is a lesson in how its power persisted. Two years ago, the Biden administration established the emancipation date as an official holiday in the form of Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is an incredible time of year. The bliss of the first days of summer, combined with a holiday that explicitly honors the resilience of Black Americans, creates confidence that collective liberation is possible and stokes a remembrance that radical imagination is essential to our communal liberation!
We’re honored to take part in Juneteenth, so for June 19th, here are 19 reading recommendations:
Note: There are more “obvious” titles we could have chosen, but we wanted to pick titles that are not so commonly recommended. So while we could talk about Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes FOR DAYS, here are some titles we think deserve more attention than they’re getting and which we think you may have not read or heard about yet.
First, A Poem!
Admittedly, I’ll be recommending a book by Danez Smith on this list, but I want to get us started with one of his poems, and that is “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” which appeared in his book, Black Movie. Danez Smith has been one of my favorite poets for a long time, and “Dinosaurs in the Hood” is one of my favorite poems and always the first I bring out for Juneteenth, the beginning of Black History Month, and more.
DINOSAURS IN THE HOOD
See Danez Smith Perform “Dinosaurs in the Hood” Here:
5 Nonfiction Books for Juneteenth
Nonfiction, Social Theory, Memoir
HOOD FEMINISM
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot
Written by Mikki Kendall
Penguin Books (February 25, 2020), 287 pages
ASIN: B07SVVPSNP
$10.99
Today’s feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. All too often the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Mikki Kendall asks, when there is a distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others? An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.
HOW TO BE ANTIRACIST
Written by Ibram X. Kendi
One World (August 13, 2019), 543 pages
ASIN: B07D2364N5
$14.99
In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.
I’M STILL HERE
I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Written by Austin Channing Brown
Convergent Books (May 15, 2018), 175 pages
ASIN: B07466JDSH
$14.99
From a leading voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female that exposes how white America’s love affair with “diversity” so often falls short of its ideals. Channing invites readers to confront apathy, recognize God’s ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness—if we let it—can save us all.
THE STUDY OF HUMAN LIFE
Written by Joshua Bennet
Penguin Books (September 20, 2022), 142 pages
ASIN: B09N6QYTQM
$11.99
Joshua Bennett further extends his range into the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood.
SHOUTIN’ IN THE FIRE
Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle
Written by Danté Stewart
Convergent Books (October 12, 2021), 264 pages
ASIN: B08SW67Z3V
$9.99
Danté Stewart gives breathtaking language to his reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy—both the kind that hangs over our country and the kind that is internalized on a molecular level. Stewart uses his personal experiences as a vehicle to reclaim and reimagine spiritual virtues like rage, resilience, and remembrance—and explores how these virtues might function as a work of love against an unjust, unloving world.
7 Poetry Books for Juneteenth
Contemporary, Young Adult/Hybrid, Spoken Word
AMERICAN SONNETS FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin: Poems
Written by Terrance Hayes
Penguin Books (June 19, 2018), 101 pages
ASIN: B076NWZ1YM
$10.99
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; One of the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2018
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered–the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
BROWN GIRL DREAMING
Written by Jacqueline Woodson
Nancy Paulsen Books; 1st edition (August 28, 2014), 365 pages
ASIN: B00M3Q6ONG
$9.99
A New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Winner
Jacqueline Woodson, the acclaimed author of Red at the Bone, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse.
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.
CALL US WHAT WE CARRY
Written by Amanda Gorman
Viking Books (December 7, 2021), 256 pages
ASIN: B08TVG7BPD
$11.99
The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller. The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman
Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
DON’T CALL US DEAD
Written by Danez Smith
Graywolf Press (September 5, 2017), 101 pages
ASIN: B01N2QLTRM
$9.99
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
“[Smith’s] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”—The New Yorker
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America—“Dear White America”—where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
FOREST PRIMEVAL
Written by Vievee Francis
TriQuarterly (November 30, 2015), 104 pages
ASIN: B071RGM8FG
$16.10
Winner 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Winner 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category
Finalist 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and Shortlist finalist 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color
“Another Anti-Pastoral,” the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes “words fail.” With a “bleat in [her] throat,” the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work.
PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING
Plantains and Our Becoming: Poems
Written by Melania Luisa Marte
Tiny Reparations Books (August 22, 2023), 160 pages
ASIN: B0BHY3NDSR
$12.99
In this imaginative, blistering poetry collection, poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte looks at the identities and histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood. Plantains and Our Becoming is “a full-throated war cry; both a request for anointment and the responding bendición” (Elizabeth Acevedo).
WALKING GENTRY HOME
Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse
Written by Alora Young
Hogarth (August 2, 2022), 209 pages
ASIN: B09KXHHL12
$7.99
“Through verse, Young . . . reclaim[s] ownership of her own legacy, and future. If, as the spiritualist Ram Dass said, ‘we’re all just walking each other home,’ then Young has taken her ancestors’ hands, the ones who lived and died without the right to their full humanity, and walks them as far as she can down their own paths.”—Ashley C. Ford, The New York Times Book Review
Walking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young’s ancestors. The lives of these girls and women come together to form a unique American epic in verse, one that speaks of generational curses, coming of age, homes and small towns, fleeting loves and lasting consequences, and the brutal and ever-present legacy of slavery in our nation’s psyche. Together they form a heart-wrenching and inspiring family saga of girls and women connected through blood and history.
7 Fiction Books for Juneteenth
Contemporary, Historical, Theoretical, Literary, Suspense
CONJURE WOMEN
Written by Afia Atakora
Random House (April 7, 2020), 417 pages
ASIN: B07T8TKWWW
$8.99
Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their enslaver’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.
HELL OF A BOOK
Written by Jason Mott
Dutton (June 29, 2021), 333 pages
ASIN: B08NWD5FYG
$12.99
An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole. In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.
As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America. Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.
HOMEGOING
Written by Yaa Gyasi
Vintage (June 7, 2016), 313 pages
ASIN: B015VACH4U
$12.99
Ghana, 18th century: two half-sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem.
JUNETEENTH
Written by Ralph Ellison
Vintage (June 1, 2011), 413 pages
ASIN: B004XW49D0
$9.99
“Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss’s history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals? Brilliantly crafted, moving, wise, Juneteenth is the work of an American master.
Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, published posthumously in 1999, was a novel in progress when Ellison died in 1994. His editor, believing he’d want it to see the light of day, condensed nearly 2,000 pages into a 368-page novel.
LIBERTE
Written by Kaitlyn Greenridge
Algonquin Books (March 30, 2021), 332 pages
ASIN: B08GFN3PX4
$15.42
Set in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, this an unforgettable story about one young Black girl’s attempt to find a place where she can be fully, and only, herself. Inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States and rich with historical detail, this novel presents a deep, moving, and lyrical dive into our past.
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
The Underground Railroad: A Novel
Written by Colson Whitehead
Anchor (August 2, 2016), 300 pages
ASIN: B01A4ATV0A
$11.99
Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. 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 strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
THE WATER DANCER
Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World (September 24, 2019), 417 pages
ASIN: B07NKMZT7T
$14.99
In his boldly imagined first novel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, brings home the most intimate evil of enslavement: the cleaving and separation of families. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
Bonus: 1 Juneteenth-Worthy Title Coming Out This September
Futuristic, Dystopian, Satirical
SKY FULL OF ELEPHANTS
I had the wonderful privilege of sitting in on a fall preview panel for highly anticipated books coming out in Fall and Winter 2024-2025, and one of the titles that was discussed was Cebo Campbell’s Sky Full of Elephants, which is a futuristic, dystopian, and smartly satirical story in which white people do not exist, and Black people are working through what it means to be Black, realizing how little progress has been made for Black people, and being confronted with how little they’ve been educated/educated themselves on these issues. Literary agent Olivia Taylor Smith loved the book for its power to encourage empathy, and the plot and writing style call up the works of Jericho Brown and Colson Whitehead, as well as The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste and The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid for me. I cannot wait for everyone to have a chance to read this book.
Sky Full of Elephants, Available on September 10, 2024
Written by Cebo Campbell
Represented by Olivia Taylor Smith
Simon & Schuster (September 10, 2024)
ASIN: B0CV2CYWML
$14.99
In a world without white people, what does it mean to be black?
One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.
Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.
Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.
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