Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...
2) Americanah
Author
Language
English
Description
"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice"--
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
Formidable Females in YA
High School Project Lit Titles
More Lists...
Formidable Females in YA
High School Project Lit Titles
More Lists...
Description
Sixteen-year-old Bri hopes to become a great rapper, and after her first song goes viral for all the wrong reasons, she must decide whether to sell out or face eviction with her widowed mother.
10) Red at the bone
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces.
11) Kindred
Author
Language
English
Description
Dana, a young modern black woman is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him, as he will father the daughter who will become Dana's ancestor. After the first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect...
12) Muted
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"For seventeen-year-old Denver, music is everything. Writing, performing, and her ultimate goal: escaping her very small, very white hometown. So Denver is more than ready on the day she and her best friends Dali and Shak sing their way into the orbit of the biggest R&B star in the world, Sean Mercury Ellis. Merc gives them everything: parties, perks, wild nights -- plus hours and hours in the recording studio. Even the painful sacrifices and the...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
6th Grade Reading
Children's and Middle Grade Novels in Spanish and English/Novelas juveniles en español e inglés
Middle School Project Lit Titles
Project Lit - Full List
Children's and Middle Grade Novels in Spanish and English/Novelas juveniles en español e inglés
Middle School Project Lit Titles
Project Lit - Full List
Description
Unable to celebrate the holidays in the wake of his older brother's death in a gang-related shooting, Lolly Rachpaul struggles to avoid being forced into a gang himself while constructing a fantastically creative LEGO city at the Harlem community center.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
6th Grade Reading
Dungeons and Dragons: What's the Big Deal?
Middle School Project Lit Titles
Project Lit - Full List
Dungeons and Dragons: What's the Big Deal?
Middle School Project Lit Titles
Project Lit - Full List
Description
Seventh-grader Tristan Strong feels anything but strong ever since he failed to save his best friend when they were in a bus accident together. All he has left of Eddie is the journal his friend wrote stories in. Tristan is dreading the month he's going to spend on his grandparents' farm. But on his first night there, a sticky creature shows up and steals Eddie's notebook. Tristan chases after it, and a tug-of-war ensues between them underneath a...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
African-American folklore was Zora Neale Hurston's first love. Collected in the late 1920's Every Tongue Got to Confess, from the celebrated author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, is published here for the first time, beautifully performed by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.
Hilarious, bittersweet, and often saucy, these folk-tales provide a verdant slice of African-American life in the rural South at the turn of the twentieth century. They capture
...16) Native son
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Amazing Audiobooks for Teens
Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
Fairy Tale Retellings
YA Retellings Featuring Fierce Females
Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
Fairy Tale Retellings
YA Retellings Featuring Fierce Females
Description
Two hundred years after Cinderella found her prince, the fairy tale is over. Teen girls are now required to appear at the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom select wives based on a girl's display of finery. If a suitable match is not found, the girls not chosen are never heard from again. Sophia would much rather marry Erin, her childhood best friend, than parade in front of suitors. Sophia tries to flee the ball, and finds herself hiding in...
18) Sister Mine
Author
Language
English
Description
Possessing no magic but a beautiful singing voice, Makeda leaves her formerly co-joined twin sister, Abby, to set out on her own for a life of independence, but must reconcile with her sibling after her father goes missing.
19) Passing
Author
Language
English
Description
"The beautiful, elegant, and ambitious Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. A light-skinned African American married to a white man unaware of her racial heritage, Clare has severed all ties to her past to become part of white, middle-class society. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, as light-skinned as Clare, has chosen to remain within the African American community. Married to a successful doctor and the mother of two boys, Irene refuses...
Author
Language
English
Description
When August, an anthropologist who has studied the funeral traditions of different cultures, revisits her old neighborhood after her father's death, her reunion with a brother and a chance encounter with an old friend bring back a flood of childhood memories. Flashbacks depict the isolation she felt moving from rural Tennessee to New York and show how her later years were influenced by the black power movement, nearby street violence, her father's...