THE BLACK LIST:
CURATED SELECTIONS FROM OUR FAVORITE LITERATURE
JUNE THEME: SUMMER HEAT
WEEK 1 - Black Girls Must Die Exhausted
by Jane Allen
The first novel in a captivating three-book series about modern womanhood, in which a young Black woman must rely on courage, laughter, and love—and the support of her two longtime friends—to overcome an unexpected setback that threatens the most precious thing she’s ever wanted.
Jane Allen writes fiction out of life experiences, calling every character "fragments of reality strung together by imagination" and strives to tell stories that stick to your bones. Her series Black Girls Must Die Exhausted she calls "chocolate chick lit with a conscience," touching upon contemporary women's issues such as workplace womanhood, race, fertility, modern relationships and mental health awareness. Her writing echoes her desire to bring both multiculturalism and multidimensionality to contemporary women's fiction with dynamic female protagonists who also happen to be black.
WEEK 2 - Memphis
by Tara M. Stringfellow
Memphis is the story of their hopes and dreams, their love affairs, the good men and the bad men in their lives, and how hope, joy, and hurt can be passed from one generation to the next. If you’re anything like me, you won’t be able to decide which woman is your favorite—Joan with her patience, rage, and artistic sensibility; Hazel whose love story made me weep; Auntie August, a secret guardian angel with laughter that booms, a tongue that lashes, and a heart bigger than anyone else’s; Mya who steadies her family with humor and sharpness; Miriam, resiliency personified; Miss Jade, the neighbor who protects each generation.
WEEK 3 - Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being
by Kevin Quashie
In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.
WEEK 4 - Sankofa
by Chibundu Onuzo
Examining freedom, prejudice, and personal and public inheritance, Sankofa is a story for anyone who has ever gone looking for a clear identity or home, and found something more complex in its place.
Like the metaphorical bird that gives the novel its name, Sankofa expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present to address universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for a family's hidden roots.
