Book List: 10 Books To Add to Your Shelf (BHM Edition)
Recently, I had a great conversation with Ralston Smith, one of Brooklyn’s finest creatives. He mentioned that he noticed my prior book list reflects a wide range of authors, from traditional bestsellers to indie self-published writers. Queer authors. Women. Men. Nonbinary writers. Authors representing diverse ethnicities and global perspectives. That observation meant a lot because it is important to me that a diversity of voices be represented in my life, my work, and on my shelf.
It also reminded me that I haven’t updated my book list in ages. In the spirit of Black History Month, I’m sharing 10 books to add to your collection. These are books I’ve recently referenced, opened, or purchased. Books that expand your perspective, provoke your thinking, challenge your worldview, or at the very least, make for great dinner discussions.
Numbered, but presented in no particular order …
1. The Cross of Redemption (James Baldwin)
A powerful collection of previously uncollected essays, letters, reviews, and speeches that reveals James Baldwin’s incisive social commentary on race, religion, identity, and culture in America. These pieces showcase Baldwin as an unflinching thinker whose voice remains urgent and relevant.
The Cross of Redemption amounts to an album of ‘studio tapes’ on which we hear songs we know in ways we’ve never heard before. —Quarterly Conversation
2. Reflections in Black (Deborah Willis)
A groundbreaking visual history documenting the work of Black photographers from the nineteenth century to today. Deborah Willis’s rich collection of images and stories redefines the narrative of photography, celebrating family life, culture, resilience, and artistic innovation.
Willis alternates chronological sections of photographs with essays that discuss the individual photographers and the scope of their work. They range from men and women who operated photography studios and made dignified portraits of the people in their communities, to photojournalists documenting social change, to contemporary artists making creative statements with digital montage techniques. This book certainly should be selected for African American or photography collections, but it could alternatively be put in general American history or social history. ― Anne Marie Lane, Univ. of Wyoming
3. Becoming Human (Zakiyyah Iman Jackson)
Becoming Human challenges dominant Western ideas about what it means to be human by showing how antiblackness has fundamentally shaped those concepts. Jackson weaves together literature, philosophy, science, and art to reveal how Black diasporic cultural production offers alternative frameworks for understanding life, matter, and relationality in a world defined by exclusion.
Brilliantly reframes the relation between blackened life and the category of the human, by shifting the terms of the debate. —Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
4. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Saidiya Hartman)
Saidiya Hartman reconstructs the intimate lives of young Black women in early twentieth-century New York and Philadelphia, exploring how they carved out new forms of love, kinship, and freedom outside societal norms. Through lyrical narrative and archival research, Hartman reframes history from the margins, challenging conventional historical accounts.
A radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of ‘ordinary’ young Black women.… As is redolent of all Hartman’s work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments offers a blistering critique of historical archives as the singular or even most authoritative source of credible knowledge.… [She] implores us to pause and consider who is inside of and outside of the archive; whose voice is heard and whose voice is silenced; whose lives matter and whose lives do not. ― Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Los Angeles Review of Books
5. Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts (Crystal Wilkinson)
A lyrical culinary memoir weaving together family stories, food traditions, and nearly forty recipes from five generations of Black country cooks. Crystal Wilkinson explores the hidden legacy of Black Appalachians, honoring the women who came before her and the cuisine they sustained.
Crystal Wilkinson reminds us all that we cannot embrace our precious time in the kitchen without a song our grandmothers sang or a spice our great-grandmothers added. We put the same apron on if we are lucky enough to still have it, wash our hands, say a little prayer, and cook for and with generations. —Nikki Giovanni, poet
6. Black History for Every Day (David Olusoga, Yinka Olusoga, Kemi Olusoga)
This richly illustrated almanac presents 366 entries that highlight the breadth of Black history from around the world, offering a daily lesson in people, events, movements, and cultural moments that have shaped global history. Accessible in style yet expansive in scope, it invites readers to reflect on often overlooked or underrepresented stories across centuries and continents.
Inspiring, accessible and meticulously researched . . . invaluable, fascinating, often heartbreaking resource for anyone, teen or adult, with an interest in history. ― The Guardian
7. Working the Roots (Michele E. Lee)
A deeply researched exploration of African American traditional medicine and healing practices that have evolved over four centuries. Michele E. Lee combines interviews, historical narrative, and folk remedies, celebrating the resilience and cultural significance of ancestral health knowledge.
This book is fundamental to the deeper understudying of a culture that usually is glossed over and commandeered or down played way too often. Working The Roots is my story as it is in many different degrees, the story of all Afro-Americans. —Opensanwo Ifakorede Fadario, Traditional health consultant, healer, visual artist, and initiated Ifa practitioner
8. Slaves to Fashion (Monica L Miller)
Monica L. Miller traces the history of Black dandyism from the eighteenth century to the present, illustrating how fashion has been used as a form of resistance, identity formation, and cultural expression in the African diaspora. This pioneering study foregrounds clothing and style as sites of political and social meaning that challenge conventional narratives of race, gender, and modernity.
Encompassing the genres of drama, fiction, photography, film, and sculpture, Miller’s study highlights the ways in which diaspora can be located in the image and the imagination of the body and its garments. . . . The value of Miller’s text is in its historical range. ― Alisa K. Braithwaite, Modern Fiction Studies
9. Black Performance Theory (Thomas F. DeFrantz, Anita Gonzalez)
Black Performance Theory brings together a wide range of essays from pioneering thinkers in the field to explore how blackness is imagined, embodied, and articulated through performance and performance theory. The interdisciplinary collection examines dance, theater, music, and cultural expression across historical and global contexts, demonstrating the depth and innovation of black performance as both method and critical practice.
This is theory that dances. […] Black Performance Theory convenes 14 scholars and practitioners of Africana performance and bids them dance and groove across national, hemispheric, oceanic, planetary, disciplinary, epochal, formal, and methodological boundaries in pursuit of blackness in motion. —La Marr Jurelle Bruce ― TDR: The Drama Review
10. Giants: Art from the Dean Collection (Alicia Keys, Indira A. Abiskaroon, and Kimberli Gant)
This art book spotlights nearly one hundred works from The Dean Collection, assembled by Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, featuring artists from the Black diaspora. Giants highlights iconic and contemporary voices in painting, photography, sculpture, and multimedia, celebrating cultural legacy and artistic power.
Substantial and boldly designed … an encyclopedic necessity for anyone interested in contemporary art. —Vanity Fair
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