Nonfiction Books by Black Women

A “dramatic [and] ingeniously crafted” (Los Angeles Times) memoir of family, community, and resilience, and an ode to the power of books to help us understand ourselves, from the renowned founder of Well-Read Black Girl. Gather Me is a glowing testament to how the power of representation in literature can gather the disparate parts that make us who we are and assemble them into a portrait of discovery.

From the award-winning author and creative writing professor at Tulane University comes an intimate and powerful memoir exploring inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters.

Michelle Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt to change and overcome various obstacles. With trademark humor, candor, and compassion, she also explores issues connected to race, gender, and visibility, encouraging readers to work through fear, find strength in community, and live with boldness.

Austin Channing Brown’s essay Collection I’m Still Here is an illuminating meditation on faith, race, and what it means to come of age in the shadow of white supremacy. Throughout her book, Brown grapples with America’s legacy of prejudice and unpacks how racism can impact an individual’s sense of self-worth. Filled with heart and searing truth, I’m Still Here is a testimony of Black womanhood, activism, and resistance. Brown’s book is a parable of resilience. It is the story of a writer who dreams of a world where we are “not afraid to name whiteness” or “celebrate Blackness.”

In Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s latest offering The Source of Self-Regard, we are reminded of why literature and those who create it matter. “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,” she writes. In a series of essays, reflections, and remembrances Morrison’s new book examines language’s capacity to uplift and destroy, how crucial resistance and political awareness is to progress, and storytellers’ potential to foster change. Much like Morrison’s prior books, The Source of Self-Regard is a masterfully crafted exploration of the American psyche. A timely and life-altering read, this collection will change you for the better. Each page is a catalyst for revolution.

In the early chapters of her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, the legendary Zora Neale Hurston confesses, “I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon’s nest.” An unabashed rebel, dreamer, and innovator, this collection is an enlightening glimpse into the mind of one of American literature’s most dynamic voices. This volume highlights Hurston’s prowess not only as a storyteller but as an anthropologist and cultural critic. It’s an essential addition to any reader’s collection.

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others — her parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer. In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics.

A hilarious new essay collection from Samantha Irby “engages readers with her characteristic combination of laugh-out-loud moments, heartfelt passages, and plenty of awkward experiences … Quietly Hostile will delight established fans and newcomers alike” (Parade). Relatable, poignant, and uproarious, once again, Irby is the tonic we all need to get by.

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: The imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds.

Like all of Zadie Smith’s books, Feel Free is an illuminating glimpse into the prolific mind of a living literary legend. A thematically kindred follow-up to the highly celebrated Swing Time, this is an immersive compilation of commentary on books, art, and film and heartfelt homages to icons like David Bowie and Prince. Although many of the essays in this collection were written during Obama’s presidency, Smith’s perceptiveness and ability to uncover what rests at the center of our culture’s political predicament, past and present, make the pages of Feel Free timeless. With piercing wisdom and precision, Smith’s essays challenge its reader to not merely think about freedom but to meditate on what freedom — and the lack thereof — feels like. As always, her work will teach you something new about yourself.

Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions pairs Toni Cade Bambara’s fiction alongside previously unpublished essays and interviews. Best known for Gorilla, My Love, and The Salt Eaters, this collection proves that Bambara’s strengths as a fiction writer equally match her prowess as an essayist. Through Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, Bambara conveys her passion for Black cinema, explores the power of language, and recounts how she became a storyteller. While reading this book, you will feel as if Bambara’s voice is whispering in your ear. Because of this, its pages are gift.

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison explores whiteness and racism’s impact on the literary canon and the way its collective legacy has limited our nation’s sense of narrative and truth. As captivating as her fiction, Morrison’s critical analysis uncovers the failings of American literature’s past and the potential of its future with unflinching scrutiny. In the end, Playing In the Dark makes a case for what we can learn by looking at texts critically, leaving its reader with a warning: “All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before is eyes.” Morrison’s insight suggests that as we read, we should do so closely and with honesty.