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14 of the Best Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2015
Hope Wabuke is a Southern California-based writer and a contributing editor at The Root. Follow her on Twitter.
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15 Powerful Works of Fiction Published by Black Authors in 2015
T Hope Wabuke is a Southern California-based writer and a contributing editor at The Root. Follow her on Twitter.
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Why Shonda Rhimes Chose to Celebrate a Year of Yes
If anyone should write a book on how to live life, it is Shonda Rhimes. The award-winning, highly successful TV producer has created an empire of hit TV shows in a field that is notoriously closed to women, not to mention women of color. As creator, executive producer and writer of three hit TV shows—Grey’s…
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Remembering the Forgotten Black Heroes of WWII
Traditionally, African Americans have been absent from the combat narratives of World War II, especially the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The collective story from military historians has long been that “the only black soldiers to land on D-Day had lent their muscle to labor units and other support work.” But this is not the case…
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A Mother’s Nurturing Love Shines Brightly in Ordinary Light
She left us at night,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith in the opening of her new memoir, Ordinary Light, which was just nominated for the National Book Award in nonfiction. “She’d been lifting her hand to signal for relief, a code we’d concocted once it became too much effort for her to speak and…
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A Muslim Daughter and Her Christian Mother Struggle to Find Peace
It is said that the two things we should never discuss at family gatherings are politics and religion; otherwise, passionate, terrible disagreements will occur—perhaps even estrangements that will last months, if not years. When Alana Raybon converted from the Christianity of her upbringing to Islam, silence was the route she and her still-Christian mother, Patricia…
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Review of Balm: 3 Who Begin New Lives After the Civil War
Dolen Perkins-Valdez made a name for herself with her New York Times best-selling and critically acclaimed debut novel, Wench. Inspired by the real-life Tawawa House, a “resort” for white slave owners to vacation with their black sex slaves during pre-Civil War America, Wench was a spellbinding tale of one of the darkest aspects of our…
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Review: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me
“I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men…
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Loving Day Captures What It Means to Be Multiracial in America
From the very first line of Mat Johnson’s new novel, Loving Day, you understand that you are in the hands of a master storyteller. In engaging, lively prose, Johnson gives us the story of Warren Duffy, a man just returned from Wales to the Germantown district of Philadelphia after his father’s death. Warren’s father has…
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A Man and His Dreads: A Twisted Love Story
Obsession with black hair is usually considered the provenance of black women, not black men. It is the women we see worrying about whether to go natural, relaxed or straightened—whether to weave, braid or dread. And yet this is where we enter Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, the second book from radio personality-turned-University of Richmond professor Bert Ashe.…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
