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…

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…

“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…

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…

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.…

What was it like for blacks in America during those painful years immediately following the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968? This is the subject of Jabari Asim’s debut novel, Only the Strong. In it, Asim, editor of the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine, chronicles the lives of the inhabitants of the fictional Gateway…

It is no secret that the publishing world—especially in children’s literature—is overwhelmingly white. Fortunately, awareness of this issue has been rising—in part because of a new organization called We Need Diverse Books. And yet, the representations of blackness in literature for young people remain terrifyingly slim. A study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at…

Looking for a book to read this summer? Here are 10 releases by African-American authors published during the first half of 2015. Ranging from memoirs to classics, mysteries to satire, there is something here for readers of all tastes. 1. The Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander This powerful, poignant memoir by the poet…

Cha-Cha Turner is seeing ghosts again. The first time it happened he was a child, just moved into his own room. Back then, there were seven willing witnesses in his watching brothers and sisters. But now he is an old man in his mid-60s, and everyone thinks he should know better. So Cha-Cha is sent…

In Pleasantville we revisit Attica Locke’s activist lawyer, Jay Porter, first seen in her novel Black Water Rising. Now, 15 years later, Jay is no longer down and out—he has moved from his strip mall office into better digs and made a successful career out of defending the little guy against fraudulent oil and chemical…