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…

When asked how it felt to have President Barack Obama request she write a poem for his first inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander humbly responded: “I was just happy there was going to be a poem for the inaugural.” Alexander is a rarity—friend of presidents, daughter of civil rights leaders, Yale professor and Pulitzer Prize nominee. But above…

Toni Morrison is, inarguably, the greatest living writer of our time. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the last American to have won the Nobel Prize. Her books have been canonized as classics…

Paul Beatty’s writing defies categorization. The author’s two collections of poetry and three novels have alternately been called satirical, dystopian, absurdist and postmodern. While the closest classification, Beatty himself admits, is absurdist, even that is rather wide of the mark. Beatty’s latest novel, The Sellout, is, on a plot level, the story of Mr. Me,…

When Barack Obama arrived on the national political stage and emerged as a presidential contender, more than one observer asked whether the young, biracial, Ivy League-educated U.S. senator was black enough to be the first African-American president. And this kind of authenticity challenge isn’t new: Many other black Americans—upwardly mobile and highly educated—are sometimes seen…