Here’s the thing about new books: They are the catalysts that inspire readers to try, do, and feel new things. “Black Girl Magic” is not just something that exists as a campaign or chant at rallies, but something to hold onto within ourselves and use to catapult over whatever obstacles come our way.
Suggested Reading
The books released this week give us so much Black girl magic, it’s hard to keep track. There is Jasmine Mans’ Black Girl, Call Home, a collection of poetry detailing her experiences as a queer Black woman and navigating her identity. Act Your Age, Eve Brown is the third installment of The Brown Sisters series by Talia Hibbert and is so comical that the magic comes from the joy it brings.
Of course, there is real magic in Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s nonfiction anthology of physics texts that teach readers how to understand the more complex concepts of physics, fall in love with the stars and understand the physics behind the melanin in their skin.
However, as I said before, there is magic in comedy as well, and Robert Fisher’s 1928 novel The Walls of Jericho is a hilarious tale of race, class and jazz-age Harlem tomfoolery.
Act Your Age, Eve Brown – Talia Hibbert (Brown Sisters No. 3, Fiction)
Eve Brown is a hot mess. After never being able to do anything right, having things constantly go awry and even ruining a wedding, her parents double down and let her know that it’s time to grow up and prove herself—by any means necessary. Contrarily, Jacob Wayne is always put together. He owns a bed and breakfast and is on a mission to dominate the hospitality industry and expects nothing but perfection. So one can imagine that when their two worlds collide, Jacob is anything but pleased. While Eve tends to Jacob’s newly broken arm (which she may or may not have played a part in) her hot-headedness and overwhelming presence break through the animosity they share and possibly tear down the walls of perfection Jacob has spent years building up.
March 9, Avon
Black Girl, Call Home – Jasmine Mans (Poetry)
From Jasmine Mans, a spoken word poet and resident at the Newark Public Library, comes an unforgettable poetry collection about feminism, race and queer identity. Mans writes a call to herself—and readers—to come home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of America and the painful yet joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.
Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the Black girl in roaming and a vital companion to any woman on a journey looking for truth, belonging and healing.
March 9, Berkley
Black Imagination – Curated by Natasha Marin, Performed by Daveed Diggs, Lena Waithe (Audio Book)
Scribd, an audiobook and ebook service, has partnered with Daveed Diggs and Lena Waithe to produce an audio performance of Natasha Marin’s Black Imagination, originally published February 2020, of curated short stories, testimonies and poetries from over 35 individuals. Each submission is in response to one of three prompts.
The choice to bring on Diggs and Waithe was one made by Marin because of their commanding presence, connection to Black youth and the Black LGBTQ+ community. The performance of Black Imagine is available now on Scribd.
March 9, Scribd
Dear Black Girl: Letters From Your Sisters on Stepping Into Your Power – Tamara Winfrey Harris (Nonfiction)
“Dear Dope Black Girl, You don’t know me, but I know you. I know you because I am you! We are magic, light and stars in the universe.” This was one of the first lines Tamama Winfrey Harris reads as part of her initiative to collect and receive letters as part of her “Letters to Black Girls” project. This project asked Black women to write and submit honest, open and inspiring letters to young Black girls between the ages of 13 to 21. The call for letters went viral, and Harris compiled a collection of 100 personal letters from Black women around the globe covering topics such as identity, self-love, parents and family, violence, grief, mental health and sex and sexuality.
Dear Black Girl not only offers a collection of unique points of view, but space for readers to interact and write a response at the end of each chapter, and gives girls a chance to hear from others that everything is—and will be—alright.
March 9, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
How Beautiful We Were: A Novel – Imbolo Mbue (Fiction)
Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amid an environmental crisis brought upon their community by American oil companies. Pipeline spills have destroyed farmlands, children die from drinking toxic water, and talks of cleanup and reparations are nothing but empty promises. Kosawa’s leader, a brazen dictator, thinks only of himself and his own interests.
Told from the perspective of a young girl named Thula, readers follow the people of Kosawa and their decades of struggle to fight back. How Beautiful We Were is an intricate exploration of the pitfalls of reckless profiteering, post-colonialism trauma and how one community’s drive and determination to hold onto the sacred past––and a young woman’s willingness to give up everything for the sake of others freedom.
March 9, Random House
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Nonfiction)
Fewer than 100 women have a Ph.D. from the department of physics and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of those who holds that degree. In her most recent book, In The Disordered Cosmos, Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics from the physics of melanin in the skin to dark matter to the Standard Model of Particle physics and what lies beyond it–all with a new spin informed by history, politics and her extensive knowledge of Star Trek. She lays out a bold and new approach to science and society and believes all people have a right to know and understand–and grow to love–the night sky, the science behind their skin and all the particles that surround them.
March 9, Bold Type Books
The Walls of Jericho – Rudolph Fisher (Fiction)
Fred Merrit has to hire the toughest removal firm when he moves to the most exclusive white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In an uproar about a Black man moving in, the white neighbors make it incredibly difficult for Merrit and his removal men, Jinx Jenkins and Bubber Brown, making the move the complete opposite of straightforward. This comical tale set in jazz-age Harlem mocks the barriers people build around them–race and class being chief among them.
The Walls of Jericho is the first novel by Rudolph Fisher, publishing in 1928, who is also the author of The Conjure Man Dies, which was reprinted on January 19, 2021. The new edition of The Walls of Jericho includes Fisher’s short story One Month’s Wages, which follows Jinx and Bubber during the Depression when they come across some luck...and some death.
March 4, (originally published 1928), HarperCollins
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