black authors
-
It Took Nearly 50 Years, but This Week, Octavia Butler Made the New York Times Best Sellers' List
“I write bestselling novels,” Octavia Butler wrote on the inside cover of a notebook in 1988. 32 years later, that affirmation has come to pass. As reported by LitHub, on Wednesday, Butler’s agent, Merrilee Heifetz, tweeted that the author’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, had made it onto the New York Times Best Sellers’…
-
'Why Is This Time Different?': Ta-Nehisi Coates to Guest-Edit Vanity Fair's September Issue on Art, Activism and Power
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the acclaimed author of the National Book Award-winning Between the World and Me, is helping Vanity Fair interpret the world we unexpectedly find ourselves living in now. On Tuesday, the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Radhika Jones announced that Coates is the guest editor of the September issue, “a special edition exploring art, activism, and power…
-
Oprah's Latest Book Club Pick Is Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: 'A New Way of Seeing Racial Inequality'
“This might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,” said Oprah Winfrey of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The Warmth of Other Suns was released on Tuesday on Apple Books, among other booksellers. The highly anticipated release…
-
Gabrielle Union Options George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue Memoir for Series Development at Sony TV
It’s Pride Month—and writer George M. Johnson has something additional to be proud of! According to Deadline, Gabrielle Union’s I’ll Have Another Productions has optioned Johnson’s memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue for series development at Sony Pictures TV, where Union has a first-look deal. Deadline breaks down the book synopsis: The title of the memoir…
-
I Don't Want to Die Poor: In His Newest Book, Michael Arceneaux Articulates the Angst of a Generation
It’s a rare feat to score a spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list with your first book—and even rarer to have your finger on the pulse of a national moment with your second. Michael Arceneaux, author, 2018 Root 100 honoree and occasional contributor to The Root has managed to do both; following the…
-
Black History, Black Stories: 7 Books That Center Our Legacies for Longer Than a Month
“No scene from African American literary history is more familiar than that of Frederick Douglass’s learning to read,” reads the opening line of the introduction of Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, an educational tome that unpacks the long legacy of black literacy and literary acumen; one that began while…
-
Alive at 89: For Her First Posthumous Birthday, Toni Morrison Is Getting an Epic Party at the Brooklyn Museum
No one can say we didn’t give Toni Morrison her flowers while she was with us; prior to her death on August 5, 2019, the Beloved author had amassed a Nobel Prize in Literature, a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and countless other accolades. And today, Feb. 18, on what would’ve been…
-
An Immigrant’s Story: Acclaimed Author Edwidge Danticat Wins $100,000 Prize for Her ‘Genre-Spanning Work’
Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; Brother, I’m Dying, etc.) has long been considered one of the most gifted voices in the diaspora, garnering a National Book Critics Circle Award, an American Book Award, and a MacArthur Genius grant, among her many honors. This week, the writer and activist can…