ENGL 1160 - Race, Writing, & Power: Black Feminist Narratives of Care, Love, and Community: Recommended Books

Nominated for the National Book Award, this rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines-from their growing up in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation. The one, Nel Wright, chooses to remain in the place of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, and to become a pillar of the tightly knit black community. The other, Sula Peace, rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college, immerses herself in city life, and when she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel, a mocker, and a seductress. Both women must suffer the consequences of their choices; both must decide if they can afford to harbor the love they have for each other; and both combine to create an unforgettable rendering of what it means and costs to exist and survive as a black woman in America.Hailed by critics for its stunning language and its original, honest depiction of the black way of life after the Civil War, Sula is a lyrical blend of myth and magic, as real as a history lesson, as enchanting as a fable.

The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to "anti poetica" and "ars america" to implicate poetry's collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem--part map, part annotation, part visual argument--offers the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it. Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love--those given and made--are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book. A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

Kincaid's essay A Small Place is expanded into this novel about a woman's search for identity as she searches for her mother.

Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and '80s, Revolutionary Mothering is an anthology that centres mothers of colour and other marginalised mothers' voices. Marginalised and oppressed mothers are at the centre of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist and queer liberation are the same challenges that marginalised mothers face every day.

"'mama say this earth will outlive this world,' Destiny Hemphill writes, and in this gleaming collection she gathers what of this life might bloom into another. Through rituals, hymns, memories, murmurings, chants, and psalms, motherworld convenes the women and waters whose routes mark an otherwise from the brutal arrangements of the here and now. This transformative practice is not for the faint of heart. Toni Cade Bambara asks: 'Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? . . . cause wholeness is no trifling matter.' And here is a poet who answers with a resounding yes--her affirmation a root system, fortified by all the nourishment of blood and earth. Hemphill's motherworld shimmers with that brightdark joy that is grief's marrow. What luck and work to carry the instruction of these poems. I will be holding them close and pressing them into many hands."--Claire Schwartz "motherworld transforms language into something map-like, topographical, somatic. A vast heredity speaks out in this beautiful collection of poetry--it is the multifarious self and all those that came before. A hymn of "we bury ourselves like cicadas upon the unearthing, the first instruction is to weep" continuous death and rebirth is here. It is prophesy in a voice that is arresting and fierce. 'i am trying to remold my mouth to speak more bravely,' Hemphill writes. She examines the past, but is not mired by it. Grief and love are emotions that are processed through the body, which is painful, but a means towards tangibility and revolution. This language-driven reality gives us something living to hold in our very mouths, and transform. These poems feel godly. And shared. This book shares a secret with the reader: 'the earth will outlive this world.' And I for one needed very much to hear it."-- Bianca Stone "Destiny Hemphill summons us to poetry as ritual, and ritual as reminder. Reminder: 'you are not alone.' Reminder: 'we bonded to each other.' Reminder: 'made boundless and bountiful with each other.' We are reminded that 'this earth will outlive this world,' and that our abolitionist task is 'to make the world come undone.' In this undoing, we are reminded 'that when it / is not easy, this makes it even / more necessary to be sweet.' For this gift of poetry as sacred work, I am incredibly grateful."-- k'eguro macharia "This powerful collection compels us through the poetics of the matriarchy: 'baby, you better feast!' and these poems nourish and sustain outside of time, and within it, fixed to the page through urgently inventive form and sonics that bring us breathe and listen together. Readers of Hemphill's motherworld will remember and be convinced: 'may we remember that we do not have to open up our wounds / just to prove that we have been wounded / may we speak that which is ours to speak' that language interfuses is as it disturbs and heals and transforms the world so that we may survive, if through language, we are also with it."-- Joan Naviyuk Kane "Destiny Hemphill's motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life stuns with an incantatory power that heals, transports, and transmutes. It's as if every poem has been tenderly and intensely embedded with an intention to raise a vortex of love while confronting the shadows that languish within personal, familial, and collective histories. From channeling an earth in distress to the summoning of ancestral lore, Hemphill proves herself to be a high priestess of language and a poet of oracular wisdom. This is a book to place on one's altar."-- Mai Der Vang Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection "[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy."--The New Yorker Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power.Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, "some of us all at once."Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy.  All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. "The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.  As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better. 

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY Danez Smith is our president Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez's friends and for you and for yours.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton--both the woman and her poetry--is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."--Toni Morrison, from the Foreword "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."--NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.