Black authors are soaring higher than ever this season with creative concepts and new ‘Bookstagram’ friendly formats ready to feed our fast-paced lifestyles.
Merging audio content, striking images, and unique storytelling devices, they are taking readers through the joys and missteps of rural Black fatherhood, inside the public courtrooms and secluded chambers of our troubled judiciary system, to the front pew of the churches upheld by the devotion (and at times degradation) of pious Black women, and introducing them to the spicy secrets of Ghanaian kitchens.
Jasmine Guillory is serving the ultimate bedtime stories with the help of our homegirl Keke Palmer.Nikole Hannah-Jones is working with Jasmine Mans to share a broader origin story and book festivals hosted by Literary Arts and Well Read Black Girl in places like Portland and Queens are giving readers a chance to connect with one another and the pen-pushers who keep them informed and entertained through their work.
This season’s literary offerings also include pensive memoirs that revisit sets of hit 90s sitcoms, the back of rowdy 2000s tour buses, reality show reunion couch seating arrangements, and star rosters of sport dynasties to share the true stories behind the relationship goals and career highlights memes have exalted. Black celebrities are setting the record straight about what they expected from the spotlight and revealing their perspectives on some of the most long standing feuds in pop culture.
Black essayists and cultural critics are using their voices to contribute to landscape shifting anthologies. They are also speaking out about the need for intersection in the approach to the climate crisis, the regional intricacies associated with food desserts, and the stress associated with being trapped in lightless cubicles and living within a system with health guidelines that do not include or prioritize Blackness.
See 19 of the best new winter reads we are curling up with this season below.
01
Will Smith – Will Smith, Mark Manson
The star proves to be just as transparent as his wife in this remarkably detailed memoir.
A pair of Detroit children scramble to pick up the pieces at the home of their estranged grandfather after the death of their father and vanishing of their mother.
