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Introspective & Exciting Reads
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items Books that'll broaden your perspective through various fictional and lived experiences. I love to shine a light on books that share the existence of living the black , queer , and feminine experience .
A fundamentally lived-experience about how one’s faith becomes deconstructed and rebuilt to affirm her existence as a black woman
God Is A Black Woman by Christena Cleveland
A Southern gothic horror novel that leaves readers jaw-dropped. This story follows Sarita Bardales, who has been protected by a guardian angel named Angelo since childhood. However, on her wedding night, Angelo murders her husband, leading Sarita to ...
Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton, Hardcover
Edwidge Danticat composes a novel comprising nine short stories that are true to the reality of Haitian lives during a dictatorship. There is an exploration of themes connected to the topic of sonder and the levels of struggle and identity.
Krik? Krak! by Edwige Danticat
Homegoing entails a multitude of experiences throughout the descendants of two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, born in 18th-century Ghana. This is a novel in which one can connect with a character or two, and raises the thought of how resilient one's id...
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Giovanni's Room follows the tale of David, a married American man living in Paris and struggling with his sexuality, who falls into a passionate relationship with an Italian bartender named Giovanni. Though in love with Giovanni, he gets engulfed wit...
Giovanni's Room (Deluxe Edition): A Novel by James Baldwin
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A dystopian sci-fi world comes to life in Octavia Butler's “Bloodchild”. Set in a world where humans are under the rule of an insect-like alien species and carry the burden of being a host for alien reproduction. Themes of complexity lie within the r...
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler
Recitatif embraces the concept of an ambiguous identity and carefully maintains the depth of one's developing character. The novel revolves around the relationship between two girls, Roberta and Twyla, as they grow up and encounter each other during ...
Recitatif: A Story by Toni Morrison
Queen Afua structures the book into 12 gateways, which represent different aspects of healing. A foundational text in the realm of Black women’s wellness and spiritual empowerment. SideNote: The cover art is STUNNING
Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind, and Spirit by Queen Afua
Fahrenheit 451 takes place in an American dystopian society where books are banned and any books that are found are burned on sight by firemen. Ray Bradbury crafts a world where the desire for individuality challenges their current state of conformit...
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury,
Terry Williams’s When Women Were Birds is a lyrical memoir and meditation on voice, silence, identity, and womanhood. Williams transforms the mystery of her mother’s silent journals into a meditation on the power of language, silence, and identity.
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Williams
Centered around Oscar Wao, an overweight, nerdy Dominican-American boy growing up in New Jersey. The one desire in his life is finding love but he struggles to obtain it. His struggles are framed against the backdrop of his family’s curse, known as t...
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys. Bot...
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson, Paperback
At one time a wild young girl and a brilliant artist, Ava Delaney changes dramatically after a violent event that rocks her entire family. Once loved and respected in their community and in their church, they are ostracized by their neighbors, led by...
The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie, Paperback
Years before "homo thug" and "down low" became infamous catchphrases, Omar Little put the "G" in Gangsta on HBO's critically acclaimed series The Wire, and Lil Nas X claimed a same gender loving space in pop music … there was B-Boy Blues. Revisit or ...
B-Boy Blues - by James Earl Hardy
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks...
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding social chaos and anarchy caused by climate change and economic crisis. In a society where any vulnerability...
Parable of the Sower (Parable, 1)
The Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin is a moving memoir about her childhood and coming of age in Jamaica. Abandoned by her parents and growing up in poverty, Chin faces harsh realities of colorism, class, and homophobia while discovering her ...
The Other Side of Paradise: Memoir by Staceyann Chin
This journey hasn’t been an easy one, but i’ve found joy within my pain. feeling like second best, spending more time stressed. looking in the mirror each morning, yup this is my best yet. i’ve had so much to gain in the midst of this stress.i invite...
A year without you by Julian J Walker
A critical and theoretical exploration of how Black male homosexuality is represented and mediated through cinema, art, and cultural history — especially in relation to whiteness and racial desire. Gerstner examines the intersections of race, sexuali...
Queer Pollen: White Seduction & Black Male Homosexuality
A Visitation of Spirits is a haunting, lyrical novel that explores the intertwined themes of identity, religion, sexuality, and community in the American South. Set in the fictional town of Tims Creek, North Carolina, the story follows Horace Cross, ...
A Visitation of Spirits: A Novel by Randall Kenan
Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde is a bold, imaginative novel set in Nigeria that follows the lives of society’s outcasts — the queer, the poor, the displaced, and the defiant. Through interconnected stories that blend realism, myth, and magic, Osunde r...
Vagabonds!: A Novel by Eloghosa Osunde
Set in west Philadelphia in the early sixties, Tempest Rising tells the story of three sisters, Bliss, Victoria, and Shern, budding adolescents raised in a world of financial privilege among the upper-black-class. But their lives quickly unravel as t...
Tempest Rising by Diane McKinney Whetston
In this daring novel, the author gives a startling account of the inner workings of contemporary South African urban culture. In doing so, he ventures into unexplored areas and takes local writing in English to places it hasn't been before. The Quiet...
The Quiet Violence of Dreams by K. Sello Duiker
A blend of autobiography, myth, and history — that tells the story of her coming of age as a Black lesbian poet in mid-20th-century America. The book traces Lorde’s childhood in Harlem, her complex relationship with her immigrant mother, and her jour...
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Under the Udala Trees follows Ijeoma, a young Nigerian girl coming of age amid her country’s civil war. Separated from her family for safety, she falls in love with another displaced girl from a different ethnic group—both bound by the taboo of their...
Under The Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. is a lyrical, heart-wrenching novel about the forbidden love between two enslaved young men, Isaiah and Samuel, on a Deep South plantation. Their bond offers refuge and hope amid brutality, until betrayal and religiou...
The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.
Doro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally ...
Wild Seed (Patternist, 1) by Octavia Butler
Includes Octavia Butler's novels , Patternmaster , Clay's Ark, Mind of my Mind & Wild Seed. celebrated author Octavia E. Butler is a genre-defining saga that chronicles the rise of a powerful telepathic dynasty. Spanning centuries, this speculati...
The Patternist Series 4-Book Collection by Octavia E. Butler
An extraordinary literary debut about a Nigerian boy's secret intersex identity and his desire to live as a girl. Oto leaves for boarding school with one plan: excel and escape his cruel home. Falling in love with his roommate was certainly not on th...
An Ordinary Wonder by Buki Papillon
Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that pla...
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’” Haunted and haunting, How We ...
How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. “[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensi...
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
They killed my mother. They took our magic. They tried to bury us. Now we rise. Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But ever...
Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orisha 1)