Best of
Black-Literature

2021

I am The Rage: A Black Poetry Collection


Martina McGowan - 2021
    Dr. Martina McGowan is a retired MD, a mother, grandmother, and a poet. Her poetry provides insights that no think piece on racism can; putting readers in the uncomfortable position of feeling, reflecting, and facing what it means to be a Black American.This entire collection was created during 2020, many shortly after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, to name but a few.

The Cask


Danielle Allen - 2021
    But when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.The good-looking businessman knew exactly what he did. And if he thought those broad shoulders and sexy lips were going to smooth things over, he was mistaken. If he thought flirting was going to change things, he was incorrect. If he thought asking me on a date was going to make things right, he was dead wrong.But his advances gave me an idea.They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And when you want revenge, it’s best that your enemy doesn’t know he’s your enemy. But how close is too close?

CONNECT, BTS


Big Hit Entertainment - 2021
    “It’s the belief that our diversity can create a world where differences do not render us apart but ‘connect’ us together through our uniqueness.”CONNECT, BTS is a global project to connect five cities and twenty-two artists, each of whom contributes their unique philosophy and imagination to it.This project aims to redefine the relationships between art and music, the material and immaterial, artists and their audiences, artists and artists, theory and practice.Marking first anniversary of 'Connect, BTS’, Big Hit Entertainment is sharing an e-book looking back on the exhibitions and fonts created exclusively for the project.

On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition


Rinaldo Walcott - 2021
    Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd's death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it? In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery's afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care.

A Strange Loop


Michael R. Jackson - 2021
    Michael R. Jackson’s blistering, momentous new musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons — not least of which, the punishing thoughts in his own head — in an attempt to capture and understand his own strange loop.

White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, Writing


Jennifer De Leon - 2021
    She gave herself permission to return—to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family’s history, and begin to make her own way. Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents’ home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.

Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds


Jayna Brown - 2021
    Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.