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For Adults
Chosen people: an Alex Powell novel
Karen Grigsby Bates
Alex Powell is a single woman in her mid-thirties with a fine mind, quick temper and sharp tongue. She's deeply loyal to her friends, and good at her work. She spends a lot of time -- maybe too much time -- questioning authority. When Alex steps into a Los Angeles bookstore on a rainy spring night, she's planning to write a column on the author who is reading and signing books there. But what she gets instead is a firsthand look at the murder of a controversial African American writer.
The first Alex Powell novel is Plain Brown Wrapper, 2003
Fledgling: a novel by Octavia E. Butler.
Baby brother's blues: a novel by Pearl Cleage
When Regina Burns married Blue Hamilton, she knew he was no ordinary man. A
charismatic R&B singer who gave up his career to assume responsibility for the safety of Atlanta’s West End co mmunity, Blue had created an African American urban oasis where crime and violence were virtually nonexistent.
Babylon sisters: a novel by Pearl Cleage.
Babylon Sisters, Catherine's home-based business that helps immigrant and
refugee women settle in America, gets an unexpected boost when former
maid-turned -millionaire Ezola Mandeville hires Catherine to help her recruit
women for her cleaning company.
 Copper sun by Sharon M. Draper.
Two fifteen-year-old girls -- one a slave and the other an indentured
servant -- escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort
Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves.
The senator and the socialite: the true story of America's first
Black dynasty by Lawrence Otis Graham
This is the true story of America's first black dynasty. The years after the
Civil War represented an astonishing moment of opportunity for
African-Americans. The rush to build a racially democratic society from the
ruins of slavery is never more evident than in the personal history of Blanche
Kelso Bruce and his heirs.
New news out of Africa: uncovering Africa's Renaissance by Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
Until recently, Charlayne Hunter-Gault was the Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN.
In New News Out of Africa, this eminent reporter offers a fresh and surprisingly
optimistic assessment of modern Africa, revealing that there is more to the
continent than the bad news of disease, disaster, and despair.
All Aunt Hagar's children: stories by Edward P. Jones
Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.
The audacity of hope: thoughts on reclaiming the American dream by Barack Obama.
In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with
an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the
discord and struggle
 to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called “the
audacity of hope.”
Creating Black Americans: African-American history and its
meanings, 1619 to the present by Nell Irvin Painter.
 Voodoo season: a Marie Laveau mystery by Jewell Parker Rhodes.
A gripping first novel that limns the life of African-American Marie Laveau, the
legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, with all the brooding intensity and
latent menace of a summer's night on a lonely bayou.
 Word from the mother: language and African Americans by Geneva
Smitherman
As a sociolinguist, Geneva Smitherman needs little introduction; she has
produced seminal works on the history, development and structure of AAL (African American Language) as well as having been at the forefront of the struggle for linguistic rights, what she terms the "Language Wars," since the 1960's. In this, her most recent work, she continues to explore the complexities and richness of African American culture and language in a style both engaging and passionate.
For Young People:
 Rosa by written by Nikki Giovanni; illustrated by Bryan Collier.
Fifty years after her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, Mrs. Rosa Parks is still one of the most important figures in
the American civil rights movement. This picture-book tribute to Mrs. Parks is a
 celebration of her courageous action and the events that followed.
The friendly four by Eloise Greenfield; illustrations by Jan Spivey
Gilchrist.
With individual poems and poems for multiple voices, Greenfield follows four
children as they explore the bonds of friendship, family, and community.
When the horses ride by: children in the times of war Poems
by Eloise Greenfield; illustrations by Jan Spivey Gilchrist.
Written from the perspective of children throughout history, this collection of poems focuses o n children's perceptions of war and how war affects their lives.
Porch lies: tales of slicksters, tricksters, and other wily
characters by Patricia C. McKissack; illustrated by Andre´ Carrilho.
Tall tales of humor and exaggeration are told on a front porch to friends and
family. Whether side-splittingly funny or spine-chillingly spooky, most of these tales are seeped in early 20th century African-American history.
The return of Buddy Bush by Shelia P. Moses.
Following her grandfather's death in rural North Carolina in 1947,
twelve-year-old Pattie Mae learns more about her family after reading her
grandmother's collection of obituaries and traveling to Harlem, New York, to
find her uncle who has escaped from the Ku Klux Klan.
Available in Adobe Acrobat PDF files
The Recommended
Reading Lists from the National Council of Teachers of English.
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