What to Read When Celebrating Black History

A list of books we love by Black authors. All are absolutely worth your time, regardless of the month, some which have appeared on this list in previous years because we are still shouting their praises.

— The Eds.

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Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi
Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions–those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.

 

Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it. In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.

 

The Islands by Dionne Irving
The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women–immigrants or the descendants of immigrants–who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother–who is also a touring comedienne–at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school’s International Day. Meanwhile, in a third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her. Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves–to grow where they find themselves planted–in a world in which the tension between what’s said and unsaid can bend the soul.

 

Inheritance by Taylor Johnson
Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.

 

The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb
The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society.  The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference—he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn’t conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions.

 

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
Set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II, casting light on the women soldiers who were left out of the historical record. At its heart is orphaned maid Hirut, who finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. What follows is a heartrending and unputdownable exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.

 

Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks
It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion–or worse–from the home they both hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town. Based on the history of the many Black towns and settlements established across the country, Jamila Minnicks’s heartfelt and riveting debut is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America.

 

Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die by Tawanda Mulalu
Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. The speaker probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image.

 

Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton
On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys–as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself–have decided to turn around the farm’s bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a “stockman” to impregnate them. But the women are determined to protect themselves. Now each of the six faces a choice. Nan, the doctoring woman, has brought a sack of cotton root clippings that can stave off children when chewed daily. If they all take part, the Lucys may give up and send the stockman away. But a pregnancy for any of them will only encourage the Lucys further. And should their plan be discovered, the consequences will be severe. Visceral and arresting, Night Wherever We Go illuminates each woman’s individual trials and desires while painting a subversive portrait of collective defiance. Unflinching in her portrayal of America’s gravest injustices, while also deeply attentive to the transcendence, love, and solidarity of women whose interior lives have been underexplored, Tracey Rose Peyton creates a story of unforgettable power.

 

Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.

 

Composition by Junious Ward
In his debut full length collection, Junious ‘Jay’ Ward dives deep into the formation of self. Composition interrogates the historical perceptions of Blackness and biracial identity as documented through a Southern Lens. Utilizing a variety of poetic forms, Ward showcases to his readers an innovative approach as he unflinchingly explores the way language, generational trauma, loss, and resilience shape us into who we are, the stories we carry, and what we will inevitably pass on.

 

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Challenging the Length and Notion of Storytelling: A conversation with Davon Loeb

My introduction to Davon Loeb was his essay, “Breakdancing Shaped Who I Am as a Black Man and Father,” a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2022. I was captivated by the vulnerability and relatability of Loeb’s writing, and quickly pre-ordered his debut lyrical memoir, The In-Betweens (West Virginia University Press, 2023). The book explores his growing up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as the son of a Black mother and white Jewish father. Loeb’s experiences growing up Black in a predominantly white-suburban neighborhood are often painful, yet not without joy. While the memoir is masterfully told—Loeb employs a variety of craft techniques that have a powerful effect—what makes The In-Betweens so special is the thoughtfulness Loeb brings to his work. Grappling with accountability and authority, Loeb leaves the reader wrestling with an important question we should all be asking: What is our culpability in systems of oppression?

I spoke with Loeb via Google Docs to discuss the transformation of the lyrical voice in The In-Betweens, developing trust with the reader, and the stickiness of relatability.

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 The Rumpus: I noticed in the acknowledgements how many of the essays have been previously published. It made me wonder about the genesis of the book. At what point did you know these essays were part of a larger work?

Davon Loeb: When completing my MFA at Rutgers-University Camden, I submitted many of the essays I workshopped to literary journals, partly because of literary affirmation. I wanted to get published so badly, which at times, trumped why I wrote. I think there’s real danger in that, submitting work just to get published versus writing good work to better your craft. However, the chapter, “Alabama Fire Ants” was first published in Portland Review, and when this happened, I felt like my writing succeeded, as if I reached a new level. “Alabama Fire Ants” was the chapter that inspired the entire collection, and that chapter can stand alone. Because of that, I wanted the rest of the book to mostly feature standalone pieces. I wanted to build context on a micro and macro level—that you could read The In-Betweens in medias res or from start to finish.

Rumpus: These read as individual essays, and there’s a strong narrative arc, but the book is described as a ‘lyrical memoir’ rather than an essay collection. Is that how you see it? As a memoir?

Loeb: I do see The In-Betweens as a memoir. I think the ultimate goal of writing this book was to explore the story of a boy trying to find himself throughout specific time periods. The lyrical voice is stretched, as if a muscle, in each chapter, and each chapter challenges the length of storytelling—challenges the notion that storytelling can be only a five-hundred-word paragraph or a two-thousand-word essay. This book is as much of a memoir of arrival as it is an exercise on craft, on how a book’s structure can be narratively and, concurrently, lyrically driven.

Rumpus: You use the first-person plural in many of the essays that explore childhood. Can you share what was behind that stylistic choice?

Loeb: Using the first-person plural was my very intentional attempt to tell an individual story universally. While my experiences as a person of color, as a person of color who is half white, as a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied man, as a college-educated teacher, as a middle class American, as someone with privilege but also without privilege, I wanted readers, regardless of their subjectivities, to see themselves in my book—that my story was their story. And so much of this is done with place, with summers in Alabama, with riding bikes in the Pine Barrens, with tropes of trying to fit in in middle and high school—all of which is purposeful, stylistically. The “we” is a syntactical choice to bind your story to mine.

Rumpus: Another compelling craft decision is the use of direct address, and the person being addressed varies. Two in particular have a chilling effect: “For My Brother,” in which the narrator addresses your brother who struggles with mental illness, and “On the Confederate Flag,” in which the narrator addresses a former friend who comes to school wearing a shirt that alludes to lynching. Why was it important to use direct address?

Loeb: The narrative voice evolves throughout the book. When we’re reading, “For My Brother” and “On the Confederate Flag,” there is a change in the narrator, a maturation. I wanted this redirection to reflect the narrator’s growth, to reflect his coming of age, and what better way to do that than to redirect how I told the story? That being said, these chapters use a direct address because I am more sure of myself, of how I tell the story and who I am talking to. Will my brother read this book? Will that friend feel racist guilt? There is no ambiguity here because I want you, whoever you are, to feel something, to feel an intimacy.

Rumpus: The growth of the narrator, including their growing confidence, is part of the narrative arc that creates intimacy, and brings us to a vulnerable space. Was this your intention?

Loeb: Writing a memoir is writing with authenticity rather than just the authority of the narrator. Because of this, I have a responsibility to write people accurately. These characters, often my family and friends, are as vulnerable as I am, and to be authentic is to write them fully—that they are never just one thing, and that was really important for me to prove. This book is not a collection of pointed fingers. This book is not to blame wrongdoers. This book never takes me off the hook. This book is about the hurt I have done and the hurt that has been done to me. I am accountable and should be—and that is the intimacy I am after.

Rumpus: How do you manage to center love in your work? Even when you’re writing about difficult topics or hurtful things?

Loeb: The In-Betweens is very much about love, and love is where the book starts, at the chapter, “A Love Story,” which is a retelling of my parents’ relationship. It seemed pivotal to begin my story here, before I’m born. My mother and father’s love story is an in-between—an in-between of age, race, culture—that “…he was white, and she Black, and this was America.” Love marries all the chapters, even if love is a criticism, even if love is a celebration. We can love our family but still be in conflict. We can love where we grew up but still criticize it. In “Something About Love,” my mother tells me that love instinctual, is an undeniable trust, is a comfort in knowing undoubtedly that you are safe and wanted and accepted, an irrefutable thing, like the sun coming out tomorrow, and there’s nothing more or less you can do on any given day to be unconditionally loved. Love is this, something unconditional, but love is not this; love can be a father’s inability to love unconditionally—and yet, love is also a man who is a verb, is an action, is a doer, a giver. Experiencing the duality of love, on many levels, is imperative to understanding the driving force behind my work.

Rumpus: Our society often takes a binary approach—you’re either this or that—but your work resists that. Why is it important to explore liminal spaces, or make room for the in-between places?

Loeb: I was raised in a Black-Latino family, my mother is Black, my stepfather is Panamanian, but I was half white, half Jewish. I grew up in a white town but was half Black. My culture and my ethnicity have always been in juxtaposition. For my entire life, I have always been in the in-between—not Black enough, not white enough. Society demands categorizations—demands our blood to be defined, whether we like it or not. I want to challenge that, the rigid belief that we are defined by one thing, one identity—because we are so much more than just our race, though, for many people of color, we cannot simply shed race, for we will still be Black, still be whatever thing society tells us we are.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the town where you grew up. There were some very disturbing abuses you and your family were subjected to. One example is your brother’s teacher asking him to be O.J. Simpson in a class project in 1995.

Loeb: The town I grew up in is often the setting of both my creative nonfiction and fiction. I absolutely loved my experiences as a kid growing up in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I spent my days after school riding bikes on backyard trails, playing basketball on neighborhood courts, chasing ice cream trucks down quiet suburban streets, drinking beers at parties in the deep woods. Growing up here, I was seemingly safe and wanted for nothing. I had a freedom that felt absolute. My writing celebrates this place with consistent image-driven narratives that intend to draw the reader in, from chapters like “The Settlers Inn” to “A Backseat and a Fire Pit”, my intention is for you to be here with me, with all of your senses. When I write about place, it is very poetic; however, place serves a greater purpose, which is to juxtapose joy with trauma. In the chapter, “On the Confederate Flag,” I am especially troubled by this, by loving my hometown, even though my classmates sported Confederate flags on their trucks at our football games. It’s the same when writing about Alabama: As a person of color, I think, “How can you write about the South without including racism?” Those years as a boy coming of age were joyous, but I was still an outsider to that place, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, to that culture. So my family and I absolutely encountered racism, like my brother did in “O.J. and the Wax Museum,” and yet, we had a good life, and I am so grateful for that.

Rumpus:. How do you balance writing about hard things while allowing room for pride, joy, and love?

Loeb: My life is not just hardship. So the pacing of the book follows joy and trauma shared in the same space, within the same chapters. Good memoir can marry joy and trauma because that’s how life is, and my book wants you to believe this marriage can exist in a literary form. On a craft level, many of the chapters embrace fragmented storytelling, whereas, I structure the narrative in vignettes, challenging traditional storytelling. A paragraph will celebrate while the next paragraph will critique, and this back-and-forth structure is a consistent thread that weaves all the chapters. Joy, love, trauma, rage—it can all exist together, in the same breath. My readers need to trust me, even when I will not tell them the entire story, even when details will be excluded, even when time has elapsed, even when the endings are ambiguous simply because memoir is life-writing, and life is messy but still demands balance.

Rumpus: That brings up interesting questions about the relationship between the writer and the reader—how is trust inherent to our engagement with a person’s story? How do you build trust on the page? By making it an invitation rather than an imperative?

Loeb: I think the invitation is when the reader sees themself in my memoir. Relatability is a power force, and I hope, as that happens at whatever point, the engagement intensifies. Once they’re on my hook, the stories resonate more, and we can approach the uncomfortable, like when readers experience the N-word, which is an experience, and the response, for many readers, is visceral and should be. I think getting there, when the -isms accumulate, takes trust. Readers will learn something from me, if they are not of color or of whatever thing I am and they are not. I believe, undoubtedly, there is learning, there is nuance, and there is growth happening between my narrator and my readers.

Rumpus: Does good storytelling challenge the idea that “relatability” comes from experiencing  similar circumstances and events?

Loeb: Relatability is clearly an important narrative tool in The In-Betweens. But good writing and good storytelling has to exceed the relatable. As much as I want my readers to connect to my work because they can relate to it, I also recognize the danger here. Relatability can devalue and diminish a writer’s work. Just because a reader cannot relate does not mean the work is not important. Publishing can absolutely operate like this, using relatability to solely dictate what is publishable and what is not, which marginalizes already marginalized writers. Having a book that is relatable is great but saying a book is not relatable padlocks it. Relatability, especially for marginalized writers, is an exclusionary term that further narrows an outsider’s viewpoint on a literary work. “I cannot relate,” is synonymous with “this story does not matter to me.” Therefore, I think relatability is necessary and is demanded for non-white writers.

Rumpus: That reminds me of recent debates about empathy in writing, specifically who carries the burden of relatability, when it comes to feeling others’ pain.

Loeb: I was really adamant about not writing trauma as guilt-reading, but writers of color, especially, cannot write our histories without including trauma. My mother is Black, and we are a people from slaves, and it is impossible to tell you my story without including the traumatic history of Blacks in America. I do not need or want readers’ guilt, however I do expect readers to understand that my history is indefinitely tied to Black trauma—that I cannot tell you this story of being in between apart from it—that guilt is not required but respect is. And that is honest writing—writing that cares about the readers’ but cares more about the story it is trying to tell.

Rumpus: You write that your mom said you should always take injustice personally. Did your mom’s words fuel the heartbeat of much of the book?

Loeb: In the acknowledgements, I refer to my mother as the orator of our family history. Her role in my memoir, as the narrator, is as significant as mine, but she has a greater purpose that exceeds our relationship. My mother represents the Black voice where there is none. I do not have the authority to tell all parts of my story because I am only half Black. So I relinquish storytelling control over to her, and in many of the chapters, she takes narrative ownership and teaches me about my Blackness, about where I fit in America as a boy and young man of color. This is my mother’s duty and how she tries to protect me, which is a universal quality of most mothers, one that is as much about race as it is about survival. My mother’s omnipresence is clear and constant, and as we transition towards the end of the book, my mother and my voice become one, and I take injustice personally, like she taught me. The In-Betweens wants you to take injustice personally, to take my story personally.

 

 

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Author photo by Frank Apollonio