Books like Portraits of the New Negro Woman by Cherene Sherrard-johnson

Alice Walker's 1982 novel, The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, exploring the lives of black women in the South and their experiences of abuse and struggle for independence.

A Raisin in the Sun is a seminal American drama about the Younger family's hopes and struggles on Chicago’s South Side as they confront race, housing discrimination, and generational conflict.

A collection of essays by African‑American women writers that explores how literature reflects and shapes race identity, female experience, and cultural imagination.

Traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds - the intertwinement of the mental and the physical - in the context of race, gender and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory and disability studies, th author demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler ("Kindred") and Phyllis Alesia Perry ("Stigmata") not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N.K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson - where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive disorder and blind demons can see magic - destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. in these texts, as well as in Butler's "Parable" series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, the author shows how these works open up new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.