Books like Cotton candy on a rainy day by Nikki Giovanni

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.

Ocean Vuong’s collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds blends precise, evocative language with lyrical sound, capturing intimate moments and the fleeting nature of life in a striking poetic voice.

A collection of Maya Angelou's poetry celebrating life, strength, love, and remembrance.

A landmark anthology of forty poets that brought serious attention to writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.

In the 19th century, abolitionist and African-American periodicals printed thousands of poems by black men and women on such topics as bondage and freedom, hatred and discrimination, racial identity and racial solidarity, along with dialect verse that mythologized the Southern past. Early in the 20th century, black poets celebrated race consciousness in propagandistic and protest poetry, while World War I helped engender the outpouring of African-American creativity known as the "Harlem Renaissance." The present volume spans this wealth of material, ranging from the religious and moral verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (ca. 1753–1784) to the 20th-century sensibilities of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Also here are works by George Moses Horton, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alberry Alston Whitman, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Daniel Webster Davis, Mary Weston Fordham, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and many more. Attractive and inexpensive, this carefully chosen collection offers unparalleled insight into the hearts and minds of African-Americans. It will be welcomed by students of the black experience in America and any lover of fine poetry.

‘The Weary Blues’ by Langston Hughes is a landmark collection of early 20th‑century African‑American poems that blends jazz rhythms, soulful lyricism, and personal reflection on race and identity.

"Poet, activist, and essayist June Jordan is a prolific, significant American writer who pushed the limits of political vision and moral witness, traversing a career of over forty years. With poetry, prose, letters, and more, this reader is a key resource for understanding the scope, complexity, and novelty of this pioneering Black American writer. From "Poem about Police Violence": Tell me something what you think would happen if everytime they kill a black boy then we kill a cop everytime they kill a black man then we kill a cop you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?. I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rabid and repetitive affront as when they tell me 18 cops in order to subdue one man 18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn street was just a "justifiable accident" again (again) People been having accidents all over the globe so long like that I reckon that the only suitable insurance is a gun"--