Day 7: Celebrating Black Authors – Zora Neale Hurston

In celebration of Black History Month, I’ll be celebrating black authors by sharing a book a day written by a black author and that has a black main character. Some of the authors I’ve read others are new to me and will be added to the ever-growing TBR pile.

Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Author: Zora Neale Hurston
ISBN-13: 978-0061120060
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Release Date: May 2006
[Re-Read] [Add to Growing TBR Pile]

I read Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God some 20 years ago and if I’m being honest with you I didn’t read it. I found the dialogue rather difficult.

One day I was over my grandmother’s struggling through and she heard me and gave a bit of a chuckle. I asked what’s funny

Day 6: Celebrating Black Authors – Behold the Dreamers by Mbue

In celebration of Black History Month, I’ll be celebrating black authors by sharing a book a day written by a black author and that has a black main character. Some of the authors I’ve read others are new to me and will be added to the ever-growing TBR pile.

Title: Behold the Dreamers
Author: Imbolo Mbue
ISBN-13: 978-0812998481
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Release Date: August 2016
[Read] [Add to Growing TBR Pile]

I work part-time at a bookstore. Not exactly sure why because my pay just goes right back to the bookstore. Maybe I should negotiate a deal.

Day 4: Celebrating Black Authors – Langston Hughes

In celebration of Black History Month, I’ll be celebrating black authors by sharing a book a day written by a black author and that has a black main character. Some of the authors I’ve read others are new to me and will be added to the ever-growing TBR pile.

Title: Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
Author: Langston Hughes
ISBN-13: 978-0679728184
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Release Date: September 1990
[Read] [Add to Growing TBR Pile]

Oh my gosh! What can I possibly say about Langston Hughes that hasn’t already been said? He is by far one of my favorite poets.

Day 3: Celebrating Black Authors – for colored girls by Shange

In celebration of Black History Month, I’ll be celebrating black authors by sharing a book a day written by a black author and that has a black main character. Some of the authors I’ve read others are new to me and will be added to the ever-growing TBR pile.

Title: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Author: Ntozake Shange
ISBN-13: 978-0684843261
Publisher: Scribner
Release Date: 1997
[Re-Read] [Add to Growing TBR Pile]

I read this when I was in college and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have yet to see the Tyler Perry movie of the same name. Even though this about women of color, I think there are experiences that transcends the color barrier.

Summary from Amazon:

The Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century.

First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had.”

 

Day 2: Celebrating Black Authors – To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry

In celebration of Black History Month, I’ll be celebrating black authors by sharing a book a day written by a black author and that has a black main character. Some of the authors I’ve read others are new to me and will be added to the ever growing TBR pile.

Title: To Be Young Gifted and Black
Author: Lorraine Hansberry
ISBN-13: 978-0451159526
Publisher: Signet Classics
Release Date: Reissue (January 4, 2011)
[Re-Read] [Add to Growing TBR Pile]

Lorraine Hansberry is one of my favorite playwrights. I could have chosen her most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, but I definitely enjoyed To Be Young Gifted and Black, too.

Summary from Penguin:

To Be Young, Gifted and Black: An Informal Autobiography was adapted after Hansberry’s death from passages from her plays, interviews, diary entries, letters, and other observations, To Be Young, Gifted and Black is “the portrait of an individual, the workbook of an artist, and the chronicle of a rebel who celebrated the human spirit,” as Robert Nemiroff describes it in the Foreword to the book. “[It is] shaped with a particular purpose in mind: to relate the artist to the person, and place the parts within the context of the whole in such fashion as to enable the words she left to tell her story.”