As February passes, it is an annual opportunity to understand and reflect on Black history. However, Black History Month is relegated to the shortest month of the year, and understanding the Black experience and empowering black voices is a year-round effort.

This is a curated list of reads that will help you educate yourself and expand your knowledge about black people’s struggles, contributions, and accomplishments throughout history and the modern world. If you start now, you’ll be through them all by next February!

This diverse list will have something in it for everyone. These books span various genres and ideas, and discuss topics of love, being Black in the modern day, and the impacts of policing and mass incarceration.

1. Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and activist Yusef Salaam

Genre: Young Adult Fiction

This book is co-authored by Yusef Salaam, an activist and member of The Exonerated Five. This is a young-adult novel suited for all ages. It is a heartbreaking story that follows a sixteen-year-old boy named Amal Shahid who has been wrongfully incarcerated. The story is about the power of art in the most debilitating situations. The novel is written in poetic verse, making it a quick but compelling read.

Quote: “We were / a mob / a gang / ghetto / a pack of wolves / animals / thugs / hoodlums / men /

They were / kids / having fun / home / loved / supported / protected / full of potential / boys”

2. All About Love: New Visions by Bell Hooks

Genre: Creative Non-Fiction

In this New York Times bestseller, feminist icon Bell Hooks explores what it means to truly love, and how the inability to understand love creates a divided society. She creates a new path to reach love that focuses on healing individuals and communities. She does not argue there’s a lack of romance in society: rather, there’s a lack of compassion, care, and nurturing. She teaches how divisions can be healed through love. 

Quote: “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

3. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique W. Morris

Genre: Non-Fiction, Sociology

Pushout is an exploration of the harmful experiences faced by Black girls in schools. Black girls are adultified, criminalized, and highly judged by teachers and administrators. An environment that is meant to nurture them instead degrades them and pushes them out. This book explores this issue at a critical moment where the school-to-prison pipeline for Black girls is discussed far less than it should be.

Quote: “For Black girls, to be “ghetto” represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be “loud” is to demand to be heard. To have an “attitude” is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and maltreatment. To be flamboyant–or “fabulous”–is to revise the idea that socioeconomic isolation is equated with not having access to materially desirable things. To be a ghetto Black girl, then, is to reinvent what it means to be Black, poor, and female.”

4. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (Edited by Angela Y. Davis)

Genre: Non-Fiction

This book is a collection of contributions from abolitionists, as it follows the trial and incarceration of Angela Y. Davis and gives one of the most thorough analyses of the U.S. prison system and what it means to be a political prisoner. Though written in the 70s, this book remains eye-opening and painfully relevant as the carceral system in the U.S. has only gotten worse. 

Quote: “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night.”

5. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Literary giant Toni Morrison’s debut novel is a heartbreaking story of a Black eleven-year-old girl in Ohio who regularly prays for her eyes to turn blue to be as beloved and as beautiful as all the white children. This book is a compelling and necessary read that gets to the heart of the feelings of loneliness that come from being a Black child in a white America.

Quote: “What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

6. Recitatif by Toni Morrison

Genre: Coming-of-age fiction

A shorter, newer book by Morrison. This arresting short story about race and relationships follows two little girls who only have each other as family. However, one is white and one is black. The story is written from the perspective of a child, and withholds crucial details about racial identity that ultimately involves the reader in a social experiment. It is short enough to read in one sitting, but it is still a powerful, eye-opening book.

Quote: “If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?”

7. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Genre: Historical Fiction

Set in eighteenth-century Ghana, this book follows the lives of two half-sisters who are born into different villages and are unaware of each other. One marries an Englishman and leads a luxurious life in a castle, and the other is sold into slavery and made to work in the same castle. Eventually, their stories collide.

Quote: “You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

8. Woman in Sujud: Poems from a Black American Muslim Girl by M’Shai S. Dash

Genre: Poetry

In Dash’s debut poetry book, she gives an account of her journey to self-acceptance. Her poems deal beautifully with her relationship with religion, sex, her appearance and identity, and the fears and hope she carries with her as an activist and mother. One of my personal favorites, her poetry is strong and touching. A short read you will not regret.

Quote: “And on the long winter nights / When prayers finish early / His laughs are like music / His words like guttural ayah to my ears”

9. A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib

Genre: Poetry

Poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurrarib wrote this book of poems about healing from heartbreak. He speaks about his mother’s death, Michael Jordan, forgiveness, and race relations. It is beautiful, emotional (and sometimes hilarious) read as Abdurraqib writes about his experiences growing up and living as a Black man in America with such poignancy that reframes everyday occurrences with Abdurraqib’s unique touch.

Quote: “I tend to think forgiveness looks the way it does in the movies / like two white people kissing in the rain & it is always white people kissing in the rain on television & it is a question of hair, I imagine.”

10. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy 

In recent years, YA fantasy has become one of the most popular genres of books but is dominated by white authors (who write white characters). Tomi Adeyemi writes a fantasy inspired by West African culture as she conjures a world of magic that TIME has named one of the Top 100 Fantasy Books of All Time. This is a trilogy (the third book is coming out this year) about Zélie Adebola, who needs to bring magic back to her world and strike against an oppressive monarchy that wants to eradicate magic for good.

Quote: “I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners in the war.”

11. Finna: Poems by Nate Marshall 

Genre: Poetry

Nate Marshall, a Chicago poet, writes an outstanding collection of poetry that celebrates Black vernacular and its place in society and pop culture, and its role in creating community and safety. The poems discuss the disposability and erasure of Black and other marginalized lives while Black vernacular is used throughout America, while also celebrating the Black vernacular as a language of hope. This is a must-read that makes us all look into our own selves as perpetrators of Black erasure. 

Quote: “once Alzheimer’s does what it do you never really have conversations it’s more a man becomes a poem a lot of repetition & love with something indecipherable in between.”

12. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Adburraqib

Genre: Autobiography and Music Criticism

This collection of essays by Abdurraqib discusses how music is an essential looking glass to view culture, and his own journey with music helped him move toward self-understanding. He discusses modern music and his own experiences with it as a black, Muslim American. He connects music to conversations about grief and love that he approaches with a kind of relatability and accessibility that helps every reader feel at home in the conversations they engage in as they move through this book.

Quote: “The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.”

13. Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat

Genre: Fiction and Short Stories

This is a collection of short stories that center around the experiences of ordinary Haitians struggling to survive under the Duvalier regime. Danticat plays with the boundaries of hopes and realities in a profound collection of stories that examines people’s responses to a dictatorship, and how those responses differ based on circumstances of identity. The stories touch on themes of sisterhood, female resilience, colonization, and humanity in oppressed communities

Quote: “The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.”