Why am I passionate about this?

As a person who reads solely for pleasure regardless of research, I make it a mission while writing to read books I actually enjoy on topics I wanna learn more about. I chose the books on this list because I’m also a person who reads multiple books at once in various genres, it keeps me honest; aware of holes and discrepancies in my own work and pushes me towards some semblance of completion. All the writers on this list do multiple things at once and I admire their skill and risk in coupling creativity with clarity.


I wrote

The Collection Plate: Poems

By Kendra Allen ,

Book cover of The Collection Plate: Poems

What is my book about?

Looping exultantly through the overlapping experiences of girlhood, Blackness, sex, and personhood in America, award-winning essayist and poet Kendra Allen…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

The books I picked & why

Book cover of Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life

Kendra Allen Why I love this book

What bell hooks has shown me about the possibility of personal narrative and memoir writing is endless because she consistently shows that your story is never-ending. But mostly bell hooks likes to hurt me on purpose. This is my favorite memoir by her because it centers on two of my favorite topics: words and whirlwind romance that refuses to interfere with the words at stake, and I knew this book would be one I would return to in order to figure out my own priorities once I read, “I’m willing to give up everything I love if it means I won’t be crazy.”

By bell hooks ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Wounds of Passion as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“bell hooks’s brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence.” ―Gloria Steinem
With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writer’s journey in Wounds of Passion. She shares the difficulties and triumphs, the pleasures and the dangers, of a life devoted to writing. hooks lets readers see the ways one woman writer can find her own voice while forging relationships of love in keeping with her feminist thinking. With unflinching courage and hard-won wisdom, hooks reveals the intimate details and provocative ideas of the life path she carved…


Book cover of A Fortune for Your Disaster

Kendra Allen Why I love this book

Hanif Abdurraqib has a way of making you forget you’re reading poetry while also reminding you that nothing else could be as poetic as one of his poems. They always unravel in a way only his unique way of storytelling permits. It’s truly a skill that is mastered beautifully in this collection.

By Hanif Abdurraqib ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Fortune for Your Disaster as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“When an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry.” ―Booklist, Starred Review

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness,…


Ad

Book cover of Tiny Tales: A Year of Daily Prompted Stories

Tiny Tales by Beth C. Greenberg,

Tiny Tales is a collection of 365 bite-sized stories and poems, written each day of 2023 to a one-word prompt created by one of the official #vss365 (very short story, 365 days a year) ambassadors on Twitter ("X").

Tweet-sized (280 characters or fewer) storytelling (aka "Twitterature") inspires experimentation and variety,…

Book cover of Lima:: Limón

Kendra Allen Why I love this book

I had been wanting to read this book for a while. Then I read this book. Then I realized I needed to revise my book. Then I reread the book. Then I researched Natalie Scenters- Zapico because I think I fell in love.

By Natalie Scenters-Zapico ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Lima as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

BuzzFeed's Books Coming in 2019 That You'll Want To Keep On Your Radar

NPR's 2019 Poetry Preview

NBC's 8 Excellent Latino Poetry Books for National Poetry Month

The Rumpus's Books To Read in 2019

Remezcla's 8 Books to Read this Year

Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of 2019

Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books To Read For Spring 2019

“Through a range of forms―tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more―the poems in Scenters-Zapico’s second collection . . . incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once…


Book cover of How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired

Kendra Allen Why I love this book

Of course this title will catch anyone’s attention, but I’m including it here because of how mundane the plot is. It’s just people people’ing and therefore experiencing and learning. They just happen to be all the things they are. It’s a fun and funny ride living in a small Parisian apartment with these characters, eating their food, and laying with their friends. 

By Dany Laferrière , David Homel (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Brilliant and tense, Dany Laferrière's first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, is as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published in Canada in 1985. With ribald humor and a working-class intellectualism on par with Charles Bukowski's or Henry Miller's, Laferrière's narrator wanders the streets and slums of Montreal, has sex with white women, and writes a book to save his life. With this novel, Laferrière began a series of internationally acclaimed social and political novels about the love of the world, and the world of sex, including Heading South and I…


Ad

Book cover of You Speak For Me Now

You Speak For Me Now by Sandy Graham,

How can a musically gifted man and deaf introverted woman find a compatible life together? And rise to the challenge of lighting a path to a better future for human society?

This powerful story of interconnected lives, ironic twists, and democratic challenges that move from the personal to the political…

Book cover of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

Kendra Allen Why I love this book

Sometimes I need a book that will inspire me not to continue writing, but to start; kinda like when I binge watch YouTube book talks—that’s the feeling this book brings over me—inspired. It’s a book that helps me write anything because I’m a person who struggles with—yet craves the ability to— strip a piece as bare as possible. Strip a story of its fluff and dissect its roots. I need to know what to save for later, and Gornick expressing the difference between situation and story is something I always go back to in order to help declutter my work. 

By Vivian Gornick ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Situation and the Story as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal…


Explore my book 😀

The Collection Plate: Poems

By Kendra Allen ,

Book cover of The Collection Plate: Poems

What is my book about?

Looping exultantly through the overlapping experiences of girlhood, Blackness, sex, and personhood in America, award-winning essayist and poet Kendra Allen braids together personal narrative and cultural commentary, wrestling with the beauty and brutality to be found between mothers and daughters, young women and the world, Black bodies and white space, virginity and intrusion, prison and freedom, birth and death. Most of all, The Collection Plate explores both how we collect and erase the voices, lives, and innocence of underrepresented bodies--and behold their pleasure, pain, and possibility

Both formally exciting and a delight to read, The Collection Plate is a testament to Allen's place as the voice of a generation--and a witness to how we come into being in the twenty-first century.

Book cover of Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life
Book cover of A Fortune for Your Disaster
Book cover of Lima:: Limón

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

2,352

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

📚 You might also like…

Book cover of Up the Down Escalator: Medicine, Motherhood, and Multiple Sclerosis

Up the Down Escalator by Lisa Doggett,

2024 Gold Winner, Benjamin Franklin Awards, Health & Fitness Category

2024 International Book Awards, Winner, Autobiography/Memoir Category and Health: Women's Health Category

A memoir of triumph in the face of a terrifying diagnosis, Up the Down Escalator recounts Dr. Lisa Doggett's startling shift from doctor to patient, as she learns…

Book cover of Old Man Country

Old Man Country by Thomas R. Cole,

This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.

In these and other intimate conversations, the book…

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Canada, feminists, and rhetoric?

Canada 463 books
Feminists 32 books
Rhetoric 60 books