Marita Golden is an award-winning author of over twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her books include the novel The Wide Circumference of Love and the memoirs Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons, and Don’t Play in the Sun One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex. She is the recipient of many awards including the Writers for Writers Award from Barnes & Noble and Poets and Writers, an award from the Authors Guild, and the Fiction Award for her novel After, from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, been featured as a question on Jeopardy!, and is a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee.
Migrations of the Heart is a memoir that chronicles my coming-of-age in Washington, D.C. as the child of parents who nurtured my imagination and my writing. In this, my first book, I wanted to capture what it meant to be a young Black girl coming of age against the backdrop of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the radical changes ushered in by the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Migrations is also the story of my marriage to a Nigerian and building a life with him in Nigeria and the dissolution of our union. The book captures the growth of my sensibility as a writer and my commitment to writing both as a calling and as an act of healing.
This first memoir in what would become a canon of the life of a woman of extraordinary courage and talent introduced me while reading it in college to a writer who would be an example of what one can do with one’s life and how writing can be poetic, vivid, and unforgettable.
The beautiful creation of family, place and the pivotal role that silence can play in our lives remain in my memory as indelible imprints. Maya wrote about her grandmother’s pride and her mother’s love with unflinching truth and made every person in this memoir complex and complicated and therefore unforgettable.
Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover.
Bragg’s homage to the strength of his mother, who picked cotton and survived an abusive marriage, his ode to the beauty and strangeness of his southern roots, and his journey out of the South into the wider world while carrying The South in his bones is an entirely satisfying and moving story of creating identity and finding home inside yourself.
I often teach this book in my memoir workshops and it is always one of the most popular reads.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, "a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times. It is also the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running…
In the introduction to the first edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright acknowledges that while inspired by his life the book is both a record of his life and an imagined autobiography of all the “black boys” he knew who like him came of age in the segregated south.
Wright’s book is an early example of the use of creative nonfiction techniques that make this memoir gripping, suspenseful, deeply psychological, and a testimony to the power of dreams and the will to prevail against adversity.
Elaine Brown served as head of the Black Power Party during the incarceration of the founder Huey P. Newton.
This memoir is written with all the qualities that made Elaine Brown give herself wholeheartedly to the Black Panther Party, passion, brilliance, keen intelligence, and fearlessness. Brown plumbs the depths of her motivations, the Party’s accomplishments and failures, and fissures that despite her ascent included sexism and brutality.
Brown had incarnations as a writer and singer before joining the Party and in telling her story and the story of a pivotal moment in social history she brings the skill of an artist.
The incredible memoir of Elaine Brown - the first woman leader of the Black Panthers
'Here I was, a woman, proclaiming supreme power over the most militant organization in America'
In 1974 Elaine Brown became the first woman leader of the Black Panther Party. This is her unforgettable memoir, charting her rise from an impoverished neighbourhood in Philadelphia, through her political awakening during a bohemian adolescence, and on to her time as a foot soldier for the Panthers and ascent into its male-dominated upper ranks. It is a seminal exploration of power, racism and one woman's revolutionary struggle.
This memoir informed me of the psychological price of immigration and displacement on young children in ways that were searing and deep because of Wang’s mastery of the child’s perspective.
She lived in New York’s Chinatown with her parents two professionals who immigrated from China and experienced poverty, isolation, fear of deportation, working in a sweatshop. She was saved by her love of books and reading, and her mother’s determination to realize the life she left China to have. Wang creates innocence and trauma with a deft, poetic skill that makes this a classic.
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK, OBAMA 2021 BOOK PICK and INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness.'
In China she was the daughter of professors. In Brooklyn her family is 'illegal.'
Qian is just seven when she moves to America, the 'Beautiful Country', where she and her parents find that the roads of New York City are not paved with gold, but crushing fear and scarcity. Unable to speak English at first, Qian and her parents must work wherever they can to survive, all while…
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.
Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father.
The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
Interested in
undocumented immigrants,
Alabama,
and
racism?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
undocumented immigrants,
Alabama,
and
racism.
