100 books like Black Girl, Call Home

D'Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding reminds me of those mushy holiday movies my wife watches on loop at the close of each year. The love connection always begins with the couple physically bumping into each other. While D'Vaughn and Kris don't run into each other, they are randomly paired up on a dating show. An odd move for D'Vaughn, as she isn't out to her family, but because Kris is a hopeless romantic, I found myself rooting hard for the faux couple.

Watching D'Vaughn come into her authentic self and the two women support each other throughout the process reminds me that despite any family dynamic or even local legislation, the moment you decide to be in a committed relationship is the moment you become a team. A united front. Gay, straight, or otherwise, that's a universal theme that most of us can get behind. 

A beautiful and engaging look at a woman named Grace Porter who surprises herself and those around her when she marries a woman she barely knows during a girls’ Vegas trip. The reason I love this book is the way Grace’s friends support her when she makes a decision she barely understands, but they’re with her regardless of wherever this journey will ultimately lead. A group of people whose expectations are not the determination of their love for you is one of the things for which we all yearn.

I've always loved a steamy MM romance, so the bogus boyfriend premise was an easy sell for me. However, as a foster mom turned adoptive mother, I'll forever have a special place in my heart for BIPOC navigating child protective services. Whether the narrative focused on Carlton's traumatized niece and the therapy she so desperately needed or the number of hoops that the LGBTQ+ community jumps through to even be considered for adoption, this story hit home on multiple fronts.

It was inspiring to watch Carlton and Deion navigate the many facets of queer culture, including their newfound fatherhood. Mainly because while stories like theirs happen every day, we don't see them nearly enough. Faux couple or not, Carlton and Deion were the safe space that Olivia needed and the mainstream representation that readers like myself consistently crave.

The Memory Librarian is an adaptation of Monáe's 2018 emotion picture, Dirty Computer. Told in the icon's signature Afro-futuristic fashion, this unquestionably queer AF collection of sci-fi stories describes a dystopian world where dirty computers (people who stray from societal norms) are ostracized in the worse ways imaginable. What's even scarier, while the stories take place in the future, the premise isn't that far from our present-day reality.

Books that boast BIPOC themes are being banned at a record rate. And this year alone, over 200 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced into legislation. Just as Americans have banded together around their common causes, the inhabitants in Monáe's sci-fi saga unite as chosen family. Together they navigate technology, battle memory control, explore identity, and fight for freedom in a ruthless police state.

"Everything comes full circle. And time takes care of itself. Our work is the work of… show more.

Oof, this book is heartbreaking/heartmaking.

I love hearing Andrea read it because of the feeling conveyed in their voice and the way it brings out the musicality in their incredible words. There is also something mesmerizing about reading it on the page, having the time to taste the words and all the space in between the lines.

Andrea’s writing is raw, visceral, and bittersweet-hurts-so-good kind of writing. Their poetry goes right to the quick. This is a book for the ages that, every time I read it, distills for me what matters in my life. 

The best writers help reimagine what a book can be, and for me, Saeed Jones did just that with this book.

It’s billed as a poetry collection, but page after page, he pushes the boundaries of what a poem can say, how it can fill the page, and the shape it can take. There are free verse poems, prose poems, and poems as essays. There are straightforward experiences and more abstract retellings. There’s grief, identity, Blackness, and queerness woven throughout.

This book is so many wonderful things. In my view, this is a vital document of Black, queer, creative living.

By showcasing the rich tradition of queer poets whose writing is inspired by nature, Queer Nature opens up the nature poetry genre.

It is the book I needed twenty years ago when I began writing poetry. In my search for queer role models I was happy to find Mary Oliver, Kay Ryan, and Elizabeth Bishop but little did I know how many others were hiding in plain sight. This expansive anthology presents up to 200 more poets from 150 years ago to the present day, with a moving introduction by editor Michael Walsh.

Funny, sad, complex, and direct; the poems explore exclusion and alienation as well as love and belonging. Above all else this anthology confirms that poetry is as boundless as nature and that together they belong to everyone.

I truly never thought I’d laugh out loud at an erasure poem. Then Ink Earl came along. Holbrook starts with a hundred copies of the original fifties ad pitch for the Pink Pearl eraser—get it yet?—and hacks away different parts of each, yielding a series of meditations and diatribes and bouts of spirited near-nonsense. The poems are consistently clever delights, and the project’s conceptual wholeness is icing on the cake.

This collection teaches me as well, by taking me into the experience of growing up in the Black, rural Appalachian South.

The poems are part memoir, as in writing about the experience of her mother visiting her where she lived with her grandparents, “(We) held hands like we thought/mothers & daughters should/but neither of us knew for sure.” 

They are also part love song to home-cooking, “Every morning of my childhood, my grandmother, who stood a little/ under five feet tall, donned an apron and cooked breakfast. Slow. Precise./ Deliberate. She equated food with love, and she cooked with both a fury/ and a quiet joy.” 

And finally, they are part Black feminist manifesto, “My black body is a boulder, a stop sign. Sometimes i think my body is/ graceful, a song of freedom. Sometimes i think it is something that every/ eye casts away. I must concentrate if i… show more.

I was in second grade when I first read this Robert Frost poem in our classroom textbook. There was one magnificent illustration of a horse in a dark, snowy forest, with big snowflakes falling that captured my imagination. I was entranced by the language and images and remember memorizing the poem to recite. In 1978 Susan Jeffers illustrated the poem as a picture book, with evocative gray and white drawings. A later edition added some color. In this case, the beauty of the text is such that no illustrations are needed, but it is lovely to see the snowy village, the narrator stopping to make a snow angel, and the snow-laden tree branches. A great introduction to the poems of Robert Frost, who called this poem “my best bid for remembrance.” (Just FYI, you can listen to a recording of Robert Frost reading this poem on YouTube.)