Here are 100 books that The 1619 Project: Born on the Water fans have personally recommended if you like
The 1619 Project: Born on the Water.
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I have written 60 books over the past 20 years. My titles include picture books, poetry books, and dozens of nonfiction books covering a wide range of history and social studies topics. My picture books deal with concepts such as counting and colors. I enjoy rhyming and wordplay and conveying ideas in simple terms.
A talented saxophone player, Sonny Rollins left a successful performing career at age 29. He believed he could improve his craft by constant practice, and he found a unique place to do so—the Williamsburg Bridge that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City. Inspired by the sights and sounds of the city, Rollins played his heart out. Gary Golio’s lyrical text captures the rhythm and flow of Rollins’ saxophone, while Ransome’s vibrant watercolor and collage artwork provides a perfect complement to the text. Back matter offers further information about Sonny Rollins’ life and career and about the Williamsburg Bridge.
James Ransome's glorious art celebrates jazz icon Sonny Rollins and how he found an inspired spot to practice his saxophone when his neighbors complained.
Sonny Rollins loved his saxophone. As a teenager, he was already playing with jazz stars and making a name for himself. But in 1959, at age twenty-nine, he took a break from performing-to work on being a better, not just famous, musician. Practicing in a city apartment didn't please the neighbors, so Sonny found a surprising alternative-the Williamsburg Bridge. There, with his head in the clouds and foghorns for company, Sonny could play to his heart's…
I have written 60 books over the past 20 years. My titles include picture books, poetry books, and dozens of nonfiction books covering a wide range of history and social studies topics. My picture books deal with concepts such as counting and colors. I enjoy rhyming and wordplay and conveying ideas in simple terms.
This engaging book presents three young children being brave in three scary situations—a thunderstorm, the first day of school, and getting a shot at the doctor’s office. Using very simple rhyming text, Karla Clark captures the fear of these events and shows the children overcoming that fear. This is a great book for parents to use with preschoolers in discussing ways to deal with being frightened. Jeff Őstberg’s artwork effectively portrays the children’s fear, as well as their pride in overcoming it. The cover art is especially striking.
Told in gentle, rhyming couplets, this collection of stories presents relatable moments of unease and the strength found in conquering fears. A roaring nighttime thunderstorm, the first day of preschool, and a doctor's visit, in turn, encourage young readers to forge their own paths of strength in times of distress. Illustrated in rich, emotional scenes that depict vignettes of daily life, this book provides comfort and empowerment for resilience and resolution.
I have written 60 books over the past 20 years. My titles include picture books, poetry books, and dozens of nonfiction books covering a wide range of history and social studies topics. My picture books deal with concepts such as counting and colors. I enjoy rhyming and wordplay and conveying ideas in simple terms.
It begins with a simple assignment—a teacher asks her class the one thing they’d save if their home were on fire. The answers, ranging from practical items such as cell phones, laptops, and wallets to priceless mementos such as a sweater knitted by gran, a baseball star’s autograph, and a lock of hair from a younger brother who died, reveal a lot about the students’ backgrounds and priorities. The text is written in a line structure called sijo—an ancient form of traditional Korean poetry. Simple black-and-white illustrations provides a nice complement to the text. This is a great book to get kids thinking about what is really important in their lives.
If your house were on fire, what one thing would you save? Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park explores different answers to this provocative question in linked poems that capture the diverse voices of a middle school class. Recipient of four starred reviews!
"[Park's] message is powerful: We don’t need a great blazing tragedy to determine what we hold most precious in our lives; we can define what’s vital through our thoughts and memories, always at hand, in our heads and hearts—safe, where the flames don’t reach."—New York Times Book Review
When a teacher asks her class what one thing they…
I have written 60 books over the past 20 years. My titles include picture books, poetry books, and dozens of nonfiction books covering a wide range of history and social studies topics. My picture books deal with concepts such as counting and colors. I enjoy rhyming and wordplay and conveying ideas in simple terms.
From the time he was young, Edward White loved outer space and dreamed of traveling there. In simple poetic language, this book tells how Edward’s life led him to serve in the U.S. Air Force and ultimately in the NASA program, where he became the first American to walk in space. Nonetheless, the book emphasizes that while he was always reluctant to stop doing anything related to outer space, he was eager to return from his journey to spend time with his greatest treasure of all—his family! Back matter gives more details about White’s life and a timeline of his accomplishments.
Edward White was the first American astronaut to walk in space. But before his spacewalk, he was just a boy who loved the stars. As he grew up, he would look up at the night sky in wonder - he knew that, one day, he would visit the stars themselves. In this touching and poignant picture book biography, we see how Edward's passion for the stars shaped the course of his life, and how…
When I moved to South Carolina some 25 years ago, I found understanding all the history around me challenging. Even more than that, I found it hard to talk about! Politics and history get mixed up in tricky ways. I worked with students to understand stories about plantation sites, leading me to start reading the words of survivors of captivity. I started reading slave narratives and trying to listen to what people had to say. While sad sometimes, their words are also hopeful. I now read books about our nation’s darkest times because I look for ways to guide us to a better future.
Whoa! There has been a lot of crazy controversy over this title, so I thought the book would be wild and confrontational. However, it turned out to be kinder and more careful in its claims than its opponents made it out to be. The whole thing began as a multi-media project for the New York Times to commemorate the first arrival of enslaved Africans to North America, and then it took off as a symbol of often manufactured culture wars.
I wanted to check it out for myself and found that this book is full of surprises. Ok: I expected to see essays about our strange American origin story and how race and power were entwined from our nation’s earliest days. But I was enthralled by the short essays (illustrated with gorgeous images and featuring brief works of poetry and fiction) that took on topics like Traffic, Healthcare, Fear, and…
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER • A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Marie Claire, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of…
From the beginning of my reading journey, I wished for more stories about women who were courageous, passionate, and in control of their own destiny. I wanted to write books for female readers who loved characters like Zorro, Robin Hood, and Jack Sparrow, but wanted to see themselves shining through them. In the process of researching, I discovered unforgettable characters like Captain Mabbot and Clare Sullivan. The Legends of Vioria series focuses on such women, who use their wit and strength to navigate the world. It is my hope to continue to write stories that will inspire others just as the books in this list inspired me.
Captive is another romance with pirates and passion. It’s part of a larger series featuring the LeVeq family. In this story, privateer Dominic LeVeq, frees and falls for slave Clare Sullivan. Soon they become desperate to have each other. I loved the relationship between these two characters and the devotion that develops between them.
I’m a fiction writer interested in exploring big historical moments through the lives of ordinary people. The extensive fight for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy for women, specifically black women, has long been a concern, admittedly for selfish reasons. This ever-shifting terrain—from eugenics and sterilization to coerced birth control and the rise in maternal mortality rates—was initially perplexing to me and it took a great deal of reading to make sense of it. Such research not only informed my historical novel, Night Wherever We Go, but much of how I understand the world. I’d argue one can’t fully comprehend the current abortion rights moment without understanding how race and reproduction are so deeply intertwined.
Her language, voice, and narrative style make her a singular entity all unto herself. Her first novel, Corregidora, explores the tumultuous life of a blues singer haunted by a dastardly familial trauma. When the novel opens, the protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, has just suffered a horrible accident that renders her unable to have children.
What happens afterwards is a complex and raw exploration of lineage, darkness, and sexuality. It’s a haunting, relentless book. And it’s not hyperbole to say that it changed the course of black women’s literature.
The rest of us, trying to grapple with the intricacies of race & sex, are simply writing in her wake.
One of The New Yorker’s “The Best Books We Read in 2020” picks
“Jones’s great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.”—Anna Wiener, The New Yorker
The new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery.
A literary classic that remains vital to our understanding of the past, Corregidora is Gayl Jones’s powerful debut novel, examining womanhood, sexuality, and the psychological residue of slavery. Jones masterfully tells the story of…
I am a lifelong lover of books. As a child, one of my most prized possessions was my library card. It gave me entrance to a world of untold wonders from the past, present, and future. My love of reading sparked my imagination and led me to my own fledgling writing efforts. I come from a family of storytellers, my mother being the chief example. She delighted us with stories from her childhood and her maturation in the rural South. She was an excellent mimic, which added realism and humor to every tale.
This book brilliantly tells the story of the guerilla warfare that Black people waged against the purveyors of slavery in the antebellum South. It belies the White establishment’s portrayal of the compliant, intellectually challenged Negro who was content to live under the necessary guidance and protection of his or her master.
In fact, a sprawling network of underground freedom fighters developed secret codes, signs, and escape routes that enabled them to thwart the system that strove to keep them in chains. The book’s protagonist, Liz Spocott, is a “dreamer” who is able to see the future.
This book helped me understand that fiction writers are also dreamers, capable of seeing worlds that do not yet exist, and pushed me to join their ranks.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'Em and Leave
In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland’s eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks. Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with “the Code,” a fiercely guarded cryptic means of…
As a bestselling and award-winning KidLit author of more than 100 books, I’ve been blessed to specialize in writing for kids about the amazing and inspiring legacy of African Americans. From an alphabet book for even the youngest readers to biographies with hands-on activities for middle graders and up, both nonfiction and fiction as well, these stories are my passion because many of these individuals are my personal heroes as well. I want kids to love and honor these men and women who have made a difference in our world as much as I do!
The author and I live near each other and we got to know each other at local writer events. So when I heard that her book won Lee and Low’s New Voices Award, I just had to get Glenda’s book. And I did! She autographed a copy for me which I treasure. This is a tender, powerful, and inspiring picture book. It tells the true story of how Frederick Douglass’s mother would visit him. He was a young child working on a plantation. His mother lived and worked six miles away. At night, she would walk six miles through the dark woods to come to visit Frederick, then head back home before dawn. He knew his mother loved him—it was a love that stretched 12 miles long.
Marybeth Gasman has been writing about African American history – within the educational setting – since 1994 when she began research that led to on an intellectual biography of African American sociologist, Harlem Renaissance architect, and Fisk University president Charles Spurgeon Johnson. Over the years, her work has explored many topics, including the history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Black medical schools, African American philanthropy, and the production of Black scientists. She is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Professor in Education & a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and also serves as the Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice.
Williams is another beautiful writer and what I love most about this book is it dispels the very harmful myths about Black intelligence during and after slavery. The author shares the many ways that enslaved Africans taught each other to read even though reading or teaching a Black person to read was illegal in all of the southern states. Reading, storytelling, and passing on knowledge across generations is part of the African American tradition and Williams captures all of this and more in this beautiful book.
In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.
