100 books like The African American Guide to Writing & Publishing Non Fiction

Yes, the same Stephen King: Carrie, The Shining, Misery, and dozens more. Fiction? Yes–his memoir is among the best books for writing nonfiction, not the best of nonfiction books.

Writers of every genre suffer the same troubles, like doubt, rejections, not enough days when the work “flows”, procrastination, alcohol, and drug abuse, having to bow and beg (until your success reverses the tables), and so on. In On Writing, Mr. King gives us his story: "the good, the bad, and the ugly", of writing. 

Start with chapter 25 of “CV”, right to the meat of King’s memoir. Be sure you read his “Tool Box” for writing. From the “fundamentals” (e.g., read and write a lot, vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs) to the “craft” (e.g., subject, story-telling; clarity {again !}; people, personalities, and characters).  

Enjoy!

This book is old, like early 1900s. It was first drafted by William Strunk, Jr., who distributed a version to his students at Columbia University in 1919. E.B. White (author of Charlotte’s Web) modernized it in the ’50s. It went on to sell millions of copies and become one of the most influential guides to English. Why the history lesson? Because it’s remarkable how relevant it remains in 2022. It can feel dusty and literary, but it offers nuggets of wisdom like “omit needless words” that influence writers like me today. I shamelessly ripped off the concept of “elements” for my book. The “little book” is short—the fourth edition is 42 pages—but mighty. It deserves a spot on your physical or virtual bookshelf.    

Just as King is a master of fiction, the late, great John McPhee is a nonfiction master. He gained fame as staff writer for The New Yorker, then authored dozens of books on such diverse subjects as fishing, geology, and transportation. (Trust me: His fascinating novel-like prose is more engaging, enlightening, and enrapturing than those topics imply.) In 1999, he finally won a well-deserved General Nonfiction Pulitzer on his fourth try. In this treatise on writing well, McPhee offers insight into his craft, including diagrams of story structure he shared with journalism students at Princeton. The book appeals to my logical side; in my book I say I see writing as like building with Legos, putting together one colorful block at a time to eventually form a 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon. 

When Lynne Truss wrote this book around the turn of the new century, she thought it would be just for grammar nerds. It turned out people care about commas and millions of copies were sold. In the book, Truss doesn’t explain her title, but I will. The cover illustration features a panda, which eats shoots and leaves—as in bamboo and its vegetation. The title, though, is mispunctuated to say the bear first eats, shoots (as with a gun), then leaves the crime scene. Truss offers advice on using apostrophes, semi-colons, em dashes—my favorite—and other marks. Like many writers, I struggle with proper placement of possessives and pauses. Truss taught me a lot about how to best employ punctuation and not to use parentheses and periods to type boobs. 

The main characters in this book were the first relationship goals for me as a teenager. I loved their relationship; the story flow was vividly in my mind as I read it.

I really shouldn’t have seen the movie because often, it doesn’t follow the same storyline, but I will forever love this book and love the main characters' relationship. It was and still is golden to me.

This book brought tears to my eyes as a little girl living in Harlem in the 1950s dreamed of becoming a prima ballerina in a time where “colored” dancers were not allowed to perform on stage.

Each night she wished upon a star that her dream would come true, though it seemed highly unlikely. I felt for this child whose dream her society strove to deny. I cheered her path to gradual acceptance in the ballet school.

Although presented as a novel, this book is a memoir of Brown’s life growing up as a Black boy in Harlem in the 1940s and 50s amid poverty, violence, and addiction.

Marlene was in Paris in the summer of 1969 when a young white American man gave her a book to read. Brown’s story smacked me in the face. He lived in an America that was foreign to me—poverty, addiction, violence, incarceration. His experiences growing up on the streets of Harlem were so different from mine in suburban New Jersey.

What I remember most is my wonder at Brown’s description of “conking” his hair—straightening it with chemical relaxers that damaged his hair and burned his scalp. His description has stayed with me for all these years as a reminder of how little I knew and know about the lives of Blacks and their position in a white world.

It can be difficult for kids to see their parents as real people, and that’s why I love Some Places More Than Others. When Amara finally convinces her parents she should get to go on a trip with her dad to New York City’s Harlem to meet the grandfather she’s only spoken to on the phone, she uncovers the fact that her dad and her grandfather haven’t spoken in twelve years. I love the depiction of Amara’s father as a person in his own right, someone with a history and his own problems and how, as Amara slowly unravels the mysteries of her father’s past, she begins to understand herself better too.

More than a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott, a schoolteacher named Elizabeth Jennings did the same on a streetcar in New York City. Her act of courage didn’t lead to a mass movement, but it did lead to a court case—which she won with the help of her lawyer, future U.S. president Chester A. Arthur.

I chose this book because it’s so important to recall that segregation wasn’t only in the South, and that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s built on a long history of resistance going back to the first slave ships that arrived on America’s shores.

Like all the young girls in this shortlist of coming-of-age stories, Ashley C. Ford (one of Angelou’s literary children) is a survivor hell-bent on finding a life better than the one she was handed, and, like the others, she is remarkably sensitive, imaginative, and able to paint her world for us in the most tender and unique shapes and colors. How does a young girl weather such brutal realities, experience beauty, and splice together a space for her soul? Ford’s memoir is one such contemporary story.