Reading List

 

Amiri Baraka — “SOS,” in Black Art

Gwendolyn Brooks — “love note I: surely,” in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander

Bebe Moore Campbell — Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine

Frederick Douglass — Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass

Paula Giddings — Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

Homer — The Iliad

Pauline Hopkins — Contending Forces

Harriet Jacobs — Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Thomas Jefferson — Notes on the State of Virginia

John, Chapter 11 — The Bible

Nella Larsen — Passing and Quicksand

Toni Morrison — Beloved and Paradise

Harryette Mullen — “Once Ever After,” in Sleeping With the Dictionary

Anne Spencer — Bio and poems in The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson

Hortense Spillers — “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

Mark Twain — Huckleberry Finn

Alice Walker — In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

Phillis Wheatley — “To His Excellency, George Washington,” in Poems on Various Subjects

William Carlos Williams — “The Red Wheelbarrow