ALMA | LEWIS Curated Booklist

Francisco

Allison Mills Newman

Alison Mills Newman’s innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English,” as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, “Francisco” is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood.
 
 

Tidal Waters

Velia Vidal

An epistolary, fictional account of one woman moving towards happiness in the black community of Colombia’s Pacific coast. After a long absence, Vel has come home to Chocó – to the Afro-Colombian community, to her family, to the sea.
 
 
 
 
 

Art on My Mind; Visual Politics

bell hooks

“In Art on My Mind, “one of the country’s most influential feminist thinkers” (Artforum) offers a tender yet potent suite of writings for a world increasingly concerned with art and identity politics. This collection of bell hooks’s essays explores both the obvious and obscure: from ruminations on the fraught representation of Black bodies, to reflections on the creative processes of women artists, to analysis of the use of blood in visual art.

The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion

Jennifer Kabat

When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills in 2005, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. As she forges friendships and explores the countryside–finding meadows dotted with milkweed, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land–she learns of the 1840s uprising, when tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ estates.

How We Write Now: Living With Black Feminist Theory

Jennifer C. Nash

Jennifer C. Nash’s “How We Write Now” offers a conceptual framework for thinking about contemporary Black feminist writing’s commitment to sitting with and at the scene of loss through beautiful writing.
 
 
 
 
 

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Toni Morrison

An essential collection from an essential writer, “The Source of Self-Regard” shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.
 
 
 
 

Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art

Erica N. Cardwell

“Wrong Is Not My Name” weaves together autobiography, criticism, and theory, and considers how Black women create alternative, queer, and “hysterical” lives through visual culture and performance.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing

Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney

“Afrekete” gives collective voice to the tradition of black lesbian writing. In the vast and proliferating area of both African-American and lesbian and gay writing, the work of black lesbians is most often excluded or relegated to the margins.
 
 
 
 

Black Women Writers at Work

Claudia Tate

Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers.
 

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Alexander Chee

“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend.

The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Tourmaline

Black trans luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQ+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy. Through nearly two decades of research, Tourmaline brings this fabulous, scandalous, essential justice warrior to life in full color, for the first time.

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

Jake Skeets

Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.”
 
 
 

Ar: Range: Ments

Esther Kondo Heller

In their hybrid debut collection “Arrangements,” Esther Kondo Heller creates stunning textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document.