Women Writers of Color

A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou
Angelou's memoir, the sixth in a series that began nearly 30 years ago with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, celebrates "the quality in the human spirit that continues to rise" despite physical pain, psychological cruelty, abuse and abandonment

You Know Better by Tina McElroy Ansa
Three generations of African-American women are visited by spirits who help them come to terms with their own faults and promote the reconciliation of their family

Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni Cade Bambara
A separated mother of three, Zala Spencer has managed to survive on the margins of a flourishing economy until she awakens the morning of Sunday, July 20, 1980, to find her teenage son Sonny missing. Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children just beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on a desperate search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial and class tensions.

Kindred by Octavia Butler
A woman from the 20th century, Dana is repeatedly brought back in time by her slave-owning ancestor Rufus when his life is endangered. She chooses to save him, knowing that because of her actions, a free-born black woman will eventually become his slave and her own grandmother.

The Future Has a Past: Stories by J. California Cooper
Story collection about ordinary women who discover that love sometimes comes when you least expect it.

After the Dance by Edwidge Danticat
Part travelogue, part memoir, this is a lyrical narrative of a writer rediscovering her country along with a part of herself. It's also a wonderful introduction to Haiti's southern coast and to the true beauty of Carnival.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person – no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
Lucy, a teenager from the West Indies, comes to America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children – the perfect American family. Almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade and bitterly compares them with the vivid realities of her native country

Sula by Toni Morrison
In Sula, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the story of two women – friends since childhood, separated in young adulthood and reunited as grown women. Nel Wright grows up to become a wife and mother, happy to remain in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to experience college, men and life in the big city,

Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.

Cane River by Lalita Tademy
Five generations and a hundred years in the life of a matriarchal black Louisiana family are encapsulated in this ambitious debut novel that is based in part upon the lives, as preserved in both historical record and oral tradition, of the author's ancestors.

The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart by Alice Walker
Part memoir, part fiction and part bibliotherapy, this collection explores several women's heartfelt (and sometimes heartbreaking) relationships with husbands, friends, lovers of both sexes, and family members across generations.