Explore historic and contemporary Black experiences through these recommended titles.
Dream Big, Little One
Recommended for ages 0-3. An uplifting celebration of black leaders from past and present in board book format.
Harriet Tubman: Freedom Fighter
Recommended for ages 4 and up. Learn about the inspiring life of Harriet Tubman in this early reader biography.
Henry's Freedom Box
Recommended for ages 5 and up. A picture book story of a slave who mails himself to freedom.
The Youngest Marcher : The Story Of Audrey Faye Hendricks, A Young Civil Rights Activist
Recommended for ages 5 and up. Meet the youngest known child to be arrested for a civil rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963
From The Heart Of Africa: A Book of Wisdom
Recommended for ages 6 and up. A collection of African wisdom gorgeously illustrated by artists from Ghana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Canada, the United States and more.
Meet Viola Desmond
Recommended for ages 6 and up. A picture book biography featuring simple text and full-colour that bring the story of Viola Desmond alive.
Elijah Of Buxton
Recommended for ages 9 and up. Newbery Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. A story set in a Canadian settlement of runaway slaves.
How Beautiful We Were
From the celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers comes a sweeping, wrenching story about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company.
Redefining Realness: My Path To Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
In 2011, Marie Claire magazine published a profile of Janet Mock in which she publicly stepped forward for the first time as a trans woman. Since then, Mock has gone from covering the red carpet for People.com to advocating for all those who live within the shadows of society. Redefining Realness offers a bold new perspective on being young, multiracial, economically challenged and transgender in America.
The Nickel Boys: A Novel
The story of two black boys sentenced to a hellish reformatory in Jim Crow-era Tallahassee, Florida and the atrocious conditions they are forced to endure. Based on a real reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years, scarring and damaging the lives of thousands of children. Read more by Colson Whitehead.
Don't Call Us Dead Poems
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth.
Salvage the Bones
Winner of the National Book Award. A gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty.
Fire Shut Up In My Bones: A Memoir
A gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful past. New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up -- a place where slavery's legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence. A powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits the tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an indelible new slant.
I've Been Meaning to Tell You
Canadian author David Chariandy writes a letter to his daughter to share with her the story of his life and to talk to her about the politics of race in her world.
The Wife's Tale
A biography of the author's grandmother Yetemegnu who lived in Ethiopia and witnessed a large part of the country's history.
They Call Me George
Chronicles the little-known stories of black railway porters-the so-called "Pullmen" of the Canadian rail lines. Drawing on the stories and legends of several of these influential early black Canadians, this book narrates the history of a very visible, but rarely considered, aspect of black life in railway-age Canada.
Dear Current Occupant
A creative nonfiction memoir about living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Skin We're In
In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a bracing, provocative and perspective-shifting book from one of Canada's most celebrated and uncompromising writers.
Frying Plantain: stories
Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle -- of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a "true" Jamaican. Set in "Little Jamaica," Toronto's Eglinton West neighbourhood, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these twelve interconnected stories.
Slay In Your Lane Presents: Loud Black Girls
Essays from the diverse voices of twenty established and emerging black British writers.
The Beauty in Breaking
Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper's journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery.
Burning Sugar: poems
In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies.
Kanopy's African Studies Collection
477 films and documentaries exploring Africa and the African diaspora - cinema, politics, economics, music and more.
