After Trump was elected last fall, I put out a call to my friends on Facebook to help me create a reading list for educating and empowering myself. Specifically, I asked for recommendations of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that would help me work toward justice and equality–with a focus on racial justice, immigration, disability rights, economic justice, and/or anything regarding feminisms, collaboration/coalitions, organizing, LGBTQ stuff, etc.
What I got was better than I could’ve ever imagined. The comment thread grew and grew, with book recommendations ranging from racial justice to feminist/womanist theology to socially critical poetry.
So, without further adieu, please find below the (only slightly curated) recommendations from my awesome friends. Hope you find something here that moves and inspires you!
Fiction
2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America by Albert Brooks
Almost Famous Women: Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Drown by Junot Diaz
The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Iguana Tree by Michel Stone
Ishmael: A Novel by Daniel Quinn
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Stone Butch Blues: A Novel by Leslie Feinberg
Non-Fiction
African Truth Commissions and Transitional Justice by John Perry and T. Debey Sayndee
All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life by Winona LaDuke
American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (Author) and Richard Philcox (Translator)
Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa by Dayo Olopade
Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow by Daniel Hunter
Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church by Letty Russell
A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes
The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone
Cultivating Peace: Becoming a 21st Century Peace Ambassador by James O’Dea
Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said
Do It Anyway: Finding Personal Meaning and Deep Happiness by Living the Paradoxical Commandments by Kent M. Keith
Emilie Townes (Womanist Theologian)
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race by Jesmyn Ward (Ed.) (Essays and Poetry)
For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward the Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr.
The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet by Virgilio Elizondo
George MacDonald by C.S. Lewis (Author/Editor)
God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria, Jr.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages by N. Scott Momaday
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson
My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS by Abraham Verghese
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 4: Myth, Manners, and Memory by Charles Reagan Wilson (Ed.)
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 24: Race by Thomas C. Holt, Laurie Beth Green, and Charles Reagan Wilson (Eds.)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson
Orientalism by Edward Said
The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore
Out of Place by Edward Said
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (Graphic Novel/Memoir)
The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millenium by Walter Wink
Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin
Public Faith in Action: How to Think Carefully, Engage Wisely, and Vote with Integrity by Miroslav Volf
Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies by bell hooks
Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 & How It Changed America by John M. Barry
Seven Theories of Human Nature: Christianity, Freud, Lorenz, Marx, Sartre, Skinner, Plato by Leslie Stevenson
Sex Object: A Memoir by Jessica Valenti
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
Slavery’s Constitution by David Waldstreicher
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching by Crystal Feimster
The Subject of Film and Race by Gerald Sim
This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath (Author) and Karen V. Kukil (Editor)
Understanding Islam: An Introduction to the Muslim World by Thomas W. Lippman
We Were the Least of These: Reading the Bible with Survivors of Sexual Abuse by Elaine A. Heath
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King, Jr.
White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity by J. Perkinson
Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It by Shelly Tochluk
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought by Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Ed.)
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (A Biomythography) by Audre Lorde
Poetry
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova
Shake Loose My Skin by Sonia Sanchez
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems by Amiri Baraka
Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros
Other recommendations from around the web
- “The Critical Starter Pack,” a beautiful bookshelf of intersectional social justice and theological book recommendations by Larry Cudrup
- “15 Women Writers Every Badass Woman Should Read” on Bustle
- Diversity in YA
- “10 Books to Read by Black Authors in 2017” on Blavity
- “The Stop Trump Reading List” on Remezcla
Got more to add to this list? Share in the comments below!
Photo Credit: © Shelly Prevost. Used under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-2.0) license.
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