Read Books by Femmes of Color: A List

by Tara Miller
AFO Staff

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One year ago, we published Part II of our “Read Women of Color Booklist.” Parts I and II of the list were curated through informal conversations and calls for participation from our staff’s community--and the response was overwhelming.

It’s not hard to figure out why. People of color, femmes, nonbinary folks, and queer folks are incredible writers. We write beautiful, moving, empowering, challenging, complex, sexy, hilarious, and deeply brilliant novels, nonfiction, poetry, and more.

And yet, books by femmes of color are too often underrepresented in bookstores, libraries, book lists, and bookshelves lining the walls of private homes.

I chose to rename this third iteration of book lists to “Read Books by Femmes of Color” in an effort to de-center cis folks from narratives of womanhood. This is the continuation of an ongoing effort to celebrate the work of all femmes of color, including trans and GNC femmes..

I hope to create these lists more often and for as long as femmes of color keep writing brilliant books, which will be forever.  

If you love any books by femmes of color that are not included in any of our published lists and want to share their incredible work with our community, please let us know by sending your suggestions here.


***This list is arranged in random order and does not reflect any form of ranking***

Homegoing
​by Yaa Gyasi

“Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.”
​
-From the publisher

Dear Baba
​by Melika Belhaj and Ananas Mustafa

“Dear Baba, is the first zine from Melika Belhaj & Ananas Mustafa's project Ya Banat, The Daughters.

Ya Banat is a storytelling project reframing narratives of the North African Diaspora. Dear Baba, is a series of open letters written to their respective fathers.”
​
-From the authors’ website

Interpreter of Maladies
​by Jhumpa Lahiri

“The characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.”
​
-From the publisher

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
​by ZZ Packer

“Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decides where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.”

​-From the publisher

Simulacra
​by Airea D Matthews

“'Tell me how to live so many lives at once ...'
Fowzi, who beats everyone at dominoes; Ibtisam, who wanted to be a doctor; Abu Mahmoud, who knows every eggplant and peach in his West Bank garden; mysterious Uncle Mohammed, who moved to the mountain; a girl in a red sweater dangling a book bag; children in velvet dresses who haunt the candy bowl at the party; Baba Kamalyari, age 71; Mr. Dajani and his swans; Sitti Khadra, who never lost her peace inside.

Maybe they have something to tell us.

Naomi Shihab Nye has been writing about being Arab-American, about Jerusalem, about the West Bank, about family all her life. These new and collected poems of the Middle East -- sixty in all -- appear together here for the first time.”
 
-From the publisher

“Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication.”
​
-From the publisher

19 Varieties of Gazelle
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Salt
by Nayyirah Whaeed

“Salt is a journey through warmth and sharpness. This collection of poetry explores the realities of multiple identities, language, diasporic life & pain, the self, community, healing, celebration, and love.”
​
-From the author

Dirty River
by Leah Lakshmi Piepzsna Samarasinha

“This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."
​
-From the publisher

The Summer We Got Free
by Mia McKenzie

“At one time a wild young girl and a brilliant artist, Ava Delaney changes dramatically after a violent event that rocks her entire family. Once loved and respected in their community and in their church, they are ostracized by their neighbors, led by their church leader, and a seventeen-year feud between the Delaneys and the church ensues. Ava and her family are displaced from the community even as they continue to live within it, trapped inside their creaky, shadowy old house. When a mysterious woman arrives unexpectedly for a visit, her presence stirs up the past and ghosts and other restless things begin to emerge. And something is reignited in Ava: the indifferent woman she has become begins to give way to the wild girl, and the passionate artist, she used to be. But not without a struggle that threatens her well-being and, ultimately, her life.”

-From the publisher

The Necessary Hunger
by Nina Revoyr

“As a star basketball player in her last year of high school, Nancy Takahiro’s life is about to change forever. Facing the fear of leaving home and wondering where her skill will take her, Nancy is not prepared for the complications that arise when she meets Raina Webber, a devoted, ferocious athlete, whose love of basketball is matched only by her talent for it.”

-From the publisher

In Her I Am
by Chrystos

“Lesbian erotic writing from tenderly seductive to outrageous, raw, stirring images, these are poems of astonishing intensity, vital and unforgettable. This is an amazing collection of erotic pleasures.”
​
-From Good Reads

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison

“Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.”

-From the publisher

even this page is white
by Vivek Shraya

“Vivek Shraya’s debut collection of poetry, even this page is white, is a bold, timely and personal interrogation of skin—its origins, functions and limitations. Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible and undeniable.”

-From the author’s website

All About Love
by bell hooks

“The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness.”

-From the publisher

Sympotomatic
by Danzy Senna

“A young woman moves to New York City for what promises to be a dream job. Displaced, she feels unsure of her fit in the world. Then comes a look of recognition, a gesture of friendship from an older woman named Greta who shares the same difficult-to-place color of skin. On common ground, a tenuous alliance grows between two women in racial limbo. So too, does the older woman's unnerving obsession, leading to a collision of two lives spiraling out of control. A beautifully written novel, at once suspenseful, erotic, and tantalizingly clever, Symptomatic is a groundbreaking contribution to the literature of racial identity.”

-From the publisher

Con Los Dos Manos / With Both Hands
by Emily Prado

“A bilingual zine by Portland-based Chicana writer, Emilly Prado, Con Las Dos Manos/With Both Hands was completed during the month of January 2017 spent as an artist-in-residence in my parents' home state of Michoacan, Mexico.

This zine explores the landscape of Mexico in relation to familial history and is comprised of three parts: Diez/Ten, Para Las Marias/For the Marias, and La Nopalito/El Nopalito. Each section is accompanied by a digital illustration and photograph as well.”

-From the author’s website

The Color Purple
by Alice Walker

“Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.”

Citizen: An American Lyric 
by Claudia Rankine

“Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society.”

-From the publisher

In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez

“In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters―Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé―speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.”
​
-From the publisher

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston

“One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.”
​
-From the publisher