  I’m thrilled to share this incredible (yet far from complete) list of books by Women of Color, crowdsourced through informal networks of family, friends, and colleagues. Some of these books are my recommendations and all time favorites, some I have never read or heard of but were recommended to me as crucial additions to this list. Please take your time reading through, add these to your must read lists, and pause at the anecdotes submitted by contributors about why some of these books hold special places in their hearts. As Jessica Osorio wrote to me after submitting a long list of her favorites (many of which I had never heard of): “Read books by women of color. Share them with your friends. Talk about them. Buy them from your local bookstore when you can. If they don’t have the book you’re looking for, ask your local bookstore to order a copy for you. It’s a great way to show bookstores, publishers, editors, and book reviewers that these stories matter and we want to see more of them.” We received an overwhelming number of suggestions, so this our first installment of the list. The next installment will be featured in our July issue. If you have additional books to recommend, please reach out to us through our submissions page. A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki  Viking Books “Her own name, Ruth, had functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life. The word ruth is derived from the Middle English rue, meaning remorse or regret. Ruth’s Japanese mother wasn’t thinking of the English etymology when she chose the name, nor did she intend to curse her daughter with it—Ruth was simply the name of an old family friend. But even so, Ruth often felt oppressed by the sense of her name, and not just in English. In Japanese, the name was equally problematic. Japanese people can’t pronounce the “r” or “th.” In Japanese, Ruth is either pronounced rutsu, meaning “roots,” or rusu meaning “not at home” or “absent.” - Excerpt from the book Bone, Yrsa Daley Ward  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform “intro: I am the tall dark stranger / those warnings prepared you for.” - Poem from the book Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker  Harcourt “It speaks so much to the fluidity of love and the conflict that brings to experiencing life as a woman and trying to have partners, mostly male, as well as being so beautifully written. I saw myself in all her women.” - Bati Alon The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros  Vintage “Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous – it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.” - From the cover Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis  Knopf “A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice.” - Excerpt from the cover Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson  Nancy Paulsen Books “Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.” - From the cover Bone, Fae Myenne Ng  Hachette Books “Fae Myenne Ng's luminous debut explores what it means to be a stranger in one's own family, a foreigner in one's own neighborhood--and whether it's possible to love a place that may never feel quite like home.” - Excerpt from the cover  Penguin Press “This tautly-paced coming of age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family.” - Excerpt from cover Oreo, Fran Ross  New Directions “A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City” - Excerpt from cover The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy  Random House “It is the first book I can remember thinking was truly beautiful. It brought together so many aspects of life framed by tragedy. It captured both the ephemeral and enduring aspects of relationships, family, history, and memory so much so that despite having little personal connection to either the events or the setting of the story, it was impossible not to relate.” - Haley Patoski Under the Udala Trees, Chinelo Okparanta  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt “Inspired by Nigeria’s folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls.” - Excerpt from the cover Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, Morgan Parker  Switchback Books "Honesty, says one of Morgan Parker's speakers, 'is uncomfortable and funny.' And how apt, how acrobatic and unflinching Parker is in bearing this thesis out. Her work roves the surfaces of our American lives—gathering up material from reality TV, from the many products we consume and are shaped by, from the sound of America in our mouths, and the racket of it in our ears. These poems are delightful in their playful ability to rake through our contemporary moment in search of all manner of riches, just as they are devastating in their ability to remind us of what we look like when nobody's watching, and of what the many things we don't—or can't—say add up to. OTHER PEOPLE'S COMFORT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT is hilarious and hard-hitting, and it ripples with energy, insight, and searing music." - Tracy K. Smith, Excerpt from back cover Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur  The Round House, Louise Erdrich  Harper “Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.” "Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality." - Excerpts from the book supplied by Izzy Jones Americanah, Chimimanda Adichie  Anchor “What I love about her writing is that she confronts the false stereotypes we have about Africa here in the USA. When newly immigrated Ifemelu asks her hairdresser why sage uses the word Africa instead of specifying Nigeria or Benin, she explains "you don't know America. You say Senegal and American people, they say, Where is that? My friend from Burkina Faso, they ask her, your country in Latin America?" She is confronting the idea that Americans are so ignorant to the fact that Africa is one of the most massive, ethnically diverse places in the world.” - Midori Samson Medical Apartheid, Harriet Washington  “Medical Apartheid is difficult to read, to say the least, especially for anyone who has any empathy for others and a hard time reading about graphic suffering. But it's not something most people want to know about or acknowledge--the fact that a lot medical breakthroughs came about because of doctors purchasing slaves and doing horrifying experiments on them. And that they were within their "legal rights" as slaves were considered property.” - M.J. McCreary The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat  Soho Press “It is 1937 and Amabelle Désir, a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, has built herself a life as the servant and companion of the wife of a wealthy colonel. She and Sebastien, a cane worker, are deeply in love and plan to marry. But Amabelle's world collapses when a wave of genocidal violence, driven by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, leads to the slaughter of Haitian workers. Amabelle and Sebastien are separated, and she desperately flees the tide of violence for a Haiti she barely remembers” - From the cover Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich  “How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.” - Excerpt from the book
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