Author |
Title |
| Apollo |
Concrete Candy (1996) |
| These six short stories, set in Oakland, CA, were published when the author was sixteen. |
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| Baldwin, James |
Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) |
| A teenager in Harlem struggles with his religious identity. |
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| Burgess, Barbara H. |
The Fred Field (1994) |
| Oren searches for his best friend's killer. |
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| Butler, Octavia |
Kindred (1979) |
| A contemporary African American woman finds herself transported to a pre-Civil War plantation. |
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| Campbell, Bebe Moore |
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) |
| Set in rural Mississippi, beginning in the 1950's |
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| Cary, Lorene |
Price of a Child (1995) |
| In 1855, Ginnie, a Virginia slave, becomes free woman Mercer Gray. But to do so, she must abandon her youngest child. |
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|
| Clair, Maxine |
Rattlebone (1995) |
| In this set of interconnected short stories, readers follow Rennie's growth from childhood to adulthood. |
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|
| Curtis, Christopher |
Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 (1995) |
| An African American family from Flint, Michigan, visit Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights struggle. |
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| Gaines, Ernest |
A Gathering of Old Men (1983) |
| Louisiana in the 1950's is the scene for this story of murder and defense. |
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| Himes, Chester |
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) |
| Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones pursue a crooked preacher. |
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| Johnson, Charles |
Middle Passage (1985) |
| In 1830, a free man finds himself on a slave ship bound for Africa. |
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|
| Lattany, Kristin H. |
Kinfolks (1997) |
| Everybody wants to find Professor Green: both women who bore his children and the children who have only recently learned they are brother and sister. |
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|
| Marshall, Paule |
Brownstones, Brown Girl (1959) |
| A family from Barbados moves to Brooklyn during the Great Depression. |
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| Morrison, Toni |
The Bluest Eye (1969) |
| The first novel by the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. |
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| Mosley, Walter |
Gone Fishin' (1997) |
| Easy Rawlings' younger days. For older readers. |
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| Mowry, Jess |
Babylon Boyz (1997) |
| On the grimy streets of "Babylon," Pook and Dante are faced with a difficult decision. |
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| Myers, Walter Dean |
Fallen Angels (1989) |
| Private Richie Perry does a tour in Vietnam. |
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| Myers, Walter Dean |
Slam (1997) |
| Sixteen year old "Slam" Harris thinks his basketball talent will get him out of the inner city, but his coach sees things differently. |
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|
| Petry, Ann |
The Street (1946) |
| In Harlem in the 1940's, a mother struggles to raise her son alone. |
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| Sanders, Dori |
Clover (1990) |
| Ten year old Clover winds up with a white stepmother she barely knows. |
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|
| Sinclair, April |
Coffee Will Make You Black (1994) |
| The story of Stevie, who comes of age in Chicago during the late sixties. |
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| Williams-Garcia, Rita |
Like Sisters on the Homefront (1995) |
| After an abortion, a 14 year old girl is sent south to stay with her country cousin. |
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|
| Woodson, Jacqueline (editor) |
A Way Out of No Way (1997) |
| This collection of stories and poems about coming of age includes work by Anna Deavere Smith, Randall Kenan, June Jordan, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Nikki Giovanni, and Jamaica Kincaid. |