Black History Month, day 16
You write today’s post: who’s your favorite black writer?
I asked my wife and she didn’t hesitate: “James Baldwin.” I thought Octavia Butler would have given him a run for his money, since Joy is a big sci-fi reader and loves Butler.
Both of those would be high on my list, as is August Wilson, but I’ll say Toni Morrison for the way she gets inside so many different kinds of people in creating her characters.
Over to you.
(ETA: Thanks, Thea. I’d originally written “Olivia Butler,” may OB’s spirit forgive me!)
Sermons in Stones 
18 comments
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February 16, 2012 at 9:40 am
Jeannie Owen
Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison–I couldn’t pick just one.
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February 16, 2012 at 9:44 am
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Wow, that took you about 5 seconds!
What do you love about these three?
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February 16, 2012 at 9:47 am
Theadora Davitt-Cornyn
Octavia Butler?
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February 16, 2012 at 9:51 am
Linda
Audre Lorde is my very favourite. Her truth telling and honest and depth just touch me every time. I go back to her words again and again and again.
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March 6, 2012 at 11:25 am
Kaz
Read a bunch of Lorde essays senior year and occasionally look through them again. They’re very dense and some people don’t have enough of outside help to digest them, but they are stark, forlorn, stunningly beautiful works of encapsulating an idea in a few pages.
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February 16, 2012 at 9:53 am
Syd
Zora Neale Hurston. But also Malcolm X-with-help-from-Alex-Haley.
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February 16, 2012 at 10:12 am
Violet
Samuel R. Delaney, a great sci-fi writer. Try Dhalgren, or Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. The characters and stories are wonderfully complex.
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February 16, 2012 at 10:16 am
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Thanks for the recommendation–I’m always looking for new (to me) scifi writers, and I haven’t read his stuff.
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February 16, 2012 at 11:18 am
sorrygnat
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker’s Third Life of Grange Copeland,Toni Cade Cambara – Gorilla My Love, incredible, Paule Marshall, Brownstone Girl,Gloria Naylor, Women of Brewster Place, Richard Wright, Black Boy and American Hunger (really my first major black writer), Manchild in the Promised Land, Claude Brown, or M. Claude Brown, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Morrison’s Sula is exquisite, so many others. I just got up; i can’t keep a favorite writer to just one name-the list is constantly in expansion, an unfolding scroll.
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February 16, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Linda, Syd: I’d love to hear more about why, and what books. I have never read all of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, can you believe it?
Sorrygnat: Paule Marshall’s Praise Song for the Widow was on the shelf in a friend’s house a few years ago–it’s always so intriguing to see other people’s books, and I grabbed this one. Read it immediately, loved it, keep forgetting to go read her others. Thanks for the reminder. Sula is my favorite of the Morrison I’ve read. Care to say more about why these are on your scroll?
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February 17, 2012 at 12:13 am
sorrygnat
i forgot to put Malcolm X; plus many more, I’m sure!
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February 17, 2012 at 8:46 am
Theadora Davitt-Cornyn
I may have missed it ~ has Alex Haley already been noted for the Autobiography of Malcolm X, as well as ROOTS and QUEEN?
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February 17, 2012 at 8:32 am
David Zucker
Definitely James Baldwin, as essayist more than fiction writer, his impressive Go Tell it on the Mountain being a favorite, however. His essays are superb in style, Henry Jamesian, and placing him on my all american, not just African American, list.
And close behind, August Wilson, hugely for his epic series in drama, all of which premiered at Yale Repertory Theater, where I met and talked to him birefly.
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February 17, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Karen
:: In the early 1980s, virtually all the fiction I read was by black women. So many brilliant voices heard nationally for the first time! –a result, I think, of both the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement. Alice Walker not only gave us The Color Purple, but also rescued Zora Neal Hurston from obscurity. Zora was part of the Harlem Renaissance, too, but got little support and lots of criticism from the men in that movement. Toni Morrison’s Beloved was riveting–I cried through the whole book. What slavery does to people!
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February 17, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
I still have not read Beloved, though I loved Tar Baby, The Bluest Eye, Sula, A Mercy . . . (despite finding the ending of the last more an anti-climax than the stunning revelation other readers have found it. It broke my heart but it was still like reading the climax of a mystery when one has figured out whodunnit a hundred pages earlier). I’ve been holding out for the audio version of Beloved (Morrison herself reads well), but I often forget to look for it at the library.
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March 6, 2012 at 11:23 am
Kaz
I can’t in honesty say Toni Morrison since I’ve only read one book in its entirety (Sula, and I thought that was a pretty good introduction to her). The Bluest Eye I just couldn’t really finish, which I guess is good on her for being that good at ethos and pathos.
I’ll go with the Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X. Read it in 11th grade, changed my life. Took Literature of Revolution in 12th, read it again, changed it again.
Race Matters by West is also up there.
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March 6, 2012 at 11:14 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Literature of Revolution! I would love to see that reading list.
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March 19, 2012 at 7:38 am
AJ Mackenzie (@tyrantswine)
Autobiography of Malcolm-X
Race Matters by West
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop by Chang
Das Kapital
Audrey Lorde, selected essays
Selected music (de la Soul, Ice Cube, Billie Holiday)
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