Books for Juneteenth

By Coll Rowe | June 7 2024 | LiteratureHistorySociology

Juneteenth, which is recognized on June 19th each year, celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. We are highlighting books from Black writers that provide insight into the rich complexity of the Black experience through history, memoir, literature, and poetry.

Find our full collection of Juneteenth titles here.

A New Origin Story
9780593230596

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction • Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction • The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together essays, poems, and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.

$25.00 US
Jun 04, 2024
Paperback
624 Pages
One World

9780143106708

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.

$18.00 US
Jul 31, 2012
Paperback
304 Pages
Penguin Classics

Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations
9780307277053

In her groundbreaking book, My Face Is Black Is True, historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the forgotten life of Callie House (1861–1928), a once enslaved person, widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five who, seventy years before the civil rights movement, headed a demand for reparations.

$16.95 US
Oct 10, 2006
Paperback
336 Pages
Vintage

The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
9780807067147
A groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America.
$18.95 US
Dec 26, 2017
Paperback
280 Pages
Beacon Press

9780143107309
An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials.
$14.00 US
Jan 28, 2014
Paperback
224 Pages
Penguin Classics

An Intimate History of Black Feminism
9780593243336

Across 11 original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad.

$30.00 US
Jan 23, 2024
Hardcover
368 Pages
Random House

9780593314616

Juneteenth is a brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise novel. This edition includes a new introduction by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson.

$17.00 US
May 18, 2021
Paperback
416 Pages
Vintage

A Library of America Anthology
9781598536669
A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present
$45.00 US
Oct 20, 2020
Hardcover
1170 Pages
Library of America

Written by Herself
9780140437959
One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in America
$15.00 US
Jul 01, 2000
Paperback
320 Pages
Penguin Classics

On Personhood, Race, and Origin
9780593448663

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction • The Black Period disrupts the myths of America’s origins through Hafizah Augustus Geter’s experiences as the queer Nigerian-born daughter of a Muslim Nigerian woman and a Black American man from a Southern Baptist family in Jim Crow Alabama.

$20.00 US
Sep 26, 2023
Paperback
448 Pages
Random House Trade Paperbacks

Imagining a Life
9780385721776
From the award-winning novelist and biographer Beverly Lowry comes an astonishing re-imagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman.
$18.95 US
Jun 10, 2008
Paperback
432 Pages
Anchor

9780807001998
A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country
$17.00 US
Mar 16, 2021
Paperback
296 Pages
Beacon Press