From Maya Angelou to Ta-Nehisi Coates: Celebrating Black History and Literary Excellence

By The Rebirth Project

Photo by Oladimeji Odunsi on Unsplash

Happy Black History Month! This year we’ve got an extra day to celebrate due to the leap year, and we from the Rebirth Project want to share a list of UMass, and our own members’, favorite Black authors for your year-round reading lists. Ranging from classics to contemporary literature, our list is full of novels, poems, and essays from centuries of incredible authors. 

Taking a moment to recognize historically significant writers, here is a compilation of some older books you should add to your bookshelves!

Maya Angelou 

Popular works: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Still I Rise

What we recommend: Phenomenal Woman 

James Baldwin

Popular works: A Raisin in the Sun, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Sonny Blues

What we recommend: If Beale Street Could Talk, Giovanni’s Room, Nobody Knows My Name, Stranger in the Village

Countee Cullen 

Popular works: Heritage, A Brown Girl Dead, Incident

What we recommend: For Amy Lowell, Fruit of the Flower, Any Human to Another

bell hooks

Popular works: All About Love: New Visions, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Teaching to Transgress

What we recommend: Communion: The Female Search of Love, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, A Woman’s Mourning Song, Appalachian Elegy 

Langston Hughes

Popular works: The Weary Woes, The Ways of White Folks, Simple (a series of books)

What we recommend: Mother to Son, The Big Sea, Dream Variations

Toni Morrison 

Popular works: The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz, A Mercy

What we recommend: The Nobel Lecture in Literature, Five poems (a collection)

Interested in Black history and theory? Check out these essays:

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin 

On Being Young– a Woman– and Colored by Marita Bonner

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom 

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain by Langston Hughes

Who Will Pay Reparations for My Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

For our poets and poetry lovers, below are collections and individuals we from Rebirth love! 

Collections from Elizabeth Acevedo

Clap When You Land 

The Poet X

Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Lucille Clifton

Golden Apple of the Sun by Teju Cole

Golden Ax by Rio Cortez

Collections from Vievee Francis 

The Shared World

Another Antipastoral 

Forest Priveal 

When Angels Speak of Love by bell hooks

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam

March being Women’s History Month, this section includes some of our favorite Black feminists.

The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou

Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxanne Gay

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Ripe: Essays by Negesti Kaudo 

Zami: the New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

Sula by Toni Morrison 

Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Last but not least, here are just good books to read.

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

The Crossover by Kwame Alexander 

Many Thousands Gone by Ira Berlin

Books by Octavia Butler

Kindred

Conversations with Octavia Butler

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Drinking from Graveyard Wells by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu 

If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson

Books by Ibi Zoboi 

Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America 

American Street

And don’t forget, it’s important to read about Black history or history that might not be yours, year-round. Support BIPOC authors anytime you can. We wish you all happy reading! 🙂

LGBTQIA+ Art Showcase and Performance Open Mic-A Space of Expression and Support

by Cynthia Ntinunu

On Tuesday Mar. 20, the Stonewall Center of the University of Massachusetts Amherst hosted a LGBTQIA+ Art Showcase and Open Mic night. Held in Bartlett Hall, the event was broken up into two parts.

The night started off with snacks and a gallery walk. The gallery featured over 15 artists with art pieces ranging from paintings, embroidery, photography, knitting, and more. People were able to walk through and admire the work that artists created as a rotation of chill music, like Solange’s latest album When I Get Home, played in the background.

Embroidery pieces by Antonia Lynch(Cynthia Ntinunu/Rebirth Project)

UMass printmaking professor uses her art and teaching to showcase her journey as an Afro-Cuban migrant growing up in America

By Isha Mahajan

Juana Valdes, printmaking professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, acknowledges that students and faculty of color deserve a platform and a community that makes them comfortable and creates a space where students can get together to share ideas and beliefs.

“Often times, there is not enough importance put to these situations and these issues are not addressed as quickly as they need to be addressed,” Valdes said.

Valdes recalls gravitating towards making art as a junior in high school, when she was put in various creative classes. She now sees it as an opportunity to express her perception of the world.

“As a woman, as a woman of color and as an immigrant, I feel that I’m at an intersection of a lot of discriminations and push-backs of my ideas and beliefs, so I have decided to use my work as a vehicle to communicate what it’s likes to be in my position.”

“REFLECT/RESPOND: A Limón Dance Legacy Concert” (photos)

by Cynthia Ntinunu

Reflect/Respond: A Limón Dance Legacy Concert, which fused dance and spoken word, was held in the University of Massachusetts Amherst Fine Arts Center Concert Hall on Friday, Jan. 25.

The event captivated audience members with the dancers’ leaps, turns, and intricate dance moves. Not only did the dancing impact the viewers but a powerful message on love being love no matter who it is, took over the latter half of the performance.

The dancer in the background leaps high as the dancer in the foreground strikes a pose on the stage.(Cynthia Ntinunu/UMass Amherst)

LOST MESSAGES BETWEEN EARTH AND MARS

By Ariya Sonethavy

I’ve always romanticized the idea of space, and the escapism that tends to come with depression. I remember reading an article a while ago about a new planet in our solar system. Quite possibly, my own lack of stability with stress from my first semester of college is the result of some astral changes happening right now in this galaxy, and I’m not just talking about the usual Mercury retrograde. There are infinite ways to measure the ambiguity of growing up and constantly feeling like you’re floating in a liminal space, and for me, collaging was the perfect medium.