Celebrating Powerful Works by Powerful Black Women

By Angela Haigler

“Black Women’s Wellness: Your I’ve Got This! Guide to Health, Sex & Phenomenal Living”

by Melody T. McCloud

Where can a Black woman go when she needs a comprehensive resource for her health and well-being? In addition to learning more from a doctor or other expert, she can now learn about issues of concern for her health in this groundbreaking guide geared to her special interests. The book explores the top five medical issues for Black women: heart disease, diabetes, cancers, HIV and maternal mortality. Other issues addressed are the effects of social stress and microaggressions on Black women’s health and gynecological conditions including fibroids, endometriosis and menopause.

“Side Notes from the Archivist: Poems”

by Anastacia-Reneé

Times like these call for voices like these and award-winning author and poet, Anastacia-Reneé has answered. This “funkadelic feminist” showcases her broad talents in a breathtaking assembly that is a wild combination of prose, images and feeling. These poems include the “youthful renditions of a Black girl coming of age in Philadelphia’s pre-funk ’80s” as well as the viewpoint of “black girl magic” through the lens of the “white gaze.”

“River Sing Me Home”

by Eleanor Shearer

Happy cheers are silenced by horrified screams when those enslaved on a Barbados planation learn the Emancipation Proclamation has freed them yet forced them to continue working for six more years as apprentices. For Rachel, those terms are unacceptable, and she escapes. Shearer catapults this mother into a search to find the five children she had been forced to give up. Eleanor Shearer’s debut novel radiates power, pain and elegance.

For middle grade readers

“She Persisted: Dorothy Height”

by Kelly Starling Lyons and Chelsea Clinton

“Butter: Novellas, Stories, and Fragments”

by Gayl Jones

Described as one of the best American novelists whose name you may not know, Gayl Jones is a literary powerhouse whose work always astounds, enrages, yet somehow also soothes. After writing her first novel in 1975 at the age of 25, Jones could also be called also the “Sade of literature.” Like the elusive and talented singer, Jones is also a legend who doesn’t like fanfare and is rarely interviewed. We’re not sure why she has decided to grace us with the presence of this forceful collection, but we’re oh so glad she did.

This chapter book series penned by Kelly Starling Lyons, with a forward by Chelsea Clinton was inspired by the #1 New York Time bestseller by Clinton and Alexandra Boiger, “She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World.” One of 27 total books in the series, Lyons has marked her career by writing books for young readers about the history of the African American experience. In this story, Height’s ground-breaking accomplishments are tailored for a middle grade audience. Height’s civil rights activism began after she joined the National Council of Negro Women when she was 25 years old. She went on to become the president of the organization, which she led for 40 years. P