Black Literary Voices Matter Now More Than Ever: A Love Letter to Our Literary Ancestors
Every February, we celebrate Black History Month. And every February, I’m reminded that Black history isn’t just history—it’s nourishment and strength for the present. It’s urgent. It’s now.
Nowhere is this truer than in literature.
Right now, across the United States, school boards are banning books by Black authors. Publishers are reconsidering diversity initiatives. The idea of “DEI” has become a political weapon. And yet Black writers keep writing. Black stories keep demanding to be told.
We’ve always written in the face of opposition and silencing. We’ve always created despite the systems set up to overlook, handicap, and ignore us.
This month, as I try to do every year, I want to invite you into the rich, radical, beautiful legacy of Black literature. Not as a distant history lesson but as a living tradition we’re all part of—whether as writers or readers, whether Black or not.
Black literary voices matter as they always have. And they matter more than ever right now.
The Lineage We Inherit
While Black writing and storytelling goes back to the earliest days of our human existence—from oral traditions and griots to hieroglyphs on ancient walls to reed pens on papyrus—Black American literature was forged from audacious hope and a deep longing for freedom while in bondage.
Slave narratives—written by people who were legally considered property, who risked death to learn to read and write—form the foundation of our literary tradition. Frederick Douglass. Harriet Jacobs. Olaudah Equiano. These writers didn’t just tell their stories. They argued for their own humanity in a country that denied it.
Their pens were weapons. Their words were evidence.
From there, the tradition grew:
Phillis Wheatley, enslaved at seven, publishing poetry at twenty in 1773
Frances E. W. Harper, suffragist, poet, and novelist, who in 1892 published, Iola Leroy, one of the first novels by an African American woman
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s—Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay creating a Black cultural explosion
Richard Wright and James Baldwin writing in exile because America was too dangerous for Black truth-tellers
Larry Neal, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, Ishmael Reed, and other poets, playwrights, and novelists of the Black Arts Movement whose writing focused on Black pride, aesthetics, and political expression
Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker claiming Nobel Prizes and Pulitzer Prizes
Octavia Butler imagining Black futures in science fiction
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, Brit Bennett continuing the work today
This is not a marginal literary tradition. This is not adjacent to the American literary canon. This is American literature at its finest—complex, powerful, necessary.
And it exists because generation after generation of Black writers refused to be silent.
More Than Books
When you read a book by a Black author, you’re not just reading a story. You’re experience and, if you choose, inheriting a legacy of resistance.
You’re inheriting:
The courage to write when writing was illegal. In the antebellum South, teaching an enslaved person to read was a crime. Black people wrote anyway—in secret, at night, at risk of their lives.
The refusal to let others tell our stories. For centuries, white writers defined Black characters, Black experiences, Black humanity. Black writers said: No. We will tell it ourselves.
The insistence that our lives are literature-worthy. Not tragic case studies. Not sociological problems. But full human lives worthy of poetry, novels, plays, essays.
The innovation of form and language. Black writers didn’t just copy or recast European literary traditions. They created new ones—blues poetry, jazz prose, code-switching narratives, Afrofuturism.
When Toni Morrison wrote, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” she was speaking from this lineage.
Black writers have always had to write the books we wanted to read.
Why It Matters Right Now
Let me be blunt: literary expression by folks with diverse backgrounds is under attack.
According to PEN America, of the books banned in schools during the 2023-2024 school year, 25 percent include LGBTQ+ people or characters, and 36 percent featured people or characters of color. Drilling down further, the report revealed that 44 percent of banned history and biography titles feature people of color. (Publishers Weekly)
Books by Black authors that are being challenged or removed from schools include:
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give
Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X
These aren’t obscure books. These are American classics. These are books that have shaped how millions of people, including me, understand race, identity, justice, and humanity.
And they’re being banned because they make some people uncomfortable.
Here’s what’s true: Discomfort is not always harm. Sometimes discomfort is growth.
Black literature makes some people uncomfortable because it renders a fuller picture of America’s history and present reality that are hard to hear. It challenges myths. It complicates narratives many wish were true. It cancels the single-story trap and refuses to make white comfort the center.
That discomfort is exactly why we need these books.
The Invitation
This Black History Month, I’m inviting you to do more than celebrate. I’m inviting you to immerse.
Read Black authors—not just during February but all year long. Not just the “safe” ones or the “classic” ones. Read widely. Read contemporary voices. Read genres you don’t usually read.
From my library to yours, here’s a starter list if you need one (note: it will lean quite a bit more toward nonfiction—it’s my heart):
Classic/Foundational
Frederick Douglass – What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Toni Morrison – The Origin of Others, Beloved
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son
Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man
Contemporary Fiction
Colson Whitehead – The Underground Railroad
Percival Everett – James, Erasure
Speculative/Genre
Octavia Butler - Kindred, Parable of the Sower
Nonfiction
Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me
Nicole Hannah Jones – The 1619 Project
Isabel Wilkerson – The Warmth of Other Suns, Caste
James H. Cone – The Cross and the Lynching Tree
Jemar Tisby – The Color of Compromise
Poetry
Patricia Smith – The Intentions of Thunder
Langston Hughes – The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Maya Angelou – The Complete Poetry
Read. Share. Teach. Resist erasure by reading banned books. Support Black authors by buying their books, leaving reviews, recommending them.
And if you’re a writer—especially if you’re a Black writer—know this: Your voice is part of this continuing a legacy of brilliance.
There are more stories to tell, perspectives to share, futures to imagine, and truths to speak than pens to write. You can never run out of good and important things to write.
So this month, let’s celebrate. Let’s read. Let’s write. Let’s remember that Black literary voices are not simple a niche, a trend, or a quota to meet.
They are essential, brilliant, and they are ours.
Who is one Black author who changed how you see the world? Tell me in the comments. I want to know whose words moved you.
Looking to develop your own voice as a writer? Start with a compelling hook that captures your unique perspective. Download my free Book Hook Cheat Sheet to learn the 4-part framework.