UK-books: Camille Dungy's Necessary New Books by Black Writers

Monday, 5 February 2018

Camille Dungy's Necessary New Books by Black Writers

<spoiler> Black History Month coverage is sponsored by One World Books. </spoiler>

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, which is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade. She also edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Here Dungy recommends "necessary new books by young(ish) black writers."

When I think of the bookshelves of my youth, it seems they were filled with classics from times long past. Hardbound books with yellowed pages. Paperbacks with the covers creased or torn. But when they first appeared on those shelves, the books must have been bold new revelations, written by my parents’ and grandparents’ peers.

Gwendolyn Brooks, whose A Street in Bronzeville I remember borrowing from my grandparents’ house, was only a year older than my grandmother and lived in the same city at the same time. I remember how excited my mother was to buy her copy of Alice Walker’s A Color Purple. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to me that my mother and Alice Walker are nearly the same age, but when Octavia Butler’s prescient Parable of the Sower was published, I recognized immediately that, just like me, the book’s main character was 19. All the timelessly necessary literature must, at one time, have been new, written by vibrant young(ish) writers with their pulse on the needs of their times.

Here are some necessary new books by young(ish) black writers. I trust my daughter will one day discover these on my shelves and recognize their wonder. I trust she will love them at that future date as much as I love them right now.

Looking for your next novel? Dive into the heart-wrenchingly relevant An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. A tale of what might become of black love and black excellence in these times of mass incarceration, her fourth novel is one of the best I’ve read in years. And don’t miss What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, a debut rich in its explorations of migration, identity, loss, and love.

Are short stories your thing? Consider Desiree Cooper’s collection of taut flash fiction, Know the Mother. A journalist by training, Cooper efficiently delivers all that’s needed to move a reader. Or read Rion Amilcar Scott’s Insurrections: Stories. I stayed up late into the night devouring these richly drawn stories about a fictional but brightly rendered town.

Poetry was my first passion and remains my dear, great love, so it will be impossible for me to name all the recent books by young(ish) black writers that recently moved me.

Here are three: Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches made me burn my dinner because just after I put on a pot, I picked up her book and couldn’t put it down. In Derrick Austin’s Trouble the Water, every poem is songful, devotional, and joyful. He’s got a stellar sestina, where every line ends in the word “black,” and a really good villanelle, too. In the same way he fluently represents received forms, he speaks with urgency to the here and now. It’s this sort of ability to swivel between our deep history and a bright vision of our future that makes me include Simulacra, the debut collection by Yale Younger Prize-winning poet Airea D. Matthews on this list.

Though it’s hard to narrow down my choices in nonfiction, I can tell you that I put down Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit and instantly wanted to pick it up again. The intelligence and expansiveness of this book of essays astounded me. Reading J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature felt like entering a conversation with an old friend, and I was both hungry and satiated reading Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South.

Let me not end this without mentioning a book that puts into focus so much of what is on my mind these days. With When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors has published an indispensable declaration for our times.

You should read these books. You’ll be grateful you did.

Be sure to add Camille T. Dungy's Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History to your Want to Read shelf.