Black History Month books point the way
This week, Lee & Low Books released a survey on diversity in the publishing industry and found little had changed since 2015. Far from reflecting the demographics in this country, 76% of publishing staff, review journal staff and literary agents are white. About 7% are Asian/Pacific Islander, 6% Latino and 5% black.
“The people behind the books serve as gatekeepers, who can make a huge difference in determining which stories are amplified and which are shut out,” the report says. “If the people who work in publishing are not a diverse group, how can diverse voices truly be represented in its books?”
With that context in mind, to commemorate Black History Month — which begins on Saturday, Feb. 1 — I’ve asked several Bay Area authors to share books that they admire or that inspire them. Recommendations like these are a gift, books where we might gather ourselves and find a way forward.
Meron Hadero selected Lesley Nneka Arimah’s acclaimed debut short story collection, “What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky.”
For Hadero, every short story in the Nigerian American’s collection has “incredible impact, each lighting up the imagination — the experience stays with the reader, like an afterimage that survives a bright flash. Stories like these flex our creativity and get us to release assumptions so that we may enter worlds where rules and expectations shift as Arimah demonstrates her incredible range.” Hadero’s short stories have appeared in “The Best American Short Stories” and elsewhere.
“These stories ask us to stay open to the unexpected, and they deliver on their promise by surprising us at every turn,” said Hadero, a native of Ethiopia who immigrated to the United States as a child. “For all of these reasons, I find that it’s just the kind of reading for our unpredictable, complex times.”
Tonya M. Foster recommends M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong!” She said the book, which examines the 1781 massacre of 133 to 150 enslaved people who were thrown overboard on the orders of the British slave ship’s captain, “fundamentally changed my understanding of poetry, and of what poetry makes possible.”
“It is a remarkably moving and challenging work that calls on the reader to mourn what s/he cannot know, to mourn what is left out of conventional and official histories,” continued Foster, a professor at the California College of the Arts and author of “A Swarm of Bees in High Court.”
“Rather than a poetry that recounts what is remembered or recalled, ‘Zong!’ is an experience of being caught in the wake of life, of grief, of catastrophe, of official history, in the wake of language, and of life anyway,” she said. “The work attends to what is destroyed and disappeared by historical and official narratives by troubling the very language of the official story, and by troubling expectations for what a poem looks like.”
Lisa D. Gray told me that one of her favorite books this past year examines issues around incarceration and its impact on families: Anissa Gray’s “The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls.”
“I’m always intrigued by adult fiction told from the perspectives of children or young people, and this one does that quite well,” said Lisa D. Gray, who grew up in New Haven, Conn., and is at work on a novel, “Stolen Summer,” about 12 girls in 1963 Georgia, as well as a short story collection. “It also gives us a look into a diverse family with juicy backstories that continually connect us to and build on the theme or core idea of a novel.”
Gray (no relation to Anissa) — founder of Our Voices Our Stories SF, a literary event featuring female writers of color — became absorbed in the form this novel takes. “A thick slice of the story comes to us through letters, and who doesn’t love a good epistle?” she said. “I love stories like this, ones that stick to my ribs long after I’ve put the book down.”
Carla Walter finds fellowship with Jan Willis’ “Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey.”
“She makes me nod my head as she validates my experiences with difference due to skin color as real and prevalent,” said Walter, who writes about spirituality, sacred dance meditation and wellbeing.
The memoir recounts Willis’ exploration of Buddhist practices, travels to India and Tibet, and her experiences with white supremacy in segregated Alabama.
“Dr. Willis’ courage to venture, motivated by her dissatisfaction with injustice and pat spirituality, reinforces taking spiritual journeys as a pathway of resistance,” Walter said. “That’s not just for blacks to do, but the entire human race.”
“These stories ask us to stay open to the unexpected, and they deliver on their promise.”
Meron Hadero, on Lesley Nneka Arimah’s short story collection