This month we’re featuring compelling stories centering on the experiences of different Black women. These stories include a brilliant lawyer struggling with childhood trauma, the biographies of Black women in music, an enslaved African woman in the little-discussed Puerto Rican Atlantic slave trade, a daughter of Nigerian immigrants processing family secrets, and a Black nurse in 1970s Alabama.

Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson

Publicly, Vivian is a success story. She is known as a brilliant lawyer advocating for patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian struggles with the memories and effects of her bad childhood plus the stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America.

She self-medicates with dating, dieting, dark humor, and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, and she finds herself alone in new, terrifying ways. Without Jane, she begins to unravel. Will Vivian find a way to repair what matters most to her?

 

 

 

Shine Bright: a very personal history of Black women in Pop by Danyel Smith

Shine Bright combines memoir, criticism, and biography to place Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop. As a music fan, essayist, editor, and podcast host, Smith has been living and writing this history since her days as a latchkey kid listening to “Midnight Train to Georgia” on the family stereo.

The narrative begins with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who sang her poems moving on to the stories of Mahalia Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and more. This book is an ode to musical masters whose genius contributions are hidden in plain sight.

 

A Woman of Endurance by Dhalma Llanos-Figueroa

Set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican plantation society, this novel follows Pola, a profoundly spiritual, enslaved African woman captured and sold as a breeder. The babies Pola births are taken from her as soon as they are born. She loses the faith that has guided her, becoming embittered and defensive. The dehumanization almost destroys her. But this is not a novel of defeat. It is a story of survival, regeneration, and the reclamation of humanity.

Readers are invited to join Pola on her journey of healing. From the barbarous early days of her life, she moves on to receive compassion and support from a revitalizing new community. And she learns to embrace the many faces of love. This is a story of the triumph of the human spirit.

 

 

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

It’s 1973, and Civil Townsend is fresh out of nursing school and looking to make a difference in the African-American community in her new role at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in Montgomery, Alabama.

During her first week on the job, she meets her new patients, India and Erica. They’re pre-teens who have never even kissed a boy, but they’re poor and black. According to those in charge of their welfare benefits, that’s reason enough to place the girls on birth control. Civil is shocked to realize the situation and cultural machine that she’s now a part of, taking the girls and their family into her heart. But one day, she discovers a tragedy that will change all of their lives forever.

Hope and Glory by Jendella Benson (Book Cover)

When Glory Akindele returns to London from her glamorous L.A. life to mourn the sudden death of her father, she finds her close-knit family has fallen apart in her absence. Her brother, Victor, is in jail and won’t talk to her because she didn’t come home for his trial. Her older sister Faith, a once independent and ambitious young woman, seems to be focusing on molding the perfect suburban family. And their mother, Celeste, is headed towards a breakdown following the death of her husband and the incarceration of her son.

Glory decides to stay in London to try and bring her family back together, a tall order when her life isn’t going according to plan either. After a chance reunion with Julian, a man she knew in her teens, she gains the courage to begin questioning why her obsessively private Nigerian immigrant family is the way it is. But her examination reveals a massive secret that threatens to shatter her fragile family.