Women’s HerStory Month & Beyond: Book Releases for Your Reading List
What are you reading this March? Here’s my curated list of books that are feeding our collective this month. I’m so proud to include Spoken Black Girl Magazine Issue 5 Motherhood contributors Michele Evans and Martheaus Perkins on this list of new books! Please go support their work. Tell them Spoken Black Girl sent you! Our Author Spotlight comes from our ongoing database of books by Black women authors. You can submit your book here for consideration in my next round up.
If you like a book, be sure to shop my curated list on Bookshop.org and use code: BSO15 at checkout for 15% off your book!
Michele Evans, the author of the poetry collection purl, returns with februaries-a chapbook of poems inspired by her participation in the National African American Read-In (AARI) founded by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Chronicling and preserving the achievements and contributions of ancestors Harriet Tubman, Billie Holiday, Maya Angelou, and others, februaries, a museum constructed of poignant poems diverse in form, reminds readers: Black History is American History, and it should be "celebrated, appreciated, and narrated" well beyond the annual 28-day observance.
Inspired by the literary tradition established by an assembly of living legends from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, such as Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin and E. Ethelbert Miller, Evans, a fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.) and English teacher, revisits significant and complicated moments from America's past to spark necessary and challenging conversations about the future of humanity.
Carried within Martheaus Perkins' The Grace of Black Mothers are the many howls of lost children and their martyrized mothers. This debut collection brings a lyrical reckoning on behalf of dismembered dreams by boldly finding grace through our Black mothers, aunties, and grannies. The work invites the reader into a yard where "whisper-thin soul-jazz drips over America" to flip through a Nile-long family album. Mamie Till-Mobley, Sybrina Fulton, Harriet Tubman, and the author's own mothers guide us as we "wander streets like cartographers of poverty" and hold our "promises to come home." Perkins shows his craft by shapeshifting through fighting game menus, optometry charts, screenplays, pirate codes, social media threads, and forms that embody dreams themselves. The Grace of Black Mothers is a collection drenched in complexity and nuance: homemade heroes and villains, justice and fabrication, wit and risk, resurrection and erasure.
With style and straight talk, musician and changemaker Lachi flips disability and neurodivergence into an empowering identity, a cultural movement, and an innovation engine
What if the most taboo parts of our identity—the parts we’re taught to mask—are exactly the ones that hold our greatest power? Lachi is an award-winning singer and leader who awakens the world to this truth: Disability has long shaped our culture and is an identity worth brazenly reclaiming. In this book, Lachi reveals why dropping the stigma is the ultimate glow-up, and inspires readers to celebrate the boldest parts of themselves.
I Identify as Blind pulses with energy. Through magnetic storytelling and pop-culture deep dives, Lachi challenges mainstream views on disability and neurodivergence with humor and heart. Because visionaries with disabilities have always driven progress. The book features trailblazing figures like Senator Tammy Duckworth, Breaking Bad star RJ Mitte, Microsoft executive Jenny Lay-Flurrie, and so many more. Lachi even takes readers behind the scenes at Coldplay concerts, since after Chris Martin developed tinnitus, he transformed his concerts into some of the most accessible in the world. Each story reframes disability not as a deficit but as a wellspring of collective strength. And inventions created for people with disabilities benefit everyone—from audiobooks to curb cuts to the internet. (Vint Cerf helped develop the first commercial email service, because he had trouble communicating by phone.)
With punchy humor and radical honesty, Lachi dismantles stereotypes and builds a new narrative of Disability identity. I Identify as Blind is just what the world needs right now: an invitation to a cultural movement that celebrates disabilities as a source of power and pride.
A personal meditation on, examination of, and tribute to Black single motherhood, unapologetically told through poignant essays and candid interviews by a celebrated cultural critic
“Jamilah Lemieux is one of the most important feminist writers of the twenty-first century.”—Brittney Cooper
With her signature candid, humorous, and sometimes biting takes, Jamilah Lemieux suffers no fools while also courageously revealing the scars of her own parenting journey and search for self-acceptance in a world that hates “baby mamas.” With a particular verve and relatability—honed in her many years among Black Twitter’s most prominent voices—Lemieux centers the complex reality of Black single motherhood: uncertainty and fierceness alike.
Black. Single. Mother. combines riveting personal essays, infused with whip-smart cultural and historical analysis, with twenty-one intimate first-person testimonies from a spectrum of Black single mothers. A long-overdue offering in celebration of the American matriarch most often maligned, Black. Single. Mother. sets out to inspire a new cultural and community dialogue about this powerful figure as one profoundly deserving of love, support, and respect.
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.
“Tayari Jones’s storytelling washed over me like a trip back home. . . . Kin is a masterpiece of a novel that will live with you long after you turn the last page.” —Oprah Winfrey
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
From a celebrated author, the thrilling sequel to The Parable of the Sower--a cautionary novel ahead of its time, perfect for fans of The Broken Earth trilogy.
In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction and ruin of everything she knew. Her peaceful community based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed, provides refuge for outcasts facing persecution after the election of an ultra-conservative president. Under his rule, Lauren's colony--a minority religious faction led by a young Black woman--becomes a target for the president's reign of terror and oppression.
Years later, Asha Vere reads the journals of a mother she never knew. As she searches for answers, she struggles to reconcile with the legacy of a mother caught between her duty to her chosen family and her calling to lead humankind into a better future.
From acclaimed author Terah Shelton Harris comes a poignant story of survival and redemption that questions what it means to stop existing and start living.
Leigh is the last of the Wildes. She knows this because she watched them all die.
Grief never truly fades and even as the tragedy haunts her, Leigh carries on, because survival is in her blood. So, when the transport bus taking her to prison careens off the road, killing everyone onboard except her, she does what's in her nature. She survives.
While searching for a place to hide, Leigh stumbles upon an unexpected sanctuary: a flower farm in rural Alabama tucked away from the world. What Leigh doesn't expect is the found family there who have built something from the wreckage of their own lives. Especially Jackson, the farm's owner, who sees through Leigh's defenses, offers her small moments of tenderness, encourages her to face her own tragedies. Slowly, Leigh finds peace with the hard pace and soft nature of the farm, taking comfort in the life blooming around her. Maybe she's not beyond redemption, not too broken for something good. And maybe, just maybe, Leigh starts to heal.
But the past isn't so easily buried.
No matter how far she runs, the truth of who she is and the ghosts of the Wildes follow. And when those secrets catch up to her, threatening everything she's come to love, Leigh will have to truly face what she can survive.
Unknowingly bitten by a deadly arachnid, Justice Reign suffers for several years and is thrust into a dark place. Upon repeated failed and troubling hospital visits, she embarks on a journey of self-learning and self-healing.
Except, all does not go as planned.
One health crisis lands Justice in the Intensive Care Unit. After being discharged from the hospital, Justice's health further deteriorates at home.
One man, a resident doctor, saves her life by acting on a hunch. Justice receives the proper medicine. But the damaging effects of a seven year long untreated disease wreaked havoc on her body, particularly her spine and nervous system.
Still unable to live a normal life, Justice steadily immerses herself in knowledge and awakens her healing forces within as she returns to the natural ways - the ancient ways of living and healing.
She emerges from that dark place as a sage, a healer, a storyteller.
"Rewilding the Nervous System: An Ancient Story; An Enchanted Memoir," is a lettered symphonic symphony.
This memoir - a testimony - is about resilience, perseverance and rebirth; and it greatly inspires us all to give our nervous system top priority, take immense responsibility for our own health, and rewild ourselves for all-around wellbeing.
Spoken Black Girl Issue 5 delves into the profound and often overlooked topic of Black Motherhood, presenting insightful viewpoints on the maternal mortality crisis and the formidable challenges that Black mothers encounter. This issue uplifts the joys and challenges of motherhood, highlighting issues that impact Black women the most, from fertility, maternal health, maternal mental health, birth stories, and depictions of motherhood's most enlightening moments to reflections on generational trauma and hope for generational healing.
Get 15% Off on Bookshop.org when you shop the SBG Book Club Women’s History Month Picks book list! Take 15% OFF* these select titles when you enter BSO15 at checkout, valid until April 1, 2026. *Discount off list prices, and excludes Ebooks. Bookshop.org is a better way to buy books online. Every purchase on Bookshop.org supports local, independent bookstores. Happy reading!
