Anti-Racist Resources
Literature At Pacific
Ebooks are available at any time (limits on simultaneous users may apply, as indicated below).
You can find the print books on the shelves at the location indicated, or place holds to pick up at the Tran Library (Forest Grove) or the Hillsboro campus library. Learn more about accessing print materials here: https://www.lib.pacificu.edu/borrow/from-pacific/
Americanah by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PR9387.9.A34354 A44 2013ISBN: 0307455920Publication Date: 2014"Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion--for each other and for their homeland." -From publisher.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection E185.97.A56 A3 1969ISBN: 0394429869Publication Date: 1969"A phenomenal #1 bestseller that has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three years, this memoir traces Maya Angelou's childhood in a small, rural community during the 1930s. Filled with images and recollections that point to the dignity and courage of black men and women, Angelou paints a sometimes disquieting, but always affecting picture of the people-and the times-that touched her life." -From publisher.
Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain; Giovanni's Room; Another Country; Going to Meet the Man by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3552.A45 A6 1998ISBN: 1883011515Publication Date: 1998"Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual, James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era, and one of the greatest African-American writers of this century. A self-described "transatlantic commuter" who spent much of his life in France, Baldwin joined a cosmopolitan sophistication to a fierce engagement with social issues. Early Novels and Stories presents the novels and short stories that established Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence." -From publisher.
Go Tell It on the Mountain by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3552.A45 G62 2013ISBN: 9780345806543Publication Date: 2013"James Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves." -From publisher
The Bean Eaters by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3503.R7244 B4 2006Publication Date: 2006"One can sense the range of Brooks’s work in three of the most anthologized poems from The Bean Eaters: the title poem, "The Lovers of the Poor," and "We Real Cool." In "The Bean Eaters," Brooks narrates the simple dinners of two elderly people who take comfort in their memories, their "remembering, with twinkles and twinges." The long, dense lines and single stanza of "The Lovers of the Poor" unflinchingly confronts the idea that white, liberal women sometimes use volunteerism as an insincere way of alleviating their consciences. In contrast, the short lines, airy stanzas, and catchy rhymes of "We Real Cool" capture the voices of poor, urban adolescents in the space of only twenty-four words." -From poets.org
Kindred by Call Number: EbookISBN: 0807083704Publication Date: 2003This ebook can be accessed by unlimited consecutive users.
"Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin." -From publisher.
Blessing the Boats, 1988-2000 by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3553.L45 B64 2000ISBN: 188023887XPublication Date: 2000"Winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 is the culminating achievement of Lucille's Clifton longstanding poetry career." -From publisher.
The Water Dancer by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3603.O17 W38 2019ISBN: 9780399590597Publication Date: 2019"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage -- and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child -- but he is also gifted with a mysterious power." -From publisher.
Perma Red by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3605.A75 P47 2002ISBN: 039914899XPublication Date: 2002"In the 1940s on the Flathead Indian Reservation, a reckless and stubborn young girl sets her life down a desperate path." -From publisher.
Invisible Man by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3555.L625 I5 1994ISBN: 0679601392Publication Date: 1994"The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be." -From Amazon.- A Raisin in the Sun: A Drama in Three Acts byCall Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3515.A515 R3 1959aPublication Date: 1959"When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life." -From publisher.
The Ways of White Folks by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3515.U274 W3 1990ISBN: 0679728171Publication Date: 1990"In these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites in the 1920s and '30s." -From summary.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3515.U789 T639 1990ISBN: 0060916508Publication Date: 1990"One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston." -From publisher.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PR9265.9.J358 B75 2015ISBN: 9781594633942Publication Date: 2015"On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer's house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped, and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. A Brief History of Seven Killings delves deep into that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica's history and beyond." -From publisher.
Beloved by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3563.O8749 B4 1987ISBN: 0394535979Publication Date: 1987"After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade." -From publisher.
The Bluest Eye by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3563.O8749 B55 1993ISBN: 0679433732Publication Date: 1993"The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment." -From publisher.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS173.N4 M67 1993ISBN: 0679745424Publication Date: 1993"A learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race. Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires." -From publisher.
The Refugees by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3614.G97 A6 2017ISBN: 9780802126399Publication Date: 2017"A collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth." -From publisher.
There There by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3615.R32 T48 2018ISBN: 9780525520375Publication Date: 2018"There There is a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people." -From publisher.
Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3569.A468 S53 1999ISBN: 0807068500Publication Date: 1999" An extraordinary retrospective covering over thirty years of work, Shake Loose My Skin is a stunning testament to the literary, sensual, and political powers of the award-winning Sonia Sanchez." -From publisher.
White Teeth by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PR6069.M59 W47 2001ISBN: 0375703861Publication Date: 2001"Set in post-war London, this novel of the racial, political, and social upheaval of the last half-century follows two families--the Joneses and the Iqbals, both outsiders from within the former British empire--as they make their way in modern England." -From publisher.
Salvage the Bones by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3623.A7323 S36 2011ISBN: 9781608195220Publication Date: 2011National Book Award, Fiction. "A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real." -From publisher.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3623.A7323 S56 2017ISBN: 9781501126062Publication Date: 2017"When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise." -From publisher.
The Underground Railroad by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3573.H4768 U53 2016ISBN: 9780385542364Publication Date: 2016"Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom." -From publisher.- Fences: A Play byCall Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3573.I45677 F4 1986ISBN: 0452258421Publication Date: 1986"The protagonist of Fences, Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. For Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black was to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But now the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s... a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can." -From Amazon.
The Nickel Boys by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3573.H4768 N53 2019ISBN: 9780385537070Publication Date: 2019Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. "As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future." -From publisher.
The Color Purple by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3573.A425 C6 2019ISBN: 9780143135692Publication Date: 1982"Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence." -From publisher.
The Fifth Season by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3610.E46 F54 2015ISBN: 9780316229296Publication Date: 2015"This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. The first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy." -From Amazon.
1919 by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3605.W553 A6 2019ISBN: 9781608465989Publication Date: 2019" The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the "Red Summer" of violence across the nation's cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event--which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries--through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present." -From publisher.
An American Marriage by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3610.O63 A84 2019ISBN: 9781616208684Publication Date: 2019" Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together." -From publisher.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3558.A8378 A6 2018ISBN: 9780143133186Publication Date: 2018"In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. These poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares." -From publisher.
Behold the Dreamers by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3613.B84 B44 2017ISBN: 9780525509714Publication Date: 2017"In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Their situation only improves when Jende's wife Neni is hired as household help. But in the course of their work, Jende and Neni begin to witness infidelities, skirmishes, and family secrets. Then, with the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, a tragedy changes all four lives forever, and the Jongas must decide whether to continue fighting to stay in a recession-ravaged America or give up and return home to Cameroon." -From publisher.
The City We Became by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3610.E46 C58 2020ISBN: 9780316509848Publication Date: 2020"Five New Yorkers must come together in order to save their city from destruction in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six." -From publisher.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PR9265.9.J358 B58 2020ISBN: 9780735220188Publication Date: 2020"Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both." -From publisher.
Deacon King Kong by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3613.C28 D43 2020ISBN: 9780735216747Publication Date: 2020"A wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting. In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel." -From publisher.
Difficult Women by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3607.A985725 A6 2017bISBN: 9780802127372Publication Date: 2017"A collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection." -From publisher.
Down the River unto the Sea by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3563.O88456 D69 2019ISBN: 0316509639Publication Date: 2019"Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island. A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise." -From publisher.
Felon: Poems by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3602.E826 A6 2019ISBN: 9780393652147Publication Date: 2019"A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems-canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace-and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life." -From publisher.
Grand Union by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PR6069.M59 A6 2019ISBN: 9780525558996Publication Date: 2019"In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. With ten extraordinary new stories complemented by a selection of her most lauded pieces for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, Grand Union loves to cultural despair, as well as the desire to be the subject of your own experience." -From publisher.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PR9387.9.A34354 H35 2007ISBN: 9781400095209Publication Date: 2007" A novel set during Nigeria's struggle for independence in the 1960s involving five characters including thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a university professor, the professor's mistress, and a young Englishman named Richard." -From publisher.
Heads of the Colored People by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3620.H6885 A6 2019ISBN: 9781501168000Publication Date: 2019"This collection of moving, timely, and darkly funny stories examines the concept of black identity in this so-called post-racial era. A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes." -From publisher.
Lot: Stories by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3623.A86737 A6 2019ISBN: 9780525533689Publication Date: 2020"With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms." -From publisher.
The Mothers by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3602.E66444 M68 2017ISBN: 9780399184529Publication Date: 2017"The Mothers is a surprising story about young love, a big secret in a small community--and the things that ultimately haunt us most." -From publisher.
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PR9387.9.B73 M9 2019ISBN: 0525564209Publication Date: 2019"Satire meets slasher in this short, darkly funny hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends." -From publisher.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3622.U96 O52 2019ISBN: 9780525562023Publication Date: 2019"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity." -From publisher.
Red at the Bone by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3573.O64524 R43 2020ISBN: 0525535284Publication Date: 2020"Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson's taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child." -From publisher.
The Revisioners by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3619.E9838 R48 2019ISBN: 1640094261Publication Date: 2019"In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family." -From publisher.
Such a Fun Age by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3618.E5363 S83 2019ISBN: 052554190XPublication Date: 2019"Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," the complicated reality of being a grown up, and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason." -From publisher.
Wade in the Water by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3619.M5955 A6 2018ISBN: 9781555978136Publication Date: 2018" A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, using her signature voice--inquisitive, lyrical and wry--mulls over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence, boldly tying America's modern moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting." -From publisher.
Africaville by Call Number: Forest Grove Main Collection PS3603.O4685 A68 2019ISBN: 0062913719Publication Date: 2020"Africaville chronicles the lives of three generations of the Sebolt family--Kath Ella, her son Omar/Etienne, and her grandson Warner--whose lives unfold against the tumultuous events of the twentieth century from the Great Depression of the 1930s, through the social protests of the 1960s to the economic upheavals in the 1980s. As it explores notions of identity, passing, cross-racial relationships, the importance of place, and the meaning of home, Africaville tells the larger story of the black experience in parts of Canada and the United States." -From publisher.
Further Reading
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