Council for Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Change: Teaching Race in the Classroom

Maya Angelou's third poetry collection, a unique celebration of life, consists of rhythms of strength, love, and remembrance, songs of the street, and lyrics of the heart.

A crucial voice during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Langston Hughes’s writing is constantly on the edge of musical and written forms. A compilation of writings including, The Langston Hughes Reader  combines highlights of the novels, stories, plays, poems, songs, and essays that have established his commanding position in world literature.

Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

Toni Morrison follows the protagonist, Milkman Dead, from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins. After a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight, Milkman, too, will be trying to fly. During Milkman's travels, Morrison introduces a broad cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

"Recent U.S. Poet Laureate's Pulitzer Prize winning collection Life on Mars addresses futurity, the pain and beauty of the human condition along with what it means to be of this universe filled with stars, planets and other forces that are bigger than us all" (Medium).

"Citizen is a National Book Circle Award winning hybrid collection of lyric prose-poems accompanied by visual art dispersed throughout. Rankine explores what racism for Black folks looks and feels like in the American landscape. What looms in Citizen is how America’s violent past is inextricably linked to its current violent present against Black minds and bodies, but it also raises questions about what this means for our future" (Medium).

"DaMaris B. Hill’s bestselling book A Woman Bound is a Dangerous Thing is one like no other in how it centers and honors the lives of significant though sometimes lesser known Black women who are still living and those who are no longer with us through poetry, historical facts, biographical information and relevant photographs" (Medium).