Beautiful Life: A Focus on Identity
Books featuring BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) in which race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, culture, im/migration, and/or religious, sacred, or origin stories are central to the story. These books explicitly focus on the diverse expressions of human experience, depending on these elements to drive the storyline. source: https://diversebookfinder.org/our-categories/
America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
Three generations of women from one immigrant family trying to reconcile the home they left behind with the life they're building in America.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Separated by respective ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America while exploring new concepts of race, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland 15 years later, where they face the toughest decisions of their lives.
Libby -- E-Book
hoopla -- E-Audiobook
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Told through the author's own evolving understanding of the subject over the course of his life comes a bold and personal investigation into America's racial history and its contemporary echoes.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
Call Us What We Carry: Poems by Amanda Gorman
A collection of poems that includes the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States.
Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith
Smith's unflinching poetry addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity.
Hoopla -- E-Audiobook
Earth Keeper: reflections on the American land by N. Scott Momaday
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet celebrates the oral tradition of his Native American culture as he recalls the stories of his childhood, passed down for generations, and their profound and sacred connection to the natural world.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
Hoopla -- E-Audiobook
Footnotes: the Black artists who rewrote the rules of the great white way by Casseen Gaines
Footnotes is the story of how Sissle and Blake, along with comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, overcame poverty, racism, and violence to harness the energy of the Harlem Renaissance and produce a runaway Broadway hit that launched the careers of many of the twentieth century's most beloved Black performers.
Libby -- E-Book
Four Hundred Souls: a community history of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N Blain
2019 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first African presence in the Americas - and also launched the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracism Institute of American University, and Keisha Blain, editor of The North Star. They've gathered together eighty black writers from all disciplines - historians and artists, journalists and novelists - each of whom has contributed an entry about one five-year period to create a dynamic multivoiced single-volume history of black people in America.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
Blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
Libby -- E-Book
How the Word Is Passed: a reckoning with the history of slavery across America by Clint Smith
How the Word Is Passed Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
A stereotyped character actor stumbles into the spotlight before uncovering surprising links between his family and the secret history of Chinatown.
Libby -- E-Audiobook
Minor Feelings: an Asian American reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
An award-winning poet and essayist offers a ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged exploration of the psychological condition of being Asian American.
Libby -- E-Book
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
In early 1900s Korea, prized daughter Sunja finds herself pregnant and alone, bringing shame on her family until a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and move with her to Japan, in the saga of one family bound together as their faith and identity are called into question.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
Sing, Unburied, Sing: a novel by Jesmyn Ward
Living with his grandparents and sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his mother's addictions and his grandmother's cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope.
Libby -- E-Book
Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris -- (Book on CD)
In the waning days of the Civil War, two freed brothers are hired to work on the farm of a husband and wife who are grieving the loss of their son in the war.
Libby – E-Book
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different.
Libby -- E-Book
The Calligrapher's Daughter by Eugenia Kim
In early twentieth century Korea, Najin Han, the privileged daughter of a calligrapher, longs to choose her own destiny. Smart and headstrong, she is encouraged by her mother, but her stern father is determined to maintain tradition. When her father seeks to marry Najin into an aristocratic family, her mother defies generations of obedient wives and instead sends her to serve in the king's court as a companion to a young princess.
Hoopla -- E-Book
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed follows the unnamed Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
Libby -- E-Book
Hoopla -- E-Book
The Kindest Lie: a novel by Nancy Johnson
Needing to reconnect with the baby she gave up for adoption years earlier, an Ivy League-educated Black engineer uncovers devastating family secrets before her bond with a young white misfit scandalizes her racially torn community.
Libby -- E-Book
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Twin sisters, inseparable as children, ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
Book on CD
Large Print
Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Anaya Mathis
The story of an African American family held together with a mother's grit and monumental courage.
Libby -- E-Book
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage, his mother was sold away and he was robbed of all memory of her, but gifted with a mysterious power that saves his life years later when he almost drowns in a river. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion, and so begins a journey into the war on slavery. It begins a journey that takes him from the corrupt Deep South to dangerous movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram resolves to rescue the family he left behind.
Libby -- E-Book | E-Audiobook
White Ivy: A Novel by Susie Yang
Years after she is sent away from Boston to China for shoplifting, a conflicted Chinese-American woman reconnects with her golden-boy childhood crush before a ghost from the past threatens her ambitions.
Libby -- E-Book
Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou
A collection of short essays includes personal reminiscences, hard-won wisdom, and inspirational ideas.
The Three Mothers: how the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin shaped a nation
My Broken Language: a memoir 
All You Can Ever Know: a memoir 
Love in Color
The Broken Heart of America: St Louis and the violent history of the United States 
El Norte: the epic and forgotten story of Hispanic North America 
The Sun Does Shine: how I found life and freedom on death row 
The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
How to Be an Antiracist
Evicted: poverty and profit in the American city 
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo and Michael Eric Dyson
