Literature: Minority Authors

Brings to life a Southern love story with a strong black female protagonist.

Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.

Searing story of Tashi, a tribal African woman first glimpsed in The Color Purple whose fateful decision to submit to the tsunga's knife and be genitally mutilated leads to a trauma that informs her life and fatefully alters her existence.

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.

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.

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.

Chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, the region a battlefield between anti and pro slavery forces.

Short essays by black women writers on pivotal moments that influenced their careers.

As one of the century's premier American writers, James Baldwin has profoundly altered the nation's social and literary consciousness. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin's first novel, brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, as it starkly contrasts two generations of an embattled black family.

The moving and beautiful autobiography of a talented black woman.

Presents the contemporary African writer's classic novel depicting the destruction of traditional tribal life by the white man, along with a collection of essays by various authors and a biographical sketch of the author.

A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. Crystal Wilkinson currently teaches at the University of Kentucky and is the 2021 Kentucky Poet Laureate.

In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and "say" stories.

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet.

Introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American--a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away.

About a family wrestling with its future and its past. With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom.

Filled with striking and memorable photographs that bring Khaled Hosseini's compelling story to life.

Here for the first time in one volume are two classic, brilliantly original works on the experience of Chinese immigrants in America.

Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies.

Gives voice to four sisters recounting their adventures growing up in two cultures.

With exquisite prose and wondrous storytelling, this coming of age classic follows a young boy as he questions his faith and beliefs in family, religion, and other aspects of his Chicano culture.

About a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, this novel depicts a new American landscape through its multiple characters.

Tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love.

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love.

From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution.

The first novel about a Native American woman by a Native American woman in fifty years, this mesmerizing work tells the story of Ephanie, a half-breed who seeks herself through her roots.

About a long-unsolved crime in a small North Dakota town and how, years later, the consequences are still being felt by the community and a nearby Native American reservation.

A young Native American, Abel has come home from war to find himself caught between two worlds.

A majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination. Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.

Daunis, who is part Ojibwe, defers attending the University of Michigan to care for her mother and reluctantly becomes involved in the investigation of a series of drug-related deaths.

The story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. It chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

The Only Good Indians is a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience.

covers the entire spectrum of the African-American literary tradition, from the 18th-century writings of pioneers such as Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley, to 20th-century canonic texts, to the finest of today’s best-selling authors and rap artists.

Features the most respected, widely read, and influential American Indian writers to date.

Includes those authors and works that are an integral part of the literary canon, as well as those that are historically significant or gaining a reputation in today's literary circles.

Traces American writers whose roots are in all parts of Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.

Surveys the world of African American women writers. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 150 novelists, poets, playwrights, short fiction writers, autobiographers, essayists, and influential scholars.

Offers a selection of contemporary critical commentary on this proud and enduring poetic tradition and features an introductory essay.

Argues that African American literature must take into account the rich diversity of African American life and culture.

Established authors and newly emerging voices.

Includes alphabetically arranged entries for 49 nationally and internationally acclaimed Asian American writers of short fiction.

Impact Latino writers have had on the literary scene.

Immigrant literature uses predominantly the language of the homeland; it serves a population united by that language, irrespective of national origin; and it solidifies and furthers national identity.

Novelists, poets, playwrights and short-story writers.