"Like so many folks, I read this book when I was around 12 and it opened up my brain and inspired me. Coupled with Spike Lee’s film it also pushed me to think more radically and get involved with political organizations as a young teenager."

"Formative in my understanding of Pan-Africanist ideology and furthering the importance of CLR James, Frantz Fanon, etc." 

"It is hard to choose just one book by bell hooks, but this one was one of the first I was introduced to in my freshman year of college, and it also made me interested in studying film as history. I’d already been interested in both film and history and realized I could bring the two together, and also think through larger concerns about life (what I would later learn as intersectionality) was transformative."

"Jeff’s love for hip-hop pours from the pages and this was one of the first historical texts I read that felt imbued with both rigor and deep love."

"Dr. Jones is one of the first art writers I began reading as I wanted to understand contemporary art. I also wanted to include a more recent book on this list (!). This book is especially of interest to me, in that it examines Southern California and its culture, specifically African American artists."

"I was introduced to this book via Julie Dash’s directors’ commentary for Daughters of the Dust. Along with the film, this book was an initial introduction, in a scholastic way, to the visual memories embedded in Black American culture directly connected to African cosmologies."

"This was a book given to me as a child but became one of my favorites and I reread it almost every year. It is about mutual aid and also the community support needed to achieve a dream and lowkey also about the merits of socialism."

"This is the first James Baldwin book I read and it is included for no other reason than hipping me to his genius."

"Jazz isn’t my favorite Toni Morrison book, but it is one I found great difficulty with, and I appreciated that difficulty. The narrative structure mimics jazz, which is also a form I have worked very hard to ‘get’ throughout my life. This is definitely one of those books I didn’t quite understand at 14 and took re-reading over the decades later and adding meaning through lived experience."

"Toni Cade is for me, by far one of the most inspirational thinkers and activists. Her books and essay collections could be my entire list, but I chose this one because of her approach to this traumatic event in novel form, which was an inspiration about how to approach historical fact through narrative--which as her editor Toni Morrision believes--and I’m paraphrasing, badly--might be the most efficient way to actually get to the truth."

"I read a lot of the fiction my mom had lying around the house. So many of the titles were from what I think of as the Golden Age of Black Women’s fiction. I really used to love reading and would spend a lot of my summer days and weekends doing nothing but reading. Mama Day became one of my favorites. I’m not sure why, but it is the one title I think of often. I think the depiction of magic and agency for the protagonists has a lot to do with it."

"There are so many anthologies I could include, but this one is perhaps the one I have taught the most and return to again and again because of its capacity to directly address the legacy of cinema and colonialism."

"I didn’t encounter this text until I was in my early twenties in graduate school, but it spoke to ideas I’d long been forming and didn't quite have the words for. It connected the dots for me in an ongoing concern about the histories of Third World people, collectively."

"I don’t think this needs much explanation, but definitely a classic and formative for me."