Found this via Imprint Design blog. (Where’s my brother at and can we work on stuff like this?)

My blog was originally intended to be a sidekick for my zine Readin & Fightin, and the zine was originally intended to focus on books by women of color. Both have kinda spun into larger projects but I am still documenting the books I read as I have for the past 4ish years, and finally updated my reading list for the first time since the last issue of the zine.

South End Press, 1998 - Biography & Autobiography - 254 pages

Since its publication in 1975, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying has been widely recognized as one of the most important books on the black liberation movement and labor struggles in the United States. It tells the remarkable story of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, based in Detroit, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, two of the most important political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s.

Today one of my students finished reading a book for the first time ever, at least as far as he could remember. It happened during my program after school. I made everyone in the room cheer for him, and I was so excited for him because I’ve seen since last year how difficult reading is for him. We were talking recently about the trouble with finding books that you can relate to and stay interested in, but he’d told me he really liked this one.

I told him I’d get him a present because I was so happy for him. I had to do christmas shopping anyway, so I got him a notebook and a sketchbook (he’s a really good artist) and a set of decent drawing pencils. Proud afterschool lady!

bell hooks, “Killing Rage”  (via bhavitavyata)

timely… thank you Hasan.

(via notyourkinddear)

I’ve written about this already, but this sentiment of “We’re all the same/stop talking about race/we just need unity” is coming up in organizing that I am peripherally involved in right now.

I read Killing Rage earlier this year and really really liked it. I know she sometimes gets a bad rap from radical WOC for being too accommodating to white feminists, and I sometimes feel that way about her writing as well, but then I read this book and it totally went the opposite direction. She was really harsh when she needed to be—constructively harsh, but harsh nonetheless. The whole thing was about POC anger and what to do with it, but not in a self-helpish way.

(via janedoe225)

guerrillamamamedicine:

liquornspice:

thefactofblackness:

Name three books that have been essential readings for you and why?

*This is intended to be as open a question as possible. I am simply curious to see which readings get mentioned and in what context.

*Signed, #simplyCurious?

1) Song of Solomon,…

brief and wondrous life of oscar wao by junot diaz  —

white teeth by zadie smith —

half of a yellow sun by chimamanda adichie —-

for all of these, it is a brilliant mix of language, imagery, culture, history, intimate relationships, family, just trying to figure out what is worth living for…

Sister Outsider—Audre Lorde

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf—Ntozake Shange

Black Power—Stokeley Carmichael & Charles V. Hamilton (haven’t read this since about 10th grade, can’t really vouch for it but it was important to me in early early organizing)

Zine research.

• Don’t Call this Country America—Betita Martinez
• La Güera—Cherríe Moraga
• The Queer, Feminist, and Trans Politics of Prison Abolition—zine, no author listed
• Unsettling Ourselves: Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality—Unsettling Minnesota
• Development, Ecology, and Women—Vandana Shiva
• Who Pollutes? The Rich or the Poor—Vandana Shiva

Gotta say, Google Scholar got revamped and is really helpful nowadays, even without any academic subscriptions; it didn’t use to be great if you weren’t using it from a university.

YESSSS. So much on Google Books. Fuck a hurricane, I know what I’m doing this weekend til the trees come crashing through my house.

I updated my women of color reading list, if anyone is interested in that.

ETA: I should mention that this is not an exhaustive list of books by women of color that I would recommend, but just the ones I’ve read since I finished college and started this reading project. Pretty much every book on the list is really good, though, so I would recommend all of them (there’s maybe 5 that were mediocre but I would still recommend them for various reasons); but there are definitely other books by women of color that may be missing from the list, simply because I haven’t read them, or did read them but before I started this project.

Just found out this book of essays by Paula Gunn Allen exists, then just found out it’s at the library. HELL YES.

alongside The Souls of Black Folk. So exciting! Wild weekend!