View the Lesson Plan

Resources and Links

NOVELS, MEMOIRS & SHORT STORIES

• Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat” (1926)

• Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929)

• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977) 

• Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” (1978)

• Octavia Butler,  Bloodchild and Other Stories (1985)

• Derrick Bell, “The Space Traders” (1992)

• Jesamyn Ward, “Where the Line Bleeds” (2008)

• Jason Douglass Louie, “Birthday Boy” (2018)

• Zadie Smith, “The Lazy River” (2017)

• Stephen A. Crockett Jr., “Fishbone (2018)

• Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman's Narrative (1853-1860)

• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

• Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)

• Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

• Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

• Alice Walker, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” (1983)

• Roxane Gay, selections from Bad Feminist (2014)

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, selection from Between the World & Me (2015)

• Patrisse Khan-Cullors & ashsa bandele, selections from When They Call You a Terrorist:   A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018)

ARTICLES/WEBSITES

• Jordan Elgrably & James Baldwin, “James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78” (1984)

• Morgan Jenkins, “Writing While Black: On Cliché, Stereotype, and the Struggle to Describe Blackness” (2016)

VIDEO LINKS

•  "Notes of a native son: The world according to James Baldwin" by Christina Greer

• "Sonia Sanchez-Black Arts Movement (BAM) to Hip Hop"

• "Found Voices : Slave Narratives"

• "Elizabeth Acevedo: Changing the literary landscape for writers of colour"

About the Teacher

Naima Yael Tokunow (née Woods) is an educator, writer and editor, currently living in New Mexico.

Her work (and life) focus around interrogating black femme identity & privilege, social justice and black futurity.

She is the author of three chapbooks, MAKE WITNESS, published in 2016 by Zoo Cake Press, Planetary Bodies, out from Black Warrior Review in 2019, and Shadow Black, the winner of Frontier's 2020 Digital Chapbook Prize, chose by Pulitzer Prize winner, Jericho Brown.

She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a TENT Residency Fellow & has attended The Home School workshop in Miami. She proudly edits the Black Voice Series for Puerto del Sol. New work is published or forthcoming from bone bouquet, Bayou, Winter Tangerine, Nat. Brut, juked, Diagram and elsewhere.

More information is available at naimaytokunow.com. She is blessed to be black and alive.