Please Note:
The following list of books is not organized according to any personal
hierarchy of the relative value of each individual book. Rather it is a
list that seriously considers ALL of the books listed here to be of
equal intellectual and cultural value and interest, albeit for different
reasons. The bottomline on this list is that each one of these books is
extraordinary and invaluable in their own right and represents some of
the very best writing published in the United States in 2015.
--Kofi Natambu, Editor
SOS: Poems 1961-2013
by Amiri Baraka
Grove Press, 2015
by Amiri Baraka
Grove Press, 2015
The Scholar Denied: W.E. B. Dubois and the Birth Of Modern Sociology
by Aldon Morris
University of California Press, 2015
by Aldon Morris
University of California Press, 2015
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Spiegel & Grau, 2015
Spiegel & Grau, 2015
Eye On the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press
by James McGrath Morris
Amistad, 2015
by James McGrath Morris
Amistad, 2015
Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical
by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo
University Press of Kentucky, 2015
F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J. Maxwell
Princeton University Press, 2015
The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination
by Robeson Taj Frazier
Duke University Press, 2015
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes
Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel
Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
The Trouble With Post-Blackness
Edited by Houston A. Baker and K. Merida Simmons
Columbia University Press, 2015
Writing On the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Edited by Johanna Fernandez
City Lights Books, 2015
Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights
by Carter Mathes
University Of Minnesota Press, 2015
Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015
by Ralph Nader
Seven Stories Press, 2015
Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial
Divide
by Joy-Ann Reid
William Morrow, 2015
Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story
by David Maranniss
Simon and Schuster 2015
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane by Patrick McGilligan
Harper, 2015
Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America
by Will Haygood
Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
The Radical King
by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Edited and introduced by Cornel West
Beacon Press, 2015
by Damon Tweedy, M.D.
Picador, 2015
The Making of Asian America: A History
by Erica Lee
Simon and Schuster, 2015
The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty
Farra, Straus, and Giroux, 2015
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert
Vintage, 2015
Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood
Edited by Ishmael Reed
Third World Press, 2015
Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich, and Sacrificing the Future of America
by Tim Wise
City Lights Books, 2015
Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth
by John Szwed
Viking, 2015
Sinatra: The Chairman
by James Kaplan
Doubleday, 2015
Negroland: A Memoir
by Margo Jefferson
Pantheon Books, 2015
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
by Ari Berman
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015
MJ: THE GENIUS OF MICHAEL JACKSON
by STEVE KNOPPER
SCRIBNER, 2015
by STEVE KNOPPER
SCRIBNER, 2015
