Last week at my job we had a wonderful Black History Presentation in which one of the participators read from Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen.” Her reading reminded me that it’s been on my to-read list the moment I learned about it and I have to purchase the book as soon as possible. Word of this “meditation on race” started circulating online like wildfire during the time two juries failed to indict cops responsible for the deaths of both  Eric Garner and Michael Brown, around the time that #blacklives matter and Black twitter in general became a force to be reckoned with.

For my own contribution to the Black History presentation, I read the poem, “All Their Stanzas Look Alike, a compelling work by Thomas Sayers Ellis from his book “The Maverick Room,” which successfully indicts a system of standards by which our work, our creative expression, our bodies are measured and assimilated into soulless White washed acceptance. I discovered Ellis as a result of googling contemporary Black poets and I’m not sure why I’ve never read of him before but I was so impressed by “All Their Stanzas” that I immediately ordered his book “Skin Inc: Identity Repair Poems” published in 2013. I haven’t been this excited about discovering a poet in years. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.

“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay by has also been strongly recommended to me by several of my female friends and although it will not be the first book I’ve read about Feminism, it shall be the first book I ever read with the word Feminist in it’s title. I’m sure that Feminists all over the country are sighing collectively. LOL!

And of course anything that Chimimanda Adiche feels like putting out this year moves swiftly to the top of that list.