When I was traveling a couple of years ago, I sent about a quarter of my library to my mother’s house in the Rocky Mountain region. My books sat in her guestroom for a year before I called her and inquired about have them sent back to me.
I’m back to writing full time after a brief stint of teaching, and with the attainment of many writing and reporting assignments, I feel naked without my collection to help me sort through and research to hone the basis of my thesis and tones for my essays, screenplays, and stories.
Whether I’m writing about a Black women jazz musician, an ethereal novella or writing an essay to assist other writers in finding methods to smooth their literary paths, I’ve known since I was a girl that a robust library of diverse books (that only you can curate via your own tastes and literary needs) is essential to growing into a successful writer.
When I received the full list of books that are patiently waiting to be reunited with my eager and voracious fingers, palms and eyes, I thought it would be good to share some of the books I own and love.
Not many people get to see my process. I wanted to take a bit of the veil down between myself and other readers and writers to ensure that we, in even the smallest of ways, stay connected.
Jordannah Elizabeth
Editor in Chief of TERSE. Journal
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I’ve organized 45 of my books into seven different categories for your convenience.
BLACK WOMEN WRITERS
Black Looks
Bell Hooks
The Source of Self Regard
Toni Morrison
The Training School for Negro Girls
Camille Acker
Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
bell hooks
Hunger
Roxane Gay
Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-WW II Paris
Rashida Braggs
Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race women
Brittney C. Cooper
Difficult Women
Roxane Gay
Diversifying Democracy
Harriett Lee Elam-Thomas
FEMINISM
The Dialectic of Sex
Shulamith Firestone
Women & Equality; Changing Patterns in American Culture
William H. Chafe
The Chalice and the Blade; our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler
Making Spaces Safer; A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot
Shawna Potter
Ecofeminism
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva
Anarchy and the Sex Question; Essays on women and emancipation
Emma Goldman
Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodern in the West
Jane Flax
Masculinity Studies & Feminist Theory
Judith Kegan Gardiner
SPIRITUALITY
Reiki, 108 Questions and Answer
Paula Horan
The Ultimate Guide to the Rider Waite Tarot
Johannes Fiebig
Chakra Therapy For Personal Growth
Keith Sherwood
BLACK NON-FICTION & JOURNALISM
Knocking the Hustle; Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics
Lester K. Spence
FlyBoy 2: The Greg Tate Reader
Greg Tate
Flyboy in the Buttermilk
Greg Tate
Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars
Henry Louis Gates, Jr
FICTION
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
Still Life with Woodpecker
Tom Robbins
Richard II
Shakespeare
Henry IV Part 1
Shakespeare
Death Kit
Susan Sontag
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs
Plexus: The Rosy Crucifixion
Henry Miller
NON-FICTION
The New Journalism
Robert Boynton
Role Models
John Waters
Modernity & Self-Identify: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
Anthony Giddens
Sound Figures: Crossing Aesthetics
Theodor Adorno
The Twilight of American Culture
Morris Berman
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom
What Great Teachers do Differently
Todd Whitaker
Writing in Society
Raymond Williams
POETRY
The Sabotage Manuals (Poetry)
Ida Borjel
Can I Kick It? (Poetry)
Idris Goodwin
Crossfire (Poetry)
Stacey Yann Chin
Everything Must Go (Poetry)
Kevin Coval/Langston Allston
Once (Poetry)
Alice Walker
Black Queer Hoe (Essays & Poems)
Britteney Black Rose Kapri