We bring to you a recommendation list of essential reads that trace the interventions and intertwining of Black lives and communities in poetry, literature, music, politics, and the academy.
| Title | Author | Source | Genre/Format |
| All About Love: New Visions | bell hooks | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1021178827 | Non-fiction |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/70823318 | Novel / Fiction |
| Black and Blur | Fred Moten | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/982502669 | Non-fiction |
| Collected Poems | Robert Hayden. Edited by Rampersad and Glaysher | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/34188239 | Poetry |
| Guidebook to Relative Strangers: A Journey into Race, Motherhood, and History | Camille Dungy | https://wwnorton.com/books/Guidebook-to-Relative-Strangers | Memoir/Essays |
| In the Wake: On Blackness and Being | Christina Sharpe | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/940520601 | Non-fiction/Afropessimism |
| Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler | Thylias Moss | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/7374781280 | Poetry |
| Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems | Yusef Komunyakaa | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/869281841 | Poetry |
| Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction | Richard Jean So | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1158506674 | Non-fiction |
| Your Silence Will Not Protect You | Audre Lorde | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1006460992 | Non-fiction |
| The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening | Jennifer Lynn Stoever | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/959980189 | Non-fiction |
| The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/933420484 | Fiction |
| Time's Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer's Life and Poetry | Spencer and J. Lee Greene | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/2912188 | Poetry |
| Trophic Cascade | Camille Dungy | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/962303904 | Poetry |
| Women, Race and Class | Angela Davis | https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/8907158 | Non-fiction |