This Black History Month, we want to highlight recent publications by Black Texan writers. We hope that you find something that interests you!
1. Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore – Char Adams (Tiny Reparations Books, 2025)
Black-Owned celebrates small businesses and their role in community building—and in liberation. Journalist Char Adams reports on how Black bookstores have always been centerpieces of resistance. This is a story of activism, espionage, violence, and perseverance. The first Black-owned bookstore was opened by an abolitionist in 1834. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X would deliver speeches at the doorstep of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem, a place dubbed “Speakers Corner.” Soon, many bookstores became targets of the FBI and local law enforcement alike.
Char Adams is a reporter for NBC News and a former reporter for People. Her writing on race and identity has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Oprah Daily, Vice, Teen Vogue, and Bustle. She hosted COVID University New York, one of the first podcasts to chronicle the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City. She is a proud Philadelphia native and now lives in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
2. Fruit Punch: A Memoir – Kendra Allen (Harper Collins, 2022)
Written in a distinctive voice and filled with personality, humor, and pathos, Fruit Punch is a memoir unlike any other, from a one-of-a-kind millennial talent. Growing up in Dallas, Texas, in the nineties and early 2000s, Kendra Allen had a complicated, loving, and intense family life filled with desire and community but also undercurrents of violence and turmoil. “We equate suffering to perseverance and misinterpret the weight of shame,” she writes. As she makes her way through a world of obscureness, Kendra finds herself slowly discovering outlets to help navigate growing up and against the expected performance of being a young Black woman in the South—a complex interplay of race, class, and gender that proves to be ever-shifting ground.
Kendra Allen is the author of the memoir Fruit Punch, the poetry collection The Collection Plate, and the essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet, which won the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, awarded by Kiese Laymon. She writes a music column, “Make Love in My Car,” for Southwest Review.
3. Proprioception – C. Prudence Arceneaux (Texas Review Press, 2025)
Proprioception tastes of a feral urgency to time, to presence, a need. The poems move through ideas of race, of fear, of sexuality, of life already lived in low-level terror now amplified, of the weight of responsibility, of the burdens of age—trying to find a way to breathe every day in a now permanent upset of an already shaky imbalance, to find new position in spaces erupting with old hate, old jealousies, old greeds.
Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices, and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry—Dirt (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and Liberty.
4. Pretty: A Memoir – K.B. Brookins (Knopf, 2024)
Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people.
KB Brookins (they/them) is a Black, queer, and trans writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. KB’s poetry chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (2022) won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their poetry collection Freedom House (2023), described as “urgent and timely” by Vogue, won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty (2024) won the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Dorothy Allison/Felice Picano Emerging Writer Award.
5. We Are Owed. – Ariana Brown (Grieveland, 2021)
We Are Owed. is the debut poetry collection of Ariana Brown, exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces. Through poems about the author’s childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult, Brown interrogates the accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. We Are Owed. asks the reader to develop a Black consciousness by rejecting U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and confronting anti-Black erasure and empire-building.
Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio, TX, now based in Houston. She is the author of the poetry collections We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Her academic and poetic works explore queerness, Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, girlhood, loneliness, and care. Ariana is a national collegiate poetry slam champion, winner of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant.
6. Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022 – Cyrus Cassells (TCU Press, 2025)
Drawn from eight acclaimed books of poetry and spanning forty years, Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022, is 2021 Texas Poet Laureate Cyrus Cassells’s long-awaited retrospective volume. Ellen Hinsey, in her compelling introduction, “A Lyric Poet in Dark Times,” heralds Cassells as “America’s foremost lyric poet, who, under the pressure of adverse circumstances, has turned from his home in music to unflinchingly face the blood and havoc of his era’s civil sphere.” Hinsey makes revealing comparisons with Yeats’s trajectory from high lyricism to poems of lament and Irish Civil War witness: “when we read Cassells’s work over the last four decades, we are aware that the music he hears is intrinsically intertwined with the noise of the world’s destruction.”
Cyrus Cassells’s profound works explore identity, history, and the human experience. With a distinctive voice that combines lyrical intensity with meticulous craftsmanship, Cassells is best known for his poetry books which have earned numerous accolades, including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Lambda Literary Award, and two Pulitzer Prize nominations. From 2021 to 2022 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Texas, where he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. He is a Regents’ Professor and University Distinguished Professor of English at TXST, where he also was awarded the Presidential Excellence Award.
7. Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas – ed. by Amanda Johnston (Host Publications, 2025)
In 2024, Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston commissioned 70 poets across 7 Texas regions to write praise poems celebrating everydayTexans. This anthology includes a range of diverse and intersecting populations across age, gender, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, differently-abled, and immigrant communities. This anthology includes many familiar names such as C. Prudence Arceneaux, Kendra Allen, K.B. Brookins, drea brown, Aris Kian, Camari Carter Hawkins, Jasminne Mendez, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, Ebony Stewart, Alexandra van de Kamp, Eddie Vega, and many more.
Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, the 61st Texas Poet Laureate, and founder of Torch Literary Arts. Johnston is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2019), edited by Lauren K. Alleyne. She is a former board president of the Cave Canem Foundation and the founder and executive director of Torch Literary Arts. In 2024, Johnston was appointed the poet laureate of Texas. In the same year, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
8. Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution – Peniel E. Joseph (Hachette, 2025)
Nineteen sixty-three opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months in between brought waves of racial terror, mass protest, and police repression that shocked the world, inspired radicals and reformers, and forced the hands of moderate legislators. By year’s end the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and four Black girls at a church in Alabama left the nation determined to imagine a new way forward.
Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and distinguished service leadership professor and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of eight award-winning books on African American history, including The Third Reconstruction and The Sword and the Shield. He lives in Austin, Texas.
9. The Story of My Anger – Jasminne Mendez (Penguin Random House, 2025)
Yulieta Lopez is angry. Angry at her racist drama teacher who refuses to cast Black students in lead roles. Angry at the school board threatening her favorite teacher for teaching works of literature that they deem “controversial.” Angry that she has to keep quiet until she can head to college and leave Texas forever. Yuli is accustomed to playing various roles: the diligent daughter, the honorable hija, the good girl who serves everyone else before serving herself. But as the fire of Yuli’s rage spreads and lights her up, she can no longer be silent. Determined to find a way to fight back, Yuli and her friends start a guerilla theatre club which stirs things up and gets people talking, and finally, Yuli steps into the role she was always meant to play.
Jasminne Mendez is two-time Pura Belpré Honor Award recipient and a Dominican-American poet, playwright and author of several books for children and adults. She is also a poet, playwright, translator, and professional audiobook narrator. Her book Aniana del Mar Jumps In (Dial), a novel in verse about a young girl diagnosed with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and others.
10. Black Chameleon – Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton (Henry Holt, 2023)
Mouton’s memoir is a praise song and an elegy for Black womanhood. She tells her own story while remixing myths and drawing on traditions from all over the world: mothers literally grow eyes in the backs of their heads, children dust the childhood off their bodies, and women come to love the wildness of the hair they once tried to tame. With a poet’s gift for lyricism and poignancy, Mouton reflects on her childhood as the daughter of a preacher and a harsh but loving mother, living in the world as a Black woman whose love is all too often coupled with danger, and finally learning to be a mother to another Black girl in America.
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally known writer, director, performer, critic, and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, Texas. She is the author of the 2019 poetry collection Newsworthy, which was a finalist for the Writer’s League of Texas Book Award and received an Honorable Mention in the Summerlee Book Prize. Her poems have garnered her a Pushcart nomination and have been translated into multiple languages. She has been a contributing writer for Glamour, Texas Monthly, Muzzle, and ESPN’s Andscape. Her work ranges from writing stage plays and librettos for operas, such as Marian’s Song, to storytelling through film. She currently resides in Houston, Texas.
11. WASH – Ebony Stewart (Button Poetry, 2025)
Through trauma and recovery, black girlhood comes of age in WASH, journeying through moments of self-discovery, mental illness, love and heartbreak. Stewart reckons traditional definitions of womxnhood, exploring its complications, its communities, and its queerness.
Ebony Stewart, most affectionately known as Eb or Gully, is an author and international touring interdisciplinary artivist. As a Black womxn writer and performance artist, Ebony Stewart harnesses the power of creativity to explore and challenge societal norms, personal identity, and the intersectionality of her experiences. With a spellbinding blend of storytelling, verbal fitness, and raw emotion, she captivates audiences, inviting them into a world where vulnerability becomes strength and authenticity reigns supreme.
12. City of Dis: A Novel-in-Verse – Randall James Tyrone (Texas Review Press, 2025)
Randall James Tyrone’s debut collection City of Dis is a searing exploration of contemporary existence intertwined with medieval notions of damnation, invoking Dante’s “Inferno” to craft a modern-day epic. Doubling as a novel-in-verse, City of Dis follows the unnamed protagonist as they navigate a cityscape that is both a circle of hell and also the urban sprawl of 21st-century America. Amidst the cacophony of sirens, construction, and hurricanes fueled by climate change, Tyrone weaves a tapestry where pop culture, late-stage capitalism, and the daily struggles imposed by inequities of race and class in this urban inferno collide with arcane theology, existential dread, and something like divine comedy. Through forms ranging from epistolary to litany, Tyrone’s speaker charts every chaotic inch of this dystopian landscape, encountering Dante himself as they confront the personification of Suicide. City of Dis stands not only as a vivid critique of modern society but also as a haunting testament to resilience in the face of spiritual and environmental decay.
Randall James Tyrone holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming. He resides in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Electric Literature’s Okey-Panky, Oversound Poetry, and Nomadic Press. He has been anthologized in the Bodies Built For A Game Anthology by Prairie Schooner. He has received a scholarship to attend the Tin House Summer Workshop and was awarded the Bentley-Buckman Poetry Fellowship to attend the Writers Week at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation. He was a finalist for the Indiana Review’s ½ K Prize and a finalist for The X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. He’s very excited for you.
13. Palaver: A Novel – Bryan Washington (FSG Books, 2025)
A finalist for the National Book Award, Palaver: A Novel, follows a story in Tokyo, where our protagonist works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother in Houston, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.
Bryan Washington is the author of Palaver, Family Meal, Memorial, and Lot. He’s also a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” winner, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award recipient, an Ernest J. Gaines Award recipient, an International Dylan Thomas Prize recipient, a two-time Lambda Literary Award recipient, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction award, and the recipient of an O. Henry Award, and was named one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30.” The New York Times referred to his writing as among the 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature, and he was a columnist for the New York Times Magazine.
