Alumni and Faculty Books on Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of The New York Public Library in Harlem, compiled a Black Liberation Reading List "in response to the uprisings across the globe demanding justice for Black lives." The list includes 95 titles, several of which were penned by Columbia faculty and alumni, to represent the 95 years of The Schomburg Center's work preserving and calling for a greater understanding of the Black experience. According to the center's staff, "The 95 titles on the list represent books we and the public turn to regularly as activists, students, archivists, and curators, with a particular focus on books by Black authors and those whose papers we steward." 

Titles by Columbia alumni and faculty which made the list include Sweat (Theater Communications Group, 2017) by Associate Professor Lynn Nottage, Negroland (Vintage, 2016) by Professor Margo Jefferson, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (W.W. Norton, 2020) by English and Comparative Literature Professor Saidiya Hartman, Citizen (Graywolf Press, 2014) by alumna Claudia Rankine '93, Survival Math (Scribner, 2020) by former Adjunct Assistant Professor Mitchell S. Jackson, Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2019) by alumna Tracy K. Smith '97, and Sister Outsider (Crossing Press, 2007) by Library Science alumna Audre Lorde '60. 

Nottage's Sweat won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for drama and was nominated for three Tony Awards including Best Play. The play follows a group of factory workers in Reading, Pennsylvania—one of the poorest cities in America—as they struggle to stay afloat. Associate Professor Hilton Als called the play "Nottage's best work. She offers a powerful critique of the American attitude toward class, and how it affects the decisions we make." Charles Isherwood of The New York Times said "That the people onstage are middle-class or lower-middle-class folks—too rarely given ample time on American stages—makes the play all the more vital a contribution to contemporary drama." 

Lynn Nottage is a two time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a screenwriter. Her plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. They include, Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award), Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play), Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award), Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas, Mud, River, Stone, Por’knockers and POOF! In addition, she is working with composer Ricky Ian Gordon on adapting her play Intimate Apparel into an opera (commissioned by The Met/LCT). She recently presented This is Reading, a performance and media installation at the Franklin Street, Reading Railroad Station in Reading, PA.

Jefferson's Negroland, a memoir of her upbringing in upper-crust Black Chicago, is the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Heartland Prize, and was named a best book of the year by several publications including The Washington Post. The New York Times Book Review called the memoir "brave...revelatory...recalls a number of America's greatest thinkers on race...James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois." 

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a book and arts critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, explores the quiet cultural revolution begun by Black women in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. The book recently won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.. Assistant Professor Leslie Jamison said of the book, "I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved....[Hartman's] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details."

Saidiya Hartman is also the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Rankine's book of essay, image, and poetry, Citizen, recounts racial aggressions as encountered anywhere from the supermarket to the tennis court with Serena Williams. Published during a time when our society was often deemed "post-race," the book is powerful evidence of the continued existence and the consequences of racism in America. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Citizen was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, the L.A. Times Book Prize, the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the PEN Open Book Award. 

Claudia Rankine is the author of six collections of poetry, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric, and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March of 2020 at The Shed, NYC, The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (FENCE, 2015). In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Jackson's Survival Math is a memoir exploring his family experience with particular focus on his male family members. The book includes "survivor files" which feature photographs and short narratives of these male relatives, all while discussing themes of addiction, violence, "hustle," and the consequences of addiction. Time Magazine named the book one of "11 New Books to Read this March" and said, "Beyond his own past, Jackson juxtaposes his history with those of his male relatives to illustrate the hardships of class and race on a generational level, creating timely narrative centered around what it takes to survive in America." 

Mitchell S. Jackson's debut novel, Residue Years won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His honors include a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts), and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. 

In Wade in the Water, Smith uses her unique lyrical voice to highlight the ties between our contemporary cultural moment and the founding history of the United States. The collection draws on historical documents by including erasures of The Declaration of Independence, correspondences between slave owners, evidence of corporate pollution, accounts of near death experiences, and more. According to The New York Times, "Smith's new book is scorching in both its steady cognizance of America's original racial sins...and apprehension about history's direction...These historical poems have a homely, unvarnished sort of grace."

Tracy K. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. 

Lorde's Sister Outsider is a collection of fifteen essays and speeches in which Lorde speaks out against sexism, racism, class, ageism, and other social ills. While her attack of these systems is unflinching, her words ultimately offer possibilities for action and growth. "Presenting the essential writings of Black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature," says The New York Times, "[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware." 

A writer, activist, and mother of two, Audre Lorde grew up in 1930s Harlem. She earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry, and was New York State's Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993. She is the author of twelve books, including Zami and The Black Unicorn. Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in 1992.

Interested in more reads for Black History Month? Columbia News published its own extensive list of books by Columbia authors throughout history that both expand on and illustrate what it is to be Black in America.. “From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, fiction to nonfiction, music to medicine, this collection of books by Columbia authors will keep you busy this February.”