For the past year, rapper and poet Noname has been reading and recommending progressive texts by POC writers as part of her Book Club – a community-driven project aimed at exploring and uplifting radical thought. As the daughter of the first Black woman to own a bookstore in her native Chicago, Noname’s continuing her mother’s legacy by fostering solidarity and creating safe spaces to discuss groundbreaking work on abolition, Black identity, feminism, decolonization, anticapitalism, self-love and survival.
Though its local chapter meetups have been put on pause in the time of COVID, Noname’s Book Club has pivoted to monthly Zoom calls where activists, organizers and educators share their thoughts and with readers. With an eye on liberation and accessibility for all, the Book Club also sends its monthly selections to incarcerated comrades via the Prison Program – a project that can be supported directly through Patreon.
Find Amazon links to Noname’s picks below, or support local, Black-owned bookstores by purchasing your copies from her list of partners. For more revolutionary reading, check out the bookshelves of Angela Davis, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Nipsey Hussle and Malcolm X.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and The Prison Industrial Complex by Eric Stanley & Nat Smith (also rec’d by Janet Mock)
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop by Dr. Guthrie Ramsey
Blood In My Eye by George Jackson (also rec’d by Nipsey Hussle)
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (also rec’d by Tupac Shakur)
War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Antonio Denis
Mean by Myriam Gurba
Love With Accountability by Aishah Shahidah Simmons
As Black As Resistance by William Anderson
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (also rec’d by Ibram X. Kendi & Janet Mock)
Magical Negro by Morgan Parker
Die Nigger Die! by Jamil Al-Amin
Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (also rec’d by Nipsey Hussle)
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (also rec’d by Emma Watson)
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (also rec’d by Gloria Steinem)
How to Cure a Ghost by Fariha Róisín
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty (also rec’d by Questlove)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby (also rec’d by Roxane Gay)
(via Noname’s Book Club)