on the rooftop by margaret wilkerson sexton

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades (Jan. Please join me in celebrating the books coming our way. In a lifetime of loving books, I’ve perhaps never been as thankful as I have in recent years for the light that books can provide. These are difficult times for so many people, very much including writers, booksellers, librarians, and the bibliophiles who work in publishing. If I’ve missed a title you’re excited about, please consider supporting it by preordering it from your local independent bookstore, placing a hold at your library, telling others about it, or all of the above. And though I love and require poetry, as a novelist and essayist I’m less aware of what’s to come in poetry, so here I address only books of prose.

The term “of color” is a necessarily flawed label with ever-adapting nuances and interpretations. We’re not there yet.Ībout the methodology: these are some of the 2022 books that I, personally, am anticipating, and the list is front-loaded toward the earlier part of the year, as there isn’t as much information yet about books publishing in the fall and later. Since then, I’ve put together such a list every year with Electric Literature meanwhile, I continue to hope that publishing and American letters will become so fully inclusive as to render this effort obsolete. That first list became one of Electric Literature‘s most-shared pieces of 2016, and before long, to my surprise, I heard it was helping inform other publications’ books coverage, teachers’ syllabi, and book prize considerations. If I was coming up short, I thought, then others surely were, too, and maybe it would be useful if I published my findings. In early 2016, I started compiling a list of books I was anticipating by women writers of color because, as a reader and occasional critic, I was having trouble finding such titles. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

On the rooftop by margaret wilkerson sexton