February is Black History Month! Check out the library’s extensive collection of novels, short stories, poetry, large print, children’s books, audio & eBooks written by Black authors or focused on African American History with titles such as… 

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup  This is the true story of a black man born free in the North who was tricked, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in the South. Northrup, a skilled violinist living in Saratoga, New York, accepted a temporary job as a musician. While traveling, he awoke one morning drugged and bound in a cell. What followed was twelve years of bondage during which Northup experienced the gamut of both kindness and cruelty afforded to slaves in the Southern United States just prior to the Civil War. 


Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward  Jojo is thirteen-years-old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. His mother is in constant conflict with herself and those around her – she wants to be a better mother, but cannot overcome her drug use. When the children’s father is released from prison, she packs her kids and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering.

Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire  Relentless, remorseless, and inspirational, this “horrific, hope-filled story” is certain to haunt a generation of readers. Precious Jones, sixteen-years-old and pregnant by her father with her second child, meets a determined and radical teacher who takes her on a journey of transformation and redemption.




Born a Crime by Trevor Noah  Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.