Black Art Is Lit | Black Literature, Culture and Iconic Stories

This week on Black Art Is Lit, we’re reading We Listen & We Don’t Judge by Tony Lamair Burks II. Chapter 1, “The Principal, the Pastor, and the Pep Rally,” places us in a real-time decision where leadership, community expectations, and student safety all collide. What seems like a straightforward moment quickly becomes a deeper question of power, responsibility, and who is actually being prote...

This week on BlackArt Is Lit , we’re reading Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge, ahistorical fiction novel set in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn. A disciplined Black community. Dangerous medical work. Secrecy as survival. Libertie is growing up under a respected physician mother who can nearly pass. Libertie cannot. After the rescue of Mr. Ben, the stakes become clear and childhood quietly starts to close...

In this episode of Black Art Is Lit, Nykieria Chaney introduces Burn Down Master’s House by Clay Cane. This historical novel takes place during American slavery and focuses on power, resistance, and the economic system that supported bondage. Within the plantation system, human life is measured by productivity and controlled through both force and narrative.  Early tensions around breeding, value,...

This week on Black Art Is Lit, we begin Loving Donovan by Bernice L. McFadden. The opening chapter introduces us to admiration, alignment, and the quiet power of first impressions. Everything feels measured. Intentional. Almost seamless. But sometimes desire edits our perception, and first chapters are rarely innocent. As we read, consider what it means to want stability, to be drawn to polish, to...

In this episode of Black Art is Lit, we're diving into the opening chapter of Deesha Philyaw's award-winning collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies . This book resonated with women because it tells the truth about the collision between desire and respectability in church spaces. It's specific, the church mothers, the unspoken rules, the particular texture of shame and grace that...

This week on Black Art Is Lit, we’re reading The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez. Originally published in the early 1990s, this book entered the literary world at a moment when Black women writers working in speculative and supernatural traditions were rarely centered, and even less often taken seriously. Gomez, an award-winning Black lesbian writer and cultural worker, built a story that has since...

This week on Black Art is Lit ,we’re reading Straight, No Chaser by Jill Nelson. Written in a moment when Black womenwere navigating media, work, relationships, and public life under intensescrutiny, this book speaks to pressures that still feel familiar today. Expectations around appearance. Respectability. Who is allowed authority. Whois expected to soften. Who is punished for clarity. Nelson wr...

In this episode ofBlack Art Is Lit, we open Mama Day by Gloria Naylor and step into the world ofWillow Springs, a Black community shaped by memory, tradition, and spiritualinheritance.   First published in1988, Mama Day explores traditions within the Black community that wereunderstood without needing to be spoken aloud. Naylor writes from a place ofcultural knowing, creating space for community,...

In this episode of Black Art is Lit , we dive into Invisible Life , the groundbreaking debut novel by E. Lynn Harris that helped redefine Black literature in the 1990s and beyond. Invisible Life was self-published in 1991 after repeated industry rejection and went on to become a bestseller, launching an entire series and solidifying E. Lynn Harris as one of the most influential Black novelists of...

This week on Black Art Is Lit , we open Bling by Erika Kennedy and step straight into the early 2000s music industry, a moment when fame, ambition, and access blurred together. Published in 2004, Bling follows Mimi, a young singer suddenly pulled from a group and positioned for solo stardom after a powerful industry decision shifts everything. In this opening chapter, we’re introduced to the gatek...

In this episode of Black Art Is Lit , Nykieria Chaney reads the first chapter of Pastor Mason "Ma$e" Betha explosive memoir, Revelations: There’s a Light After the Lime . This opening chapter is a rare look inside the mind of one of hip-hop’s most elusive figures—past the shiny suit era, past Bad Boy mythmaking, and straight into the spiritual awakening that changed everything. Ma$e pulls no punch...

In this week’s episode of  Black Art is Lit , host Nykieria Chaney reads the powerful first chapter of  Black Girls Must Die Exhausted  by Jayne Allen, a deeply moving novel exploring the realities of modern Black womanhood. “Black girls must die exhausted” is something that 33-year-old Tabitha Walker has heard her grandmother say before. Of course, her grandmother (who happens to be white) was re...

Octavia Butler didn’t just write fiction—she wrote the future. And in  Parable of the Sower , that future looks a lot like our present. Economic collapse, climate disaster, political instability—it’s all here. In this episode of  Black Art is Lit , host  Nykieria Chaney  reads the first three chapters of Butler’s groundbreaking novel and breaks down why this book is more relevant than ever. Whethe...

This week Nykieria covers Sinful by Victor McGlothin Everybody's got a weakness and Chandelle Hutchins' is a love of material possessions-a love that is causing serious trouble in her marriage. Chandelle's latest object of desire is an expensive new house. Her husband Marvin knows they can't afford it-and he also knows he can't talk Chandelle into giving it up. With their relat...

In this episode, Nykieria covers Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America by Joy-Ann Reid Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family. Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with be...

Monday Charles is missing, and only Claudia seems to notice. Claudia and Monday have always been inseparable—more sisters than friends. So when Monday doesn’t turn up for the first day of school, Claudia’s worried. When she doesn’t show for the second day, or second week, Claudia knows that something is wrong. Monday wouldn’t just leave her to endure tests and bullies alone. Not after last year’s...

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Ne...

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavi...

America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the fantastic tale of slaves that spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and negro spirituals. It is a sugarcoated legend based on an al...

Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.

New York Times bestselling author Priscilla Shirer, widely known for her international speaking, teaching, and writing ministries, brings her new role from the 2015 film War Room into the real lives of today’s women, addressing the topics that affect them most: renewing their passion, refocusing their identity, negotiating family strife, dealing with relentless regrets, navigating impossible sched...

“In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history.” –President Barack Obama, 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony "Just As I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for s...

"Imagine the Black Panthers of the 1960s, only with magic in a stunningly well-written and detailed take of that turbulent time in history." This alternate history fantasy series is set in the turbulent years of 1968-1969 - particularly the month of December, 1969 - when J. Edgar Hoover took on the Black Panther Party. To Raise a Clenched Fist to the Sky is the first book in The Panther Chronicles...

President Joe Biden gives his 2021 Inauguration Speech to America. #JoeBiden #InaugurationSpeech #JoeBidenInaugurationSpeech

This fiery and provocative novel weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There...