A series of personal essays by George M. Johnson that trace growing up as a Black queer youth in the U.S., linking autobiographical scenes to direct address to younger Black queer readers.

A first-person memoir tracing the author's journey from an abusive childhood through competitive swimming, substance use, and sexual exploration toward eventual stability in adult life.

Richard Wright's Black Boy is a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood, following life in the segregated American South and his later move to Chicago where he begins a writing career and political engagement.

Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is a verse memoir that records her early childhood and adolescent memories growing up African American in the 1960s.

Janet Mock recounts her path to womanhood from childhood through young adulthood, focusing on the realities of growing up transgender and multiracial in Hawaii and negotiating family, community, and medical systems.

A first-person memoir that links the author's history of sexual trauma to long-term weight gain and the ways her body has been treated by herself and others. The book focuses on physical hunger and its emotional roots while situating those experiences within social reactions, stigma, and personal coping.

Two aging ex-con fathers unite after their sons — a married interracial couple — are murdered, and they set out to find the killers. The immediate pressure is violent revenge complicated by grief, entrenched prejudices, and the challenge of protecting the son's infant.

A firsthand memoir of growing up Black and poor in mid-20th-century rural Mississippi, following the author's life from childhood into her twenties.

A first-person memoir that follows a woman raised in a survivalist, home‑schooled household who leaves that insular world to attend college and later pursue advanced academic study.

A contemporary Black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles is repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation in the early 19th century, where she encounters ancestors and must navigate slavery's social and moral realities to survive and return to her own time.

A first-person memoir that follows the author's experience growing up as the child of an incarcerated parent and the personal consequences that unfolded in family life, identity, and adulthood. The book situates intimate recollection alongside social context to reckon with shame, longing, and the search for belonging.

A first-person memoir that looks closely at a relationship Machado calls the Dream House and how that relationship involved psychological abuse.