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.

A linked memoir of personal and communal loss: the author recounts the deaths of five Black men connected to her across roughly four years and situates those deaths within family history, local conditions, and systemic forces.

Set in the violent 1850s, the novel follows Henry Shackleford, a young enslaved boy who becomes involved with abolitionist John Brown.

A Cup of Water Under My Bed is a memoir in linked essays about growing up Colombian–Cuban in a working-class immigrant family.

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.

A writer trains and lives with a hawk as she processes bereavement, using close attention to the bird and falconry practice as a way to reckon with grief.

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 fictional first-person memoir presenting the life and travels of Estebanico (Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori), a Moroccan enslaved man who survives the Narváez expedition and recounts his experience in the New World.

A nonfiction letter from Ta‑Nehisi Coates to his teenage son that explains what it feels like to be Black in the United States.