From the Book - First 37 Ink/Atria Books hardcover edition.
Foreword: Our first stories / Nikki Giovanni ; Introduction: Reading matters / Stephanie Stokes Oliver --
The peril, 1800-1900. Suspected of having a book / Frederick Douglass ; Nine years deprived of a sheet of paper / Solomon Northrup ; A whole race begins to read / Booker T. Washington ; The Negro in literature and art / W.E.B. Du Bois --
The power, 1900-1968. Books and things / Zora Neale Hurston ; Poetry is practical / Langston Hughes ; The business of the writer / James Baldwin ; Turning point / Malcolm X ; Lessons in living / Maya Angelou ; Morehouse College / Martin Luther King Jr. ; The site of memory / Toni Morrison ; Where are the people of color in children's books? / Walter Dean Myers ; Reading for revolution / Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] ; Twenty-one / Alice Walker ; A temporary library in a small place / Jamaica Kincaid ; What is an African American classic? / Henry Louis Gates Jr. ; New Black scribe / Terry McMillan --
The pleasure, 1968-2017. MFA vs. POC / Junot Díaz ; Create dangerously / Edwidge Danticat ; How to write / Colson Whitehead ; From Jamaica to Minnesota to myself / Marlon James ; I once was Miss America / Roxane Gay ; The mecca / Ta-Nehisi Coates ; The danger of the single story / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie --
Bonus feature. What books mean to me / President Barack Obama ; an interview with Michiko Kakutani.
