African American Literature

AALBC.com is the oldest, largest, and most frequently visited web site dedicated to books by, or about, people of African descent. Started in 1997, AALBC.com is a widely recognized source of information about Black authors.

New York Public Library.
The African American Women Writers of the 19th Century Guide originated from the Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century site that included fully accessible published works, writer biographies, and citations for these works. In this guide, researchers will find original content from the site; direct links to plain text digital books for all and full view for many; related Schomburg collections; online resources; and much more.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth), a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research.

"North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of Black people struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people and some significant fictionalized first-person accounts of enslavement published in English before 1920.

From the National Humanities Center, this guide includes essays by leading scholars on slave narratives, Pigmentocracy, Segregation, African American Protest Poetry and more.

This website is a part of Lift Every Voice, a year-long, nationwide celebration of the 250-year tradition of African American poetry.

Poems, articles, and podcasts that explore African American history and culture.

The Center for Black Literature has been—and continues still—to expand, broaden, and enrich the public’s knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of the value of Black literature. In keeping with its mission, the staff at CBL began compiling a reading list of titles that we and our colleagues turn to for fortitude, inspiration, and uplift. These titles provide impactful narratives that reflect the rich, wide ranging literary genres in which Black writers use their voices to express their experiences and to center on the political and social consciousness that represents varied Black experiences, in America, the Caribbean, and abroad.