Mixed Race Studies

Color Me In, A Novel

Delacorte Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2019-08-20
384 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525578239
eBook ISBN: 9780525578246
Audiobook ISBN: 9781984889140

Natasha Díaz

Debut YA author Natasha Díaz pulls from her personal experience to inform this powerful coming-of-age novel about the meaning of friendship, the joyful beginnings of romance, and the racism and religious intolerance that can both strain a family to the breaking point and strengthen its bonds.

Who is Nevaeh Levitz?

Growing up in an affluent suburb of New York City, sixteen-year-old Nevaeh Levitz never thought much about her biracial roots. When her Black mom and Jewish dad split up, she relocates to her mom’s family home in Harlem and is forced to confront her identity for the first time.

Nevaeh wants to get to know her extended family, but one of her cousins can’t stand that Nevaeh, who inadvertently passes as white, is too privileged, pampered, and selfish to relate to the injustices they face on a daily basis as African Americans. In the midst of attempting to blend their families, Nevaeh’s dad decides that she should have a belated bat mitzvah instead of a sweet sixteen, which guarantees social humiliation at her posh private school. Even with the push and pull of her two cultures, Nevaeh does what she’s always done when life gets complicated: she stays silent.

It’s only when Nevaeh stumbles upon a secret from her mom’s past, finds herself falling in love, and sees firsthand the prejudice her family faces that she begins to realize she has a voice. And she has choices. Will she continue to let circumstances dictate her path? Or will she find power in herself and decide once and for all who and where she is meant to be?

The Gap Toothed Banister: A Tale of Anglo-India

Niyogi Books
2013-09-16
297 pages
5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-9381523711

Juliette Banerjee

The Gap-Toothed Banister – A Tale of Anglo-India is a close, compassionate look by Juliette Banerjee, an Anglo-Indian, at her community facing the challenges of change. It portrays with clarity the lives of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta during the 60s and 70s. In a shabby apartment block in Central Calcutta, four families, the Renshaws, the D’Cruzes, the Johnsons and the Vincents live in harmony. This smooth tempo changes forever one humid night when one of the families’ children are singled out, one lauded, the other randomly attacked. Tragedy and horror seem to haunt the apartment block. The next day a resident is raped by a servant. The social fabric has been rent in a way that tilts this world. It brings together all the other families of the ‘mansion’, as this block of flats is wryly nicknamed. The Gap-Toothed Banister is a love story, not in kindergarten hues but with softer colours of hope and faith. It is a story of a people more confused than disloyal, puzzled by a lack of appreciation for their myriad talent and fuelled by an anger at what is perceived as scornful rejection. The Gap-Toothed Banister will be of immense interest to all curious about the mores and magic of Anglo-India.

Bridge of Triangles

University of Queensland Press
1994
140 pages
ISBN: 978 0 7022 2639 7

John Muk Muk Burke

1993 David Unaipon award-winning novel about exile and longing in a mixed-race community. It explores identity issues in an inner-city environment devoid of values and family heritage. Inevitable conflict as the protagonist must cross the bridge into the landscape of his Wiradjuri ancestors. This striking new edition features a haunting cover photograph symbolising the loneliness and single-mindedness of the central character’s plight.

Chris Leeton is tormented but also sustained by his growing need to cross over into the landscape of his aboriginal ancestors. After the night of the flood, his Wiradjuri mother resolves to take her four children away from their riverbank home and her unhappy life with Chris’s white father. In the struggle to keep the family together in Sydney’s grim commission housing, schoolboy Chris is tender witness to poverty and despair. In time he comes to understand that they are exiles in their own land. He senses that it is his generation which must cross the bridge back to that landscape which defines his people’s existence.

Band of Angels, A Novel

Louisiana State University Press
August 1994 (originally published in 1955)
375 pages
5.50 x 8.50 inches
no illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780807119464

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. At her father’s death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods of American History as seen through the eyes of star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war’s end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist. Despite sporadic periods of contentment, Amantha finds life with Tobias trying, and she is haunted still by her tangled past. “Oh, who am I?” she asks at the beginning of the novel. Only after many years, after achieving a hard-won wisdom and maturity, does she begin to understand that question.

Band of Angels puts on ready display Robert Penn Warren’s prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

Sabrina & Corina: Stories

One World (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2019-04-02
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525511298

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.

Starling Days

Hodder & Stoughton
2019-07-11
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781473638365

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she’s not about to jump but they don’t believe her. Her husband, Oscar is called to pick her up.

Oscar hopes that leaving New York for a few months will give Mina the space to heal. They travel to London, to an apartment wall-papered with indigo-eyed birds, to Oscars oldest friends, to a canal and blooming flower market.

Mina, a classicist, searches for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women.

But she finds a beam of light in a living woman. Friendship and attraction blossom until Oscar and Mina’s complicated love is tested.

The Other Room

Crown Publishers
1947
274 pages
ISBN 13: 9780000100184

Worth Tuttle Hedden (1896-1985)

Winner of the Southern Authors Award

A Southern White Girl Gets The Shock Of Her Life

The iron grillwork of the gate stood between them…..and so did years of tradition and social custom. It was a barrier, built by hate and fear, between one color and another. He might have crossed that line, and lived on her side–but he was too proud to pass for white.

This prize-winning novel is about a young woman who unknowingly signs up to teach classes at an all-black college in New Orleans in 1920. It is one of the best—and earliest—views of breaking the color line as well as a touching love story of a man and woman of different races.

In the evening she was on a train, rushing towards New Orleans. Her first job waited for her; she was counting off the miles to adventure, romance, and independence. In the morning, shamed and horrified, she was fighting the necessity to quit, to go home to a scornful family and admit failure.

Nina Latham was a southern girl, trained in a rigid code of black and white. She wanted to get away from home, but when she signed for her new job she didn’t know she would be working with Negroes, eating with them, living among them. And certainly she didn’t know that she would meet handsome young Leon who could have passed for white—but wouldn’t.

Girl, Woman, Other

Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin UK)
2019-05-02
464 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780241364901
Ebook ISBN: 9780241985007

Bernardine Evaristo

Teeming with life and crackling with energy – a love song to modern Britain, to black womanhood, to the ever-changing heart of London

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, A Novel

University of South Carolina Press
May 2019 (originally published in 1994)
256 pages
5.5 x 8
Paperback ISBN 978-1-64336-018-8

John Gregory Brown

A luminous and heartbreaking tale of identity, devotion, and regret

John Gregory Brown’s debut novel examines family, race, and faith in a heartbreaking tale of identity, devotion, and regret. The story centers on the Eagen family of New Orleans, Irish Catholics of “mixed blood” in a city where race defines destiny. In 1965 Thomas Eagen and his twelve-years-old twins, Meredith and Lowell, abruptly drive off, leaving his second wife, Catherine, and their home. As they cross Lake Pontchartrain, a section of the bridge collapses, injuring Murphy Warrington, an African American man who once worked for Thomas’s father. Murphy becomes the catalyst for a series of revelations about Thomas’s light-skinned black mother and the reasons she abandoned her husband and son when Thomas was an infant.

Black Sheep Boy

Rare Bird Books
2016
208 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1942600374
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1947856066

Martin Pousson

• PEN Center USA Fiction Award Winner
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Winner
• Simpson Family Literary Prize Finalist
• Los Angeles Times Literary Pick
• NPR: The Reading Life Featured Book
• The Millions Best Summer Horror Selection
• Book Riot Must-Read Indie Press Book
• On Top Down Under Book of the Year Finalist
• Best Gay Fiction Selection
• Best Gay Speculative Fiction Selection

Meet Boo, a wild-hearted boy from the bayou land of Louisiana. Misfit, outcast, loner. Call him anything but a victim. Sissy, fairy, Jenny Woman. Son of a mixed-race Holy Ghost mother and a Cajun French phantom father. In a series of tough and tender stories, he encounters gender outlaws, drag queen renegades, and a rogues gallery of sex-starved priests, perverted teachers, and murderous bar owners. To escape his haunted history, Boo must shed his old skin and make a new self. As he does, his story rises from dark and murk, from moss and mud, to reach a new light and a new brand of fairy tale. Cajun legends, queer fantasies, and universal myths converge into a powerful work of counter-realism. Black Sheep Boy is a song of passion and a novel of defiance.