February is Black History Month. In honor, I thought I’d put up a list of some of my favorite black genre writers, folks whose work really just blows me away. Note: as usual with this kind of thing, I do not intend this to be an exhaustive list. As I’m posting this kind of off-the-cuff as it were, I’m sure I’ll accidentally leave some wonderful creators out. It’s not intentional at all, and certainly not meant to be a slight.
Maurice Broaddus: I first became aware of Maurice thanks to his Knights of Breton Court trilogy, a modern-urban-gang-warfare take on the Arthurian mythos. His short story collection Voices of Martyrs is brilliant. His two most recent works are the middle-grade novel The Usual Suspects, and the steampunk alternate history Pimp My Airship. He’s also co-edited a number of anthologies including Dark Faith from Apex.
Nnedi Okorafor: Nnedi’s Binti novellas, hard SF mixed with fantasy, sheer blew me away, as did her post-apocalyptic novel Who Fears Death. Her short stories are great as well, and I’m about to read her graphic novel with Tana Ford, LaGuardia.
Tananarive Due: I should be embarrassed that I’ve yet to read one of Tananarive’s novels, based on how much I’ve enjoyed her short stories in various magazines and anthologies over the past few years. Ghost Summer: Stories is a few years old now, but it’s a great place to start on her short fiction.
Nalo Hopkinson: Another author whose short stories I love and whose novels I should have read long since. Some of Nalo’s best stories can be found in Skin Folk: Stories. She’s also the writer of the brilliant addition to DC Comics’ “Sandman Universe” called House of Whispers.
Nisi Shawl: Nisi’s alternate history Everfair, about the creation of an independent African state during King Leopold’s conquest of the Congo, is amazing and thought-provoking, and refreshing in that it’s alternate history that doesn’t center the US Civil War or World War Two. She’s also a great editor (New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color, among others) and the co-author with Cynthia Ward of the non-fiction book Writing the Other.
Victor LaValle: Victor’s short stories are gut-punches of detail and emotion. His novella The Ballad of Black Tom takes on Lovecraft. He’s also a talented editor, most recently of A People’s Future of the United States with John Joseph Adams.
P. Djèlí Clark: The Black God’s Drums is another piece of amazing alternate history that combines steampunk with the supernatural. His other short fiction is great as well.
Nane Kwame Adjeh-Brenyah: Friday Black: Stories was one of my favorite short story collections of last year. Nane’s stories had me thinking about societal forces and systemic racism in ways I hadn’t done so before.
Octavia Butler: No list of black genres authors is complete without her. Parable of the Sower is coming up on my reading list during my next business trip, and as I said last week, Fledgling still disturbs me.
Tade Thompson: I just read Tade’s evocative supernatural poem “Komolafe” in the sixth issue of Occult Detective Magazine. I need to read more by him. A lot more.
Gary Phillips: Like many of the folks on this list, Gary writes in a number of genres, but I’m most familiar with him as a writer of “new pulp” adventure, in anthologies like The Green Hornet Casefiles (edited by Joe Gentile and Win Scott Eckert) and the recent From Sea to Stormy Sea (edited by Lawrence Block).
Okay, your turn readers. There are a lot of black genre writers I’ve read who aren’t on this list, sins of omission based on a deadline and work-loads and such, but there are also plenty out there I’ve never read. Who do you think I should be reading? Give me names in the comments!