DEI Reading Lists

"To discover the truth behind her mother's mysterious death, a teen girl infiltrates a magical secret society claiming to be the descendants of King Arthur and his knights" After her mother dies in an accident, Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC-Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape-- until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus. A young mage who calls himself a 'Merlin' attempts-- and fails-- to wipe Bree's memory of everything she saw. His failure unlocks Bree's own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now she'll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

Octavia E. Butler's 1979 masterpiece and ground-breaking exploration of power and responsibility, for fans of The Handmaid's Tale, Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who will become Dana's ancestor. Yet each time Dana's sojourns become longer and more dangerous, until it is uncertain whether or not her life will end, long before it has even begun....

Octavia E. Butler's bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred , now in graphic novel format. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler's mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century. Butler's most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana's own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him. Frightening, compelling, and richly imagined, Kindred offers an unflinching look at our complicated social history, transformed by the graphic novel format into a visually stunning work for a new generation of readers.

Binti has just been invited to study at Oomza University, the best school in the galaxy. However, accepting will mean not only leaving behind her family and the Himba people but also putting herself in the middle of a war with the Meduse, a terrifying alien race not to be reckoned with.

Essun comes home one day to find her husband has killed their son and kidnapped their daughter. She must journey through a broken and war-torn world to find and save her daughter, all during the collapse of the all-powerful empire that has ruled over the world for a thousand years.

Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city. Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five. But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

This anthology gathers fiction and essays from classic writers of Black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction like Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley, and more.

In the year 2025 on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Lauren Olamina is left to fend for herself when a fire destroys her family's compound. While making her way north to safety, along with a handful of other refugees, Lauren comes up with a revolutionary idea that may save all of mankind.