What we’re about
This is a book club for Black women interested in reading and discussing books written by Black women (including but not limited to American, Caribbean, African, and European authors). I started this group to bring together people who love to read and who want to build a community focused on discovering, discussing, and celebrating the literature of Black women writers from across the African diaspora. We read literary fiction and nonfiction. We will meet monthly for book discussions at various locations across the city.
Upcoming events (4)
See all- #106: Reel by Kennedy Ryan + Summer PicnicPromontory Field House, Chicago, IL
Our August book selection is Reel by Kennedy Ryan. Feel free to bring food and drinks (or even a whole picnic basket!) to enjoy before, during, and after the discussion. UPDATE: We will be doing a book swap during the week with Call & Response and Expand the Classroom. More details to come!
We will meet at Promontory Point, near the Promontory Field House. Our meeting location is in the park by the lake, NOT the restaurant/music venue near 53rd Street. Please leave yourself enough time to find your way, and read the directions under "How to find us" carefully.
About the book: Neevah Saint is ready for the spotlight. After months as an understudy, this is her night to shine. She never imagined he would be in the audience. Canon Holt. Famous film director. Fascinating. Talented. Fine. Before she can catch her breath, everything is changing. Neevah goes from backstage Broadway to center stage Hollywood. From being unknown, to having her name on everyone's lips when Canon casts her as the lead in a star-studded Harlem Renaissance biopic. But forbidden attraction, scandal, and circumstances beyond Neevah's control soon put her dream in jeopardy. Could this one shot—the role of a lifetime, the love of a lifetime—cost her everything?
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing Reel on Bookshop (affiliate link).
- #107: Small Island by Andrea LevyBlackstone Library , Chicago, IL
Our September book selection is Small Island by Andrea Levy!
About the book: Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve.
Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers—in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing Small Island on Bookshop (affiliate link).
- Author Event: Book Talk + Signing with Angela Flournoy at Call & Response BooksCall & Response Books, Chicago, IL
Let's join Call & Response Books to celebrate the release of award-winning author Angela Flournoy's newest book, The Wilderness! You must register for this event here.
Call & Response Books is a Black woman-owned bookstore that centers books by Black authors and other authors of color. Angela will be joined in conversation by writer, culture critic, and professor Lauren Michele Jackson.
- #108: The Wilderness by Angela FlournoyNeeds location
Our October book selection is The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy! Flournoy will be in Chicago this month for her book tour. Join us for her book talk and signing at Call & Response Books in Hyde Park.
About the book: Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.
Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.
As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.
The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing The Wilderness and Flournoy's debut novel The Turner House on Bookshop (affiliate links).
