Black authors represent a diverse part of literature and have made an impact in many social movements that shaped our present-day society. Celebrate Black History month with WhyHunger by reading Black literature and supporting Black writers! Here is our reading list of books by Black authors centered around food, sustainability, and racial justice.

Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America
by Psyche A. Williams-Forson

This book illuminates how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating, detailing how food shaming is used as a mechanism of control and surveillance over black bodies.  

Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability
Edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman

A collection of studies documenting how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives.

We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy
by Jessica Gordon Nembhard

A winning anthology that explores the legacy of “Black and brown farmers”. It brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today.

Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage
by Dianne D. Glave

This work discusses how contemporary African American culture is usually seen as an urban culture. It explores the genesis of Black environmentalism and urges interested urban dwellers to “get back to the land.”

Unbowed
by Wangari Maathai

An inspirational memoir of the first African woman, and the first environmentalist, to win the Nobel Peace Prize