A reading list for Black Brilliance Month — and every month after
I’ll be honest: I don’t always love the phrase Black history.
Not because history doesn’t matter, it does. Deeply. But because the word history can sometimes make us sound like we belong only to the past. Like we are something to study, instead of something living. Something still becoming.
And Black life, especially Black Canadian life, is not a museum. Often, as Black Canadians, we get lost in the shuffle and are piled in with our American neighbours.
But Black Canadian voices are unique. Black Canada is unique.
It is memory and movement. It is survival and softness. It is family stories in kitchens. It is protest in the streets. It is grief, yes, but also beauty, genius, laughter, longing, and language. It is the auntie who keeps receipts. The teenager trying to find themselves. The poet refusing silence. The novelist telling the truth sideways through story.
So this month, I’m calling it Black Brilliance Month.
And this reading list is my offering: a collection of Black Canadian books that help us read this country more honestly, and read ourselves more fully.
These books matter because they do more than “educate.” They shift us. They give us language. They expose systems. They preserve lineage. They remind us that Black Canadian writing is not a side shelf, it is foundational.
So let’s get into the books.
1. Truth-telling about Canada: Systems, surveillance, and police harm
These are the books that challenge the “nice Canada” myth. They name what many of us have lived, felt, or witnessed, even when the country tries to smooth it over.
Policing Black Lives
A necessary, foundational book for understanding how anti-Black racism is built into institutions in Canada — especially policing, migration, education, and social systems. This one gives language to what people often try to dismiss as “isolated incidents.”
The Skin We’re In
Desmond Cole writes with urgency, clarity, and lived truth. This book helps readers understand what it means to move through Canada in a Black body while the country insists it’s neutral. It’s sharp, personal, and impossible to unread.
They Said This Would Be Fun
A powerful memoir about race, harm, and survival in Canadian university spaces. Eternity Martis speaks to the emotional and psychological cost of being “the only one” in a room — and what it means to keep going anyway.
Black Like Who?
Rinaldo Walcott’s work is essential for anyone trying to understand Blackness in Canada beyond tokenism. This book pushes readers to think about Black identity, culture, and politics as central — not peripheral — to Canadian life.
Until We Are Free
This anthology is a gathering of Black feminist voices, ideas, and organizing. It’s thoughtful, urgent, and deeply rooted in community. Read this when you want to move beyond theory and into the real work of collective liberation.
Race on Trial
A critical and important text for understanding how race is produced, contested, and regulated through legal systems. This belongs in the conversation because Canada’s institutions don’t just reflect race — they shape it.
Why this section matters:
Because if we’re going to talk about Black Canadian books, we need books that tell the truth about the country. Not just what Canada says it is — but what Black people have had to survive inside of it.
History and Lineage: The stories Canada tried to bury
Black people have been here. Black people built here. Black people resisted here. This section is about recovering what was erased, and honoring the writers who refuse national amnesia.
The Hanging of Angélique
A crucial text. Afua Cooper’s work reminds readers that slavery existed in Canada and that Black resistance has always existed too. This book disrupts the lie that anti-Black violence only happened “somewhere else.”
The Book of Negroes
A sweeping and emotional novel that has introduced many readers to Black historical experience connected to Canada. It’s a powerful entry point into conversations about displacement, survival, and what it means to rebuild a life after violence.
Any Known Blood
Lawrence Hill offers a layered, multi-generational exploration of identity and inheritance. This is a book about lineage — what families pass down, what gets hidden, and how history lives inside the body.
They Call Me George
A brilliant and important contribution to Black Canadian labour and social history. This book restores the stories of Black railway porters and the communities, resistance, and dignity they built under impossible conditions.
North of the Colour Line
This one helps map Black life in Canada historically and politically, especially in relation to migration, rights, and belonging. It’s an anchor text for understanding Black Canada across borders and time.
Black Ice
A strong addition for readers who want to go deeper into Black Canadian historical and social realities. It helps expand what counts as “Canadian history” and pushes back against narrow national storytelling.
Why this section matters:
Because history is not just about dates, it’s about power. These books remind us that memory is a form of resistance, and lineage is a form of protection.
Memoir and Becoming: Black Canadian interior life (not just headlines)
Black life is not only public struggle. It is also private becoming. These books matter because they let us into Black interior worlds, family, identity, home, longing, healing, and the everyday work of making a self.
My Mother’s Daughter
Perdita Felicien writes with honesty and heart about family, survival, and ambition. This memoir holds complexity: the love that shapes us, the pain that forms us, and the determination it takes to become ourselves.
Where Beauty Survived
George Elliott Clarke’s memoir carries history, family, and voice in a deeply personal way. It offers a vivid look at how identity is shaped by place, community, and inheritance.
Son of Elsewhere
Elamin Abdelmahmoud reflects on Blackness, faith, language, and belonging with such care. This is a powerful book for anyone who has ever felt “in-between” — between countries, identities, expectations, or selves.
Dear Current Occupant
Chelene Knight writes about home, displacement, and memory in a way that feels intimate and searching. This book asks what it means to build a self when “home” has never felt stable.
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
A deeply thoughtful and tender book that speaks across generations. It holds fatherhood, vulnerability, race, and memory all at once — and reminds us how much is carried in what families do and don’t say.
The Long Road Home
A memoir that bridges the personal and the political beautifully. It gives us the author’s life and reflections while also naming the broader realities of Blackness in Canada — a combination that makes it both moving and deeply instructive.
Why this section matters:
Because Black people deserve to be read as whole human beings — not just symbols, stats, or headlines. These books hold the private truths that shape public life.
Fiction that teaches Canada through story. Novels and stories that let us feel what theory can’t
Sometimes fiction teaches us what policy books can’t. A novel can show you a city. A family. A silence. A grief. A longing. A way of surviving. These books don’t just explain Black Canadian life, they let us live inside it for a while.
Brother
A tender and heartbreaking novel about brotherhood, masculinity, grief, and survival. It captures the emotional cost of growing up Black in a country that often criminalizes Black boys before it ever sees them as children.
Reproduction
Ian Williams gives us family, intimacy, rupture, and identity in a fresh, layered way. This is a brilliant novel for thinking about how people are shaped by what they inherit — and what they refuse.
Frying Plantain
Zalika Reid-Benta writes Black Caribbean girlhood in Canada with humour, precision, and so much heart. This is one of those books that feels familiar in your bones if you know the tension of family, culture, and becoming.
Butter Honey Pig Bread
A lush, emotional novel full of longing, food, love, and intergenerational complexity. Francesca Ekwuyasi gives us Black life with depth and softness — not flattened, not simplified.
The Sleeping Car Porter
Suzette Mayr offers history through character, labour through feeling, and Canada through the people who held up its systems while being shut out of its promises. This one belongs on every reading list.
Dominoes at the Crossroads
This story collection gives range — migration, masculinity, intimacy, dislocation, and home. It’s a great reminder that Black Canadian life is not one narrative; it’s a chorus.
Washington Black
A sweeping, brilliant novel about freedom, invention, and what it means to survive while still imagining more for yourself. This is one of those books that opens up huge questions while still carrying emotional depth.
Why this section matters:
Because fiction helps us feel the texture of Black Canadian life. It fills in what statistics leave out. It gives us breath, body, and voice.
Poetry that holds truth. Language as witness, ritual, and refusal
Poetry is not extra. Poetry is evidence. These books belong on the list because poetry helps us name what regular language can’t hold. It gives us rhythm for grief. Space for spirit. A way to tell the truth without flattening it.
A History of Soul Speak
This title belongs here for how it treats language as inheritance — something carried, broken, remade, and passed on. It helps us think about Black voice as history and future at the same time.
Burning Sugar
A stunning collection that holds migration, memory, mothering, and longing with such tenderness. This is poetry that feels lived-in — intimate, powerful, and deeply human.
Africanology
A bold and necessary poetic text that speaks to Black identity, history, and imagination in ways that push beyond easy reading. This is poetry that asks us to listen harder.
Zong!
A monumental work. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! is not just a poetry collection — it is a reckoning. It confronts the violence of slavery, archives, and language itself. Difficult, yes. Essential, absolutely.
Why this section matters:
Because some truths can only be held in poems. And Black Canadian poetry has always been one of the places where memory and resistance speak most clearly.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t a “theme month.” This is a reading practice.
Black Canadian books should never be seasonal.
But if this month becomes a doorway, if it helps people build a deeper reading practice, then let’s use it well. Let’s use it to move beyond surface-level recommendations. Let’s use it to build a truer, fuller bookshelf.
These books matter because they tell the truth about Canada.
They matter because they preserve lineage.
They matter because they make room for Black interior life.
They matter because they remind us that Black writing in Canada is not a side note, it is central.
So if you’re building your list, start here.
Read one truth-telling book.
Read one memoir.
Read one novel.
Read one poetry collection.
Read across genres. Read across generations. Read like your understanding of this country depends on it, because it does.
