About Books for Black Kids
Books for Black Kids aims to be the largest searchable directory of children’s books—from infant to high school and (young) adult literature—with a Black protagonist and/or a Black author. This directory also has books for educators and parents with similar criteria, meaning a focus on Black youth and/or a Black author.
Whether you’re looking for a certain genre, language, topic, reading age, author, or country, I hope you’ll find what you need here. I also plan on curating educational materials, resources for parents, and even scholarships to nurture Black children and families.
Books from renowned writers and publishers as well as newcomers and self-published authors are listed here. Authors of all backgrounds are welcome as long as their books feature a Black leading character.
This is a work in progress, but I hope it’ll serve as a resource for years to come. There are thousands of books I’ve yet to cover (and hundreds on the site already with incomplete entries, let’s be honest), but I hope to list as many as possible over time.
How to Use the Books for Black Kids Directory
The book directory currently has over 2,600 listings, and I’m adding books all the time. Here are some tips to use the database to find what you need.
As a note, I’m still filling out a lot of the entries, so not everything is as easily searchable as it will be in the future.
Here are the different classifications for the database:
Type Here
This is pretty self-explanatory. Anything in a book listing can be found by typing it here. You can put titles, authors, genres, topics, languages, countries, names of awards (often listed in a publisher’s book description), illustrators, publishers, translators, that-word-about-that-thing-that-you-think-you-heard-about-the-book…
Basically, almost anything in a publisher’s description of a book as well as the database categories below can be found by writing it here.
The main things that you will not find will be book formats and their associated ISBNs, with the exception of “available as board book.”
Categories
Currently there are over 160 categories in the directory. I’m constantly adding categories to the list. Click here for the latest list of all 160+ categories.
These include:
- genres (e.g., science fiction, fantasy and enchantment, biographies and non-fiction)
- types of books or prose (e.g., novels in verse, poetry, graphic novels and comic books, available as board book, coloring books, activity books)
- themes (e.g., Black joy, ABCs, STEM, multigenerational families, prejudice and racism, positive affirmations, money and finances, sports, disabilities and differences)
- and reading age.
Reading ages are defined as follows:
- Infants and toddlers: Age 2 and under.
- Preschool: Age 3 to 5.
- Elementary school: Age 5/6 to 8/9.
- Upper elementary: Age 8/9 to 11/12.
- Middle school: Age 11/12 to 14.
- High school and (young) adult: Over age 14. This includes YA books as well as books people that age would enjoy reading, without the YA classifier.
- Educators or parents: These books are geared towards parents, educators, and other individuals with an interest in the well-being of Black youth. They will also be designated by the “books for educators” or “books for parents” tag.
Languages
The majority of the books in the Books for Black Kids directory are in English. However, there are bilingual and monolingual listings in about 20 language combinations.
Authors
You can scroll down to your author of choice to see what’s available on the directory.
Not all the authors who currently have books in the directory have an author’s page yet. Similarly, writers who do have an author’s page may be missing some of their books. This is because some listings are incomplete and also because books with multiple authors only seem to show up on the primary author’s page. I’m not sure I can fix the latter, but I’m making progress on the former.
Access the book directory here
If you would like to donate to this project, check out the Books for Black Kids Ko-Fi page:
