The culminating piece in our three-part series on our language and culture.

Ibi Zoboi (EEE-bee zoe-Boy) is a Haitian-American, young adult writer most famous for her books American Street, Pride, and Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America. Her newest title, My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, centers on Ebony-Grace Norfleet, a Star Trek loving southerner visiting her father in Harlem for the summer.

If you can’t tell by now, I’m a bit of a library fanatic. I even have a post I wrote about the library hacks I use almost daily.

After you check that out (go ahead, I’ll wait), here are 4 reasons why my heart beats for LAPL:

In 2017, Hannah Ali published The Story of Us with Market Fifty Four, which launched in October of that year. She will be the first contemporary writer to be translated and published in Somali, her native language. The Story of Us is a collection of 4 short stories about womanhood from a Somali perspective.

So You Want To Talk About Race is a hybrid memoir and guidebook for discussing some of the toughest topics here in the U.S. Oluo uses her history and background to insert common racial topics onto her life, showing how the missteps of the majority population create a challenging world for people with Brown skin. Written to and for non-People of Color, So You Want To Talk About Race cuts to the heart of why this subject is so difficult. 

An American Marriage is a hard book to ignore. That shiny "Oprah's Book Club" sticker pulls you in, just long enough to read the dust jacket. It must be good, right? Knowing very little about Tayari Jones before her book blew up, I'm grateful that her beautiful writing is being celebrated.