Finding BIPOC authors to fill the 2021 categories

[Lilith]

Jennifer W wrote: "I saw, sadly, that Hank Aaron passed away today. The author of the book The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, Howard Bryant, is a black man. The Last Hero is a song b..."

I was so sad to hear of Hank Aaron's passing! My brothers were huge baseball fans. I'll have to check this out.

[Emerson]

By coincidence, and perhaps PopSugar's intention, this is the year of BIPOC reads. I find the same books croping up and being recommended to me. Considering that I am an US white female, who's too close to 50, and my resident state demographics, and actions; that's a lot of books. That said, I am still going to read plenty of fluffy books that ard probably written by white females. I need something to counter all thaf "serious" reading.

Meanwhile, the books on my TBR
The Storyteller's Secret: A Novel
Trail of Lightning
Black Sun
An American Marriage
Half Light
Leaving Atlanta
Tayari Jones
The City We Became
N.K. Jemisin
The Rape of Nanking
She Would Be King
So You Want to Talk about Race
Children of Blood and Bone
Tomi Adeyemi
The Palace of Illusions
An Unkindness of Ghosts
Honecoming.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
How to Be an Antiracist
Naturally Tan


Previously read, and highly recommended.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Kafka on the Shore
The Bollywood Bride
A Bollywood Affair
[[book:Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood|55938545]
The Lotus Palace
The A.I. Who Loved Me

[Lauren]

Can anyone think of a BIPOC novel about a writer (for the job I want prompt)? Nothing comes to mind and it doesn’t seem to be searchable (results only show books written by BIPOC authors, which of course I have plenty of those)...

[poshpenny]

This is what I could come up with.

The Enigma of Arrival - Autobiographical novel
The Great Passage - Japanese lexicographers

Unsure about this one
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

[Nadine in NY]

Lauren wrote: "Can anyone think of a BIPOC novel about a writer (for the job I want prompt)? Nothing comes to mind and it doesn’t seem to be searchable (results only show books written by BIPOC authors, which of ..."


It's slim pickings!!


On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong - the book is a letter he's writing to his mother. But you probably already read this.

Marrying Buddha by Zhou Weihui

Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba by Reinaldo Arenas - is this author a BIPOC author? He's Cuban, but he looks white.

In Custody by Anita Desai - the character seems more like a professor than a writer?

Ben Singkol by F. Sionil José

Taipei by Tao Lin

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami - the character is a writer? maybe?

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - she writes a blog ... but you've probably read this already

Fish of the Fire by Saisei Murō - this one sounded good but Goodreads doesn't list it!

The Book of Chocolate Saints by Jeet Thayil


and in On the Come Up she writes raps ... if that counts?

[JoDee]

ErasureLauren wrote: "Can anyone think of a BIPOC novel about a writer (for the job I want prompt)? Nothing comes to mind and it doesn’t seem to be searchable (results only show books written by BIPOC authors, which of ..."

[Lauren]

JoDee wrote: "ErasureLauren wrote: "Can anyone think of a BIPOC novel about a writer (for the job I want prompt)? Nothing comes to mind and it doesn’t seem to be searchable (results only show books..."

Oh, I've been meaning to read more Everett - thanks!

And thanks for everyone's suggestions! I've read a few of those, and don't recognize some others, so that's good to know.

Funny enough, the book I started last night for another reason happens to fit. The Mixquiahuala Letters. :)

[Nadine in NY]

Lauren wrote: "Funny enough, the book I started last night for another reason happens to fit. The Mixquiahuala Letters. :)..."


LOL! sometimes the Universe hears your request ;-)

[Lauren]

Nadine wrote: "Lauren wrote: "Funny enough, the book I started last night for another reason happens to fit. The Mixquiahuala Letters. :)..."


LOL! sometimes the Universe hears your request ;-)"

Right?!

[Nadine in NY]

This isn't really about authors for the 2021 Challenge, but it's more about finding BIPOC authors in general. From the GR blog post 10 Books that 'Disrupted' the Literary Status Quo, I was was startled to see the stat:

out of 7,124 books published between 1950 and 2018, 95 percent of them were written by white authors.

It's not the 95% that startled me, it's the total number of books published. That's barely more than 100 books a year!!!

I questioned this stat so I went to the NYT article referenced

For those who can't access NYT, here's part of that article:

First, we gathered a list of English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018. That list came from WorldCat, a global catalog of library collections. We wanted to focus on books that were widely read, so we limited our analysis to titles that were held by at least 10 libraries and for which we could find digital editions.

We also constrained our search to books released by some of the most prolific publishing houses during the period of our analysis: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday (a major publisher before it merged with Random House in 1998), HarperCollins and Macmillan. After all that we were left with a dataset containing 8,004 books, written by 4,010 authors.

To identify those authors’ races and ethnicities, we worked alongside three research assistants, reading through biographies, interviews and social media posts. Each author was reviewed independently by two researchers. If the team couldn’t come to an agreement about an author’s race, or there simply wasn’t enough information to feel confident, we omitted those authors’ books from our analysis. By the end, we had identified the race or ethnicity of 3,471 authors.

We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.

Author diversity at major publishing houses has increased in recent years, but white writers still dominate. Non-Hispanic white people account for 60 percent of the U.S. population; in 2018, they wrote 89 percent of the books in our sample.

Obviously, there are more than 100 books published each year, or my TBR list wouldn't be growing so fast. I don't pay much attention to publisher when I choose books, but now I'm wondering if most of my books are not from the "Big Five" publishing houses.

And then I looked at my stats for this year so far. 40% of the books I've read this year have been by white authors. I'm seeking out books for cultural appreciate months, but other than that I'm not intentionally choosing authors of color over white authors, it's just sort of happening. A fifth of my books have been by BIPOC authors from other countries, the rest are from the US. Which makes me think that the smaller publishing houses must be doing a better job of publishing BIPOC authors?

For those of you who have been intentionally seeking BIPOC authors, are you finding that it pushes you to read from smaller publishing houses?

[Chrissy]

I also think that some percentage of books published each year in the past went out of print and so may not be in enough libraries or in a digital edition now.