Paying Homage
A verified registry of the people building, making, and shaping what shows up on black.wiki. Over time, verified entries will receive plaques, certificates, and contributor cards — a durable record of who put in the work.
Amanda Gorman — The Hill We Climb
Writers
Amanda Gorman's 2021 Biden inaugural poem.
Audre Lorde — Sister Outsider
Writers
1984 essay collection that founded modern Black-feminist theory.
August Wilson — Fences
Writers
1985 play in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, set in a 1950s Black working-class household.
Imani Perry — South to America
Writers
2022 National Book Award winning travel/cultural memoir.
James Baldwin — The Fire Next Time
Writers
1963 essay collection arguing that Black America's survival depends on white America's reckoning.
Jesmyn Ward — Sing, Unburied, Sing
Writers
2017 novel and second National Book Award winner — Mississippi Gulf Coast family on a road trip to a penitentiary.
Kiese Laymon — Heavy
Writers
2018 Laymon memoir on his Mississippi childhood, body, food, and writing.
Maxine Waters — DNC Speech 2020
Writers
Maxine Waters's prime-time DNC speech in 2020.
Maya Angelou — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Writers
1969 autobiography centered on Angelou's childhood in Stamps, Arkansas.
Maya Angelou — On the Pulse of Morning
Writers
Maya Angelou's 1993 Clinton inaugural poem.
Octavia Butler — Kindred
Writers
1979 time-travel novel that drops a modern Black woman into a Maryland plantation in 1815.
Patricia Hill Collins — Black Feminist Thought
Writers
1990 sociological foundation text of Black feminist epistemology.
Ralph Ellison — Invisible Man
Writers
1952 novel that opens at a Southern Black college modeled on Tuskegee and ends in a Harlem coal cellar.
Roxane Gay — Bad Feminist
Writers
2014 essay collection that brought Black feminist criticism into the mainstream.
Stacey Abrams — 2020 Concession Refusal
Writers
Stacey Abrams's 2018 refusal to concede the Georgia gubernatorial race.
Ta-Nehisi Coates — Between the World and Me
Writers
2015 epistolary essay to Coates's son on Black life in America.
The Color Purple
Writers
Alice Walker's 1982 epistolary novel set in rural Georgia between the wars.
Toni Morrison — Beloved
Writers
1987 novel based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than allow her recapture.
Toni Morrison — Jazz
Writers
Toni Morrison's 1992 novel set in 1920s Harlem.
Toni Morrison — Song of Solomon
Writers
1977 novel that opens with a man leaping from a Mercy Hospital roof in Michigan but ends with a Black flying myth tracing back to Shalimar, Virginia.
Toni Morrison — The Bluest Eye
Writers
Morrison's 1970 debut novel — a girl in 1940s Ohio prays for blue eyes.