A 2015 study concluded that 79 percent of the publishing industry was staffed by white employees. While the industry has (hopefully) been working toward diversity in the past several years, there's certainly no shortage of excellent writing from women of color. Just look at Jesmyn Ward, a black novelist who penned the haunting National Book Award winner Sing, Unburied, Sing, or Celeste Ng, an Asian-American author who continues cranking out best-sellers like Little Fires Everywhere (which, by the way, is getting its own Hulu treatment).
In 2019, stock your shelves and update your reading lists with these books by women of color, from Elizabeth Acevedo's young adult family drama, With the Fire on High, to Helen Hoang's romantic read, The Bride Test.
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The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay's debut novel, is about a Bangalore woman named Shalini who attempts to find a traveling salesman from her childhood after her mother's death based on the suspicion that her mother's death and his disappearance are related. When Shalini visits the man's hometown of Kashmir, she finds herself amidst political turmoil.
Release date: Jan. 15
Angie Thomas is none other than the bestselling author behind the film adaptation of The Hate U Give, which stars Amandla Stenberg and KJ Apa. Her upcoming YA novel, On the Come Up, follows a teenager named Bri, the daughter of a late underground hip-hop legend who wants to become one of the greatest rappers of all time.
Release date: Feb. 5
Writer Esmé Weijun Wang, a former lab researcher at Stanford, analyzes schizophrenia from different angles in The Collected Schizophrenias, drawing from personal experience as well as incorporating research about the mental illness.
Release date: Feb. 5
A British author of Nigerian descent, Helen Oyeyemi has been writing books based on fairy tales for a while, including Boy, Snow, Bird. In Gingerbread, she is influenced by children's stories around the pastry, telling the story of a daughter whose memories of making the treat with her mother put her on a search for a family friend that exposes her to secrets of jealousy and ambition.
Release date: March 5
Etaf Rum's debut novel, A Woman Is No Man, weaves through the lives of three generations of Palestinian women living in America. Herself the daughter of Brooklyn Palestinian immigrants, Rum has been told that "a woman is no man," and uses that as a touchstone to tell the story of powerful women.
Release date: March 5
Best known for her best-selling 2018 novel Love, Hate, & Other Filters, author Samira Ahmed spins a harrowing, relevant tale set in the near-future United States in which a teenage girl and her parents are forced to attend an internment camp for Muslim Americans. Entertainment Weekly calls Internment one of "2019's most politically urgent reads."
Release date: March 19
The title character of Candice Carty-William's Queenie is a 25-year-old Jamaican woman who works at a national newspaper, where she navigates a sea of white middle class peers. Following a rough break-up, Queenie seeks solace in men who are more or less the same grade as the salacious Daniel Cleaver.
Release date: March 5
Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Sabrina & Corina is a collection of short stories about Latinas of indigenous descent living in the American West. The debut short story collection has pieces about everything from a sex worker and her daughter who leave their ancestral home to a woman leaving prison to return to a gentrified city.
Release date: April 2
Susan Choi is perhaps best known for her novel, American Woman, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2003. Her next novel, Trust Exercise takes a stab at teen drama at a competitive performing arts high school in an American suburb in the '80s. At the school, David and Sarah, two fledgling freshmen, intensely fall in love and captures the attention of their charming acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
Release date: April 9
With a background as a trial lawyer herself, Angie Kim pens this thrilling courtroom drama about a pair of scientists who develop Miracle Submarine, a pressurized oxygen chamber that could potentially cure certain diseases. The machine explodes, killing two people and shaking up the small rural Virginia town in which Miracle Creek takes place.
Release date: April 16
Acevedo recently won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The Poet X, which is about an Afro-Latina high school student who uses slam poetry to make herself heard in her Harlem neighborhood. With the Fire on High is another young adult novel, this time about a teenage girl who takes care of her daughter and abuela while aspiring to become a chef.
Release date: May 7
Romance readers might be familiar with Helen Hoang's first romance novel, The Kiss Quotient, a sexy and sweet story about an autistic woman who hires a male escort to learn about relationships. The Bride Test follows the romance of another autistic character in Hoang's debut work, this time a man named Khai whose mother goes to Vietnam to find a bride for him.
Release date: May 7
The titular character in Nicole Dennis-Benn's Patsy is a Jamaican immigrant who gets a visa to go to Brooklyn, leaving behind her devout mother and daughter, Tru, and reuniting with her love Cicely. The novel touches upon the issues at the juncture of immigration and womanhood as we see the inner turmoils that Tru and Patsy must battle across seas and continents.
Release date: June 4
The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Jia Tolentino is a staff writer from The New Yorker who's written about a range of different topics from Juul to Thomas the Tank Engine with wit and sharpness. Her book Trick Mirror will be a collection of nine essays.
Release date: Aug. 6
