Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Other Plays by Lynn Nottage.

Amazon.com's Editorial Reviews:

This collection includes Lynn Nottages best known work, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, which has been produced widely since its premiere in May 1995 and which the Chicago Tribune hailed as "a complex and thought provoking new play." Also included are Mud, River, Stone, Poof, PorKnockers and her latest work, Las Meninas, inspired by the playwrights research into the African presence in 17th century Europe.

Lynn Nottage lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her plays have been produced in many theatres across the U.S. including Second Stage (NY), South Coast Rep (Costa Mesa), Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), Alliance Theatre (Atlanta) and Steppenwolf (Chicago). She has won the Heideman and the White Bird awards and was a runner-up for the Susan Blackburn award.

Yellowman and My Red Hand, My Black Hand: Two Plays by Dael Orlandersmith

Yellowman is a play by Dael Orlandersmith about Alma, a dark-skinned African-American woman, and her childhood friend, Eugene, a light-skinned African-American man, growing up together and yearning to escape the South. The play looks at the harsh realities of internal racism, and explores the ways that the sins of the past become the legacy of the future. Yellowman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.

Jar the Floor
Cheryl L. West

From Dramatists Play Source:

"...a moving and hilarious account of a black family sparring in a Chicago suburb..." --NY Magazine.
"...heart-to-heart confrontation and surprising revelations... first-rate..." --NY Daily News.
"A fresh, spirited evening--genuinely moving." --Washington Post.

THE STORY: A quartet of black women spanning four generations makes up this heartwarming dramatic comedy.

Red Letter Plays
Suzan-Lori Parks

From TCG:

The playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way [John Heilpern, New York Observer and Vogue]," has written two haunting riffs on Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter: In the Blood and Fucking A. Hester La Negrita of In the Blood is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children--"my treasures, my five joys"--who practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up. The letter A is as far as she gets. Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available-- abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her. These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.

Secrets of Gingerbread Men
by Valorie M. Taylor

Book Description
Secrets of Gingerbread Men is a compilation of three novella's chronicling the lives of three, powerful, God-fearing, African American Males.

The Way Forward
by Alice Walker

Review from Booklist
Part memoir, part fiction, and part bibliotherapy, this collection explores several women's heartfelt (and sometimes heartbreaking) relationships with husbands, friends, lovers of both sexes, and family members across generations. The direct homilies about life and love and the "ecology of the soul" have a greeting-card banality, reminiscent of some slogans from the sixties. And yet, it is that generation's struggle for civil rights and for women's rights that fuels Walker's most moving stories and passionate insights. She grabs you from the start with "To My Young Husband," a memoir of her first marriage to a Jewish civil rights lawyer she met on the picket lines in Mississippi. Her account of their decade of happiness and her enduring grief about their breakup ("Did living interracially wear them out?") is achingly personal. Just as strong are her searing accounts of coming of age in a racist society: her own experiences and those passed on by older family members. One great-aunt, like the Ancient Mariner, had to make everyone listen to her family stories of what it was like to be a woman slave, stories you can never forget. In her various persona, Walker also talks intimately about bisexuality and her surprising discovery that she finds women sexy, even as she still yearns with a broken heart for that first husband. Whether writing about race, sex, class, or romance, she celebrates love that "requires us to become intimate with what is foreign."
Hazel Rochman
(Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved )

In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks

THE STORY: In this modern day riff on The Scarlet Letter, Hester La Negrita, a homeless mother of five, lives with her kids on the tough streets of the inner city. Her eldest child is teaching her how to read and write, but the letter "A" is, so far, the only letter she knows. Her five kids are named Jabber, Bully, Trouble, Beauty and Baby, and the characters are played by adult actors who double as five other people in Hester's life: her ex-boyfriend, her social worker, her doctor, her best friend and her minister. While Hester's kids fill her life with joy--lovingly comical moments amid the harsh world of poverty--the adults with whom she comes into contact only hold her back. Nothing can stop the play's tragic end.

In honor of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, who died in 2000

Selected Poems

New York Times
"When Miss Brooks...writes out of her heart, out of her rich and living background, out of her very real talent, then she induces almost unbearable excitement."

Cover to Cover
(information)
by D. M. Brown
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Talk to Me:
Listening Between the Lines
by Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith, an actress and playwright in a category all her own, travels America in pursuit of authentic language, the kind that reveals the truth of a person, not just information. Once she finds that "personal music," she becomes the person through their verbal tics and idiosyncrasies, showcasing them in her critically acclaimed one-women plays. In 1995, Smith took her tape recorder to Washington, D.C., to capture the American presidency. But, she writes, "I knew that I knew nothing about the president, or any public figure for that matter, that the press didn't tell me. I would have to look at the press too." Over the course of five years, she interviewed Washington insiders (George Stephanopoulos, Marlin Fitzwater, David Kendall), members of the press (Ben Bradlee, Mike Wallace, Mike Isikoff), cultural critics (Ken Burns, Studs Terkel), and finally President Clinton himself. The book is a hybrid of transcripts of these interviews, vignettes of capitol politics, and ruminations on language, race relations, and inclusion; the parallel between the theatre and politics; and the potential for genuine human communication between politicians and the people.

The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville:
The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender and Class in African American Theatre, 1900-1940
by Nadine George-Graves

No Surrender! No Retreat!:
African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater
by Glenda E. Gill

Blackberries, Blackberries
by Crystal Wilkinson

"Being country is as much a part of me as ym--who practices writing the alphabet to help herself full lips, wide hips, dreadlocks and high cheek bone Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available--abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her. These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available--abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her. These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.s. There are many Black country folks who have lived and are living in small towns, up hollers and across knobs. They are all over the South - scattered like milk thistle seeds in the wind. The stories in this book are centered in these places."--Crystal Wilkinson

Sorority Sisters
by Tajuana "TJ" Butler

"Butler writes a very engaging story about five African American college women struggling with campus life and the rigors of pledging ... Each woman matures to confront her insecurities through sheer determination to survive not only the pledging process but also the rite of passage between friends and the unique bonds of sorority sisterhood."
Author's Homepage

Lilith's Brood, a science fiction masterpiece by African American female science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler

This novel is a compilation of her Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

"First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light."