About us
Black Girls Read Book Club (also known as Black Girls Read Chicago) is a monthly Chicago-based book club that celebrates Black women writers. This is a book club for Black women interested in reading and discussing books written by Black women from the United States and around the world. We read fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and our book discussions take place at various locations in the city. By collectively elevating and celebrating the work of Black women writers, we affirm that our stories matter.
Featured event
#115: Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola
Our May book selection is Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola! This meeting is now VIRTUAL, since Tolani will join us for the second half for a Q&A!
About the book: The Longe siblings are really botching their parents’ American Dream.
Sola Longe, eldest daughter, estranged from the family, is secretly back home in Chicago for the first time in a decade. She’s a newly single and recently disgraced influencer trying to quietly put her life back together again. The other three Longe siblings aren’t doing much better.
Anjola is in love with her best friend, who just got engaged to someone else; Karen, a college junior and the baby of the family, is grappling with her sexuality and self-image; and Ola, the golden child with a baby of his own on the way, is questioning his marriage and how to raise a Black son in America.
Sola’s unexpected return sets them on a crash course towards each other, and when the four siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents’ Thanksgiving table, a decade’s worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore.
In the wreckage of their fateful reunion, each Longe is forced to reckon with the past, take stock of what really matters, and find a way back to each other. Big-hearted, hilarious, and wise, Leave Your Mess At Home is a poignant exploration of forgiveness, unconditional love, and becoming who you want to be, asking the question: what do we owe to our families, and what do we owe to ourselves?
Purchase Leave Your Mess at Home from our Bookshop or LibroFM affiliate links, or from your favorite independent book store!
Upcoming events
4
#115: Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola
·OnlineOnlineOur May book selection is Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola! This meeting is now VIRTUAL, since Tolani will join us for the second half for a Q&A!
About the book: The Longe siblings are really botching their parents’ American Dream.
Sola Longe, eldest daughter, estranged from the family, is secretly back home in Chicago for the first time in a decade. She’s a newly single and recently disgraced influencer trying to quietly put her life back together again. The other three Longe siblings aren’t doing much better.
Anjola is in love with her best friend, who just got engaged to someone else; Karen, a college junior and the baby of the family, is grappling with her sexuality and self-image; and Ola, the golden child with a baby of his own on the way, is questioning his marriage and how to raise a Black son in America.
Sola’s unexpected return sets them on a crash course towards each other, and when the four siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents’ Thanksgiving table, a decade’s worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore.
In the wreckage of their fateful reunion, each Longe is forced to reckon with the past, take stock of what really matters, and find a way back to each other. Big-hearted, hilarious, and wise, Leave Your Mess At Home is a poignant exploration of forgiveness, unconditional love, and becoming who you want to be, asking the question: what do we owe to our families, and what do we owe to ourselves?
Purchase Leave Your Mess at Home from our Bookshop or LibroFM affiliate links, or from your favorite independent book store!
37 attendees
#116: Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy
Haitian-American Museum of Chicago, 4623 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL, USOur June book selection is Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy! Myriam will join us virtually for a Q&A.
PLEASE NOTE THE EARLIER START TIME. We will begin promptly at 1 pm with a guided tour of the Haitian-American Museum of Chicago, which moved into its new, permanent space earlier this year.
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing* Village Weavers *from Bookshop or from LibroFM (affiliate links).***
About the book: From award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy comes an extraordinary and enduring story of two families—forever joined by country, and by long-held secrets—and two girls with a bond that refuses to be broken.
In 1940s Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship—until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier’s rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal success and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and—perhaps—forgive the past.
Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality, charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart, and envisions two girls—connected their entire lives—who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other’s hearts.
5 attendees
#117: The Wedding by Dorothy West
Blackstone Branch, Chicago Public Library, 4904 South Lake Park Avenue, Chicago, IL, USOur July book selection is The Wedding by Dorothy West!
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing The Wedding from Bookshop or from LibroFM (affiliate links).***
About the book: In her final novel, Dorothy West offers an intimate glimpse into the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast’s Black bourgeoisie on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s.
Within this inner circle of “blue-vein society,” we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from “a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions.” Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.
With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family’s struggle to break the shackles of race and class.
7 attendees
#118: Unapologetic by Charlene A. Carruthers + Picnic and Book Swap
Promontory Point, 5491 South Shore Drive, Chicago, IL, USOur August book selection is Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A. Carruthers!
Stick around after the book discussion for our "Last Days of Summer" Picnic and Book Swap!
- We will meet at Promontory Point (NOT The Promontory restaurant). Please read the "How to find us" details carefully, especially if you plan to drive.
- We will be outdoors by the lakefront, so make sure to dress comfortably and appropriately for the weather. Remember that it's always cooler by the lake!
- What to bring: (1) a chair or blanket and whatever else you need to be comfortable (2) food and drinks for yourself or to share, and (3) at least one new or gently used book to give away or swap.
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing Unapologetic from Bookshop or from LibroFM (affiliate links).***
About the book: A manifesto from one of America’s most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.
Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.
4 attendees
Past events
198
