What we’re about
This is a book club for Black women interested in reading and discussing books written by Black women (including but not limited to American, Caribbean, African, and European authors). I started this group to bring together people who love to read and who want to build a community focused on discovering, discussing, and celebrating the literature of Black women writers from across the African diaspora. We read literary fiction and nonfiction. We will meet monthly for book discussions at various locations across the city.
Featured event
Book Club Run: Gwendolyn Brooks's Bronzeville (with Read & Run Chicago)
Register for this Book Club Run ($40) on Read & Run Chicago's page: https://www.readandrunchicago.com/events/bookclubrunofgwendolynbrooks. There is also an option to attend the free post-run discussion only.
Run with Read & Run Chicago guide and Black Girls Read Book Club founder Cynthia Okechukwu on a five-mile journey through Bronzeville honoring the life and legacy of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, often called the “Oracle of Bronzeville."
Along the way, you’ll visit places where Brooks lived, worked, and shaped Chicago’s South Side in the mid-1900s, as well as landmarks that inspired her writing about Black urban life and nurtured artists of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
The run concludes with light bites and a post-run conversation.
As with all Book Club Runs, we strongly recommend you read prior to attending. Sites along our route will be connected to poems featured in Selected Poems. Grab a copy from your local library branch or purchase from your favorite indie bookstore or online on Read & Run Chicago's Bookshop affilate page.
Upcoming events
4
Book Club Run: Gwendolyn Brooks's Bronzeville (with Read & Run Chicago)
Hall Branch, Chicago Public Library, 4801 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL, USRegister for this Book Club Run ($40) on Read & Run Chicago's page: https://www.readandrunchicago.com/events/bookclubrunofgwendolynbrooks. There is also an option to attend the free post-run discussion only.
Run with Read & Run Chicago guide and Black Girls Read Book Club founder Cynthia Okechukwu on a five-mile journey through Bronzeville honoring the life and legacy of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, often called the “Oracle of Bronzeville."
Along the way, you’ll visit places where Brooks lived, worked, and shaped Chicago’s South Side in the mid-1900s, as well as landmarks that inspired her writing about Black urban life and nurtured artists of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
The run concludes with light bites and a post-run conversation.
As with all Book Club Runs, we strongly recommend you read prior to attending. Sites along our route will be connected to poems featured in Selected Poems. Grab a copy from your local library branch or purchase from your favorite indie bookstore or online on Read & Run Chicago's Bookshop affilate page.
1 attendee
Author Event: Book Talk + Signing with Angela Flournoy at Call & Response Books
Call & Response Books, 1390 E Hyde Park Blvd, Chicago, IL, USLet's join Call & Response Books to celebrate the release of award-winning author Angela Flournoy's newest book, The Wilderness! You must register for this event here.
Call & Response Books is a Black woman-owned bookstore that centers books by Black authors and other authors of color. Angela will be joined in conversation by writer, culture critic, and professor Lauren Michele Jackson.
20 attendees
•Online#108: The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
OnlineOur October book selection is The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy! Flournoy will be in Chicago this month for her book tour. Join us for her book talk and signing at Call & Response Books in Hyde Park.
About the book: Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.
Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.
As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.
The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing The Wilderness and Flournoy's debut novel The Turner House on Bookshop (affiliate links).
34 attendees
•Online#109: Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
OnlineOur November book selection is Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur.
About the book: On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.
This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou. Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she passed away in September 2025.
***Support Black Girls Read Chicago by purchasing Assata: An Autobiography on Bookshop (affiliate link) or at your favorite Black-owned independent bookstore.
35 attendees
Past events
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