Top Picks: Books Edited by Toni Morrison

You may know her for her poetic prose and spellbinding novels like Beloved or The Bluest Eye. But before Toni Morrison was an author, she was an editor. During a 16-year tenure at Penguin Random House publishing (1967 to 1983), Morrison edited a cohort of nascent visionaries. Among them, civil rights activist Angela Davis, novelists Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara and poets Lucille Clifton and June Jordan stand out as Black-woman writers that Morrison helped to infiltrate the largely white and male world of literary publishing. As the 5-year anniversary of her passing (August 5, 2019) approaches, enjoy the fruits of writerly collaboration by reading a book edited by Morrison.

Part political coming-of-age story, part prison diary, Angela Davis An Autobiography remains relevant 50 years after its original publishing for its poignant descriptions of her arrest and imprisonment by the FBI. Describing neglect and abuse by guards as well as prisoner-led systems of support, this book recounts the core experiences behind much of Davis's activism around prison abolition. 

In Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Blues singer and Kentuckian Ursa comes to terms with the gendered violence that has plagued her family for generations, stretching back to a Brazilian slave master after which the novel is named. Morrison described Ursa as “a kind of combination Billie Holiday and Fannie Lou Hamer. Poignant, frail and knee buckling. She was every wilted gardenia, and every plate of butterbeans. She was lye cooked in hominy.” 

In The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara takes us to a small, fictional town in Georgia where a group of black women turn to the restorative powers of salt to heal the wounds that American life has inflicted upon them. Bambara’s writing, much like that of Morrison, is notable for its rich symbolism and lyricism, its centering of a Black American vernacular English and its deep forays into the psyches of its characters. 

The Black Book by M. A. Harris is genre-defying historical collage. Encounter a 200-year archive of Black American life: from the records of our births and bulletins for our sale, to the newspapers, music, photographs, films, textiles, advertisements and patents we made to celebrate our survival, or others made to denigrate it. Beautiful or hideous, this book is unflinching in its portrayal of Black American history.