Celebrating Black History Month: Books

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In this thought-provoking study, Carolyn Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans.

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In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape.

This book is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.

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Farming While Black is the first comprehensive "how to" guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture.

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In 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to spend the remainder of his life in upstate New York's Hudson Valley, where he was employed as a gardener by the wealthy, Dutch-descended Verplanck family on their estate in Fishkill Landing.

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“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”
Lanham is a 2022 recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Award

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With a basis in environmental history, this groundbreaking study challenges the idea that a meaningful attachment to nature and the outdoors is contrary to the black experience.

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As an educator and Earth historian, Savoy has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie largely eroded and lost.

In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today.