The Gold Trail Literary Collection
From Nobel laureates to the poet writing in a notebook right now — the Gold Trail honors every Black author who ever put pen to paper and refused to be silent.
If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye. Her prose reshaped American literature.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Essayist, novelist, and playwright whose work — from Go Tell It on the Mountain to The Fire Next Time — remains essential.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings changed what autobiography could be.
In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.
Groundbreaking science fiction author who invented Afrofuturism as a literary practice. Kindred and Parable of the Sower are prophetic masterworks.
Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.
The poet laureate of Harlem. His jazz-inflected verse gave the Renaissance its heartbeat.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Anthropologist and novelist whose Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most important American novels ever written.
The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.
Journalist and author of Between the World and Me, a letter to his son about race in America that won the National Book Award.
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.
The Princess of Black Poetry. Her work spans the Black Arts Movement to the present with undiminished fire.
You have to find your own way.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. One of the most decorated novelists of his generation.
I am not a metaphor or symbol. This you hear is not the wind in the trees.
A founding voice of the Black Arts Movement and one of the most powerful poets alive. Her work is fire, grief, and love in equal measure.
This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another.
The only author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three consecutive years, for the Broken Earth trilogy.
A man's got to have a code, a creed to live by, no matter his job.
Creator of Easy Rawlins, the Black private detective who walks through mid-century Los Angeles like a ghost who knows every secret.
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Two-time National Book Award winner from Mississippi. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a haunting masterpiece of Southern Gothic.
Hunting is not those heads on the wall.
Playwright, poet, and political firebrand. Dutchman ignited the Black Arts Movement. Newark's poet laureate.
I wanted to write a book that would make Black Southerners feel less alone.
Author of Heavy, a memoir about body, family, and the American South that reads like a reckoning and a love letter at once.
The past is a country we carry inside us.
Poet and novelist whose The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is a 800-page epic that rewrites American history from the inside.
Black women's interior lives are worthy of exploration.
Her debut story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was a revelation — finalist for the National Book Award and the basis for an HBO series.
I write about the places that made me.
Author of Insurrections and The World Doesn't Require You — linked story collections set in a fictional Maryland county that feels more real than real.
I write poems because I need to survive.
Poet and novelist from Louisiana whose debut collection Negotiations is a fierce, tender examination of Black womanhood.
I want to write stories that feel like they're about right now, even when they're set in the future.
Author of Friday Black and Chain-Gang All-Stars — satirical, brutal, visionary fiction about race and capitalism in America.
From the Nobel Prize to the self-published chapbook — every Black author belongs on the Gold Trail. Tell us who we're missing.
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