Titles that we recommend are featured below. The ones with reviews are noted with an asterisk (*). Some titles are recommended with a caveat.

Elementary | Middle School | YA/Adult | Learn More

Book Uncle and Me

By Uma Krishnaswami

Colorful Mondays: A Bookmobile Spreads Hope in Honduras

By Nelson Rodríguez and Leonardo Agustín Montes

Go Forth and Tell: The Life of Augusta Baker, Librarian and Master Storyteller

By Breanna J. McDaniel

The Great Banned-Books Bake Sale *

By Aya Khalil and Anait Semirdzhyan (Illustrator)

The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq

By Jeanette Winter

The Library Bus

By Bahram Rahman and Gabrielle Grimard (Illustrator)

Love in the Library

By Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Yas Imamura (Illustrator)

Nour's Secret Library

By Wafa' Tarnowska and Vali Mintzi (Illustrator)

Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré *

By Anika Aldamuy Denise and  Paola Escobar (Illustrator)

Pura's Cuentos: How Pura Belpré Reshaped Libraries with Her Stories*

By Annette Bay Pimentel

Richard Wright and the Library Card

By William Miller, R. Gregory Christie

Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library*

By Carole Boston Weatherford

She Persisted: Pura Belpré

By Meg Medina with Marilisa Jiménez García

Miles Morales Suspended: A Spider-Man Novel

By Jason Reynolds and Zeke Peña (Illustrator)

The Secret Library

By Kekla Magoon

Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore

By Char Adams

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II

By Elyse Graham

The Book Thief

By Markus Zusak

The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South

By Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand

Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African Americans in the South

By Mike Selby

The Impacts of Censorship: Research on the Intersection of Censorship and Teaching English

Edited by Katharine Covino, Ann D. David, et al.

Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library

By Wayne A. Wiegand

Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores

By Katie Mitchell, foreword by Nikki Giovanni

Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History

By Laura E. Helton

That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America

By Amanda Jones

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Learn about our criteria for selecting and reviewing titles at Social Justice Books. Feedback on these lists and suggestions for additional titles are welcome.

Most of the books on these lists are linked for more information or purchase to Bookshop (an indie bookstore platform). A small percentage from book sales through these links goes to Teaching for Change.

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