7 Books By Black Authors to Read for the 2025 Read Harder Challenge
It’s the second month of the 2025 Read Harder Challenge as well as Black History Month, so today I have seven books for you by Black authors that also check off Read Harder tasks. More than half of these books are also queer, so if you’re going for that bonus task of completing the challenge using all queer and/or BIPOC books, you’re in luck.
This is hardly a complete list, though. Let me know in the comments if you’d like more recommendations of books by Black authors that complete tasks. For task one alone, there are countless options: here are some 2025 books by Black authors to start with.
Now, let’s get into the books!
1) Read a 2025 release by a BIPOC author.
Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory (April 8)
Jasmine Guillory is a beloved romance author best known for her The Wedding Date series, and now she has a queer romance coming out! Avery is almost 30, newly single, and ready to start casually dating, especially women. The only problem is that she doesn’t have a lot of confidence in her romantic life. Taylor, on the other hand, is a heartbreaker who has plenty of casual romantic experience. She offers to tutor Avery in the art of flirting. She needs the distraction, because she just took up her best friend on a bet that she can’t go two months without sleeping together. But as much as Avery and Taylor assure their friends this arrangement isn’t serious, Taylor is beginning to worry that she’s ruining the best chance she’s ever had at a real relationship.
5) Read a book about immigration or refugees.
Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali
As war engulfs Somalia, Ali and his family flee to the Netherlands, and later move on to Toronto. Unfortunately, the people around Ali are not ready to give him the love he deserves, and in addition to the racism and Islamophobia all around them, he experiences painful homophobia and abuse from within his own home.
Ali wrote this book when he was living in a homeless shelter, and it was published by the University of Regina Press as part of a series “written by authors who have caught in social and political circumstances beyond their control.” —Leah Rachel von Essen
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Do you have any more recommendations? Let’s chat in the comments!
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