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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6) Read a standalone fantasy book.
The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope
In 1920s Washington D.C., a young woman with the ability to talk to spirits sets out to solve the mystery of who’s been murdering people along Black Broadway. When one of the powerful spirits she speaks with tasks her with stealing a socialite’s magical ring, she and a jazz musician vying for the same artifact put together a ragtag team including a Vaudeville performer and a former “circus freak” to pull off this impossible heist. —Rachel Brittain
8) Read literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author.
The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie
This book feels like the moment before a summer thunderstorm. It’s about a family dealing with the fallout from a tragedy they can’t bear to talk about. We alternate between Ava’s childhood when she was free-spirited and passionate, and her closed-off, practical adult self. Read this to think about race and racism (particularly anti-Black racism), societal norms, growing up, family secrets, and the possibility of kissing a strange woman who shows up at your doorstep.
10) Read a romance book that doesn’t have an illustrated cover.
Learned Reactions by Jayce Ellis
Who can resist a fake dating story? Deion has been in love with his best friend, Carlton, for decades. Carlton needs someone to fake a relationship with him so he can adopt his teenage niece. Deion can’t say no, but he knows he’s setting himself up for heartbreak. As the adoption is pending and they continue to play house, though, the two will have to decide whether to walk away or try to make this new family a reality.
12) Read a staff pick from an indie bookstore.
This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets edited by Kwame Alexander
Weighing in at over 350 pages, and with more than 160 poems, This is the Honey is a treasure. This is meant to be a vast and extensive collection that Alexander describes as “an unbridled selfie” of Black poets in the introduction to the book. The poems are contemporary and, as such, speak of contemporary joys and concerns. It’s meant to be a celebration as much as it is an interrogation, and the overall impact of the gathered poetry is one that will leave all readers with plenty to reflect on. —Anne Mai Yee Jansen
This is currently a staff pick at Powell’s.
13) Read a nonfiction book about nature or the environment.
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Carolyn Finney
Hiking, survivalism, and other outdoor recreational activities tend to be pretty white. Or are at least represented that way. Carolyn Finney delves into why here, drawing on Jim Crow laws, slavery, geography, cultural studies, and environmental history and referencing films, books, and other pop culture and historical materials showing how Black people in the United States have been excluded from enjoying nature the way white people have been able to, and how we can move forward and make the outdoors as accessible, and protected, as it should be. —Caitlin Hobbs
Do you have any more recommendations? Let’s chat in the comments!
Check out all the previous 2025 Read Harder posts here.
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