Comprehensive exams take place over a course of 48 hours based on the reading and notation of major and minor area lists. These are those lists…

The Lists.

Major (20th-21st Century African American Literature)

Fiction/Novels

  1. 1899, The Conjure Women, Charles Chestnutt

  2. 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, James Weldon Johnson

  3. 1923, Cane, Jean Toomer (JM)

  4. 1928, Quicksand, Nella Larsen (JM)

  5. 1929, Passing, Nella Larsen (LH)

  6. 1931, Black No More, George Schuyler

  7. 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (SadieC)

  8. 1938, Uncle Tom’s Children, Richard Wright

  9. 1940, Native Son, Richard Wright (BT)

  10. 1946, The Street, Ann Petry

  11. 1952, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (JM)

  12. 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

  13. 1953, Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks

  14. 1956, Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin (Liz)

  15. 1970, Bloodline, Ernest Gaines

  16. 1970, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

  17. 1973, Sula, Toni Morrison (NS)

  18. 1976, Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed

  19. 1976, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred Taylor*

  20. 1976, Meridian, Alice Walker

  21. 1977, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

  22. 1979, Kindred, Octavia E. Butler**

  23. 1980, The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara

  24. 1982, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, Mildred D. Taylor*

  25. 1982, The Color Purple, Alice Walker (SadieC)

  26. 1983, Praisesong for a Widow, Paule Marshall

  27. 1984, Everett Anderson’s Goodbye, Lucille Clifton* --

  28. 1986, Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams

  29. 1987, Beloved, Toni Morrison

  30. 1987, Mama Day, Gloria Naylor

  31. 1989, A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan

  32. 1990, Middle Passage, Charles R. Johnson

  33. 1990, Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman

  34. 1993, Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (ordered)

  35. 1993, A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines

  36. 1996, The White Boy Shuffle, Paul Beatty

  37. 1997, Paradise, Toni Morrison

  38. 1999, Caucasia, Danzy Senna

  39. 1999, The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead

  40. 2001, Erasure, Percival Everett (JM)

  41. 2003, The Known World, Edward P. Jones

  42. 2003, The Fall of Rome, Martha Southgate

  43. 2006, Nat Turner, Kyle Baker

  44. 2009, Bayou, Jeremy Love

  45. 2011, Salvage the Bones, Jeremy Ward

  46. 2012, Home, Toni Morrison (JM)

  47. 2013, March: Book One, Andrew Aydin and John Lewis

  48. 2015, Counternarratives, John Keene

Poetry

  1. 1895, Lyrics of a Lowly Life, Paul Laurence Dunbar

  2. 1922, Harlem Shadows, Claude McKay

  3. 1925, Color, Countee Cullen

  4. 1927, God’s Trombones, James Weldon Johnson

  5. 1942, For My People, Margaret Walker

  6. 1945, A Street in Bronzeville, Gwendolyn Brooks

  7. 1959, Selected Poems, Langston Hughes

  8. 1961, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka

  9. 1966, Selected Poems, Robert Hayden

  10. 1968, In The Mecca, Gwendolyn Brooks

  11. 1983, Collected Poems, Sterling A. Brown

  12. 1986, Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove (JM)

  13. 1994, Neon Vernacular, Yusef Komunyakaa

  14. 1996, The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1995, Nikki Giovanni

  15. 2000, Shake Loose My Skin, Sonia Sanchez

  16. 2006, Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey

  17. 2007, For the Confederate Dead: Poems, Kevin Young

  18. 2010, Lighthead, Terrence Hayes

  19. 2011, Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney

  20. 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, Lucille Clifton

  21. 2016, Olio, Tyehimba Jess

Dramas

  1. 1928, The Purple Flower, Marita Bonner

  2. 1959, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

  3. 1964, Blues for Mister Charlie, James Baldwin

  4. 1964, Dutchman & The Slave, Amiri Baraka (CX)

  5. 1976, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange

  6. 1986, Fences, August Wilson

  7. 1996, Venus, Suzan-Lori Parks

  8. 2001, Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks

Nonfiction

  1. 1901, Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington (JM)

  2. 1903, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois

  3. 1945, Black Boy, Richard Wright

  4. 1955, Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin

  5. 1963, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

  6. 1964, Shadow & Act, Ralph Ellison (JM)

  7. 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X

  8. 1969, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

  9. 1974, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker

  10. 1982, Zami, Audre Lorde (KR)

  11. 1984, Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde

  12. 2006, Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman

  13. 2013, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon

  14. 2015, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (NS)

Critical Works

  1. 1979, From Behind the Veil, Robert Stepto

  2. 1986, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, Werner Sollors

  3. 1988, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Henry Louis Gates

  4. 1989, selections from Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl Wall

  1. 1992, Playing In the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison

  2. 1993, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy

  3. 1995, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative, Farah Jasmine Griffin

  4. 1995, selections from “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory, Deborah McDowell

  5. 1996, The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan, Trudier Harris

  6. 1997, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya Hartman

  7. 2003, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Brent Edwards

  8. 2003, In the Break, Fred Moten

  9. 2010, Extravagant Abjection, Darieck Scott

  10. 2011, What Was African American Literature?, Kenneth S. Warren

  11. 2014, Writing Through Jane Crow, Ayesha K. Hardison

  12. 2017, Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination, Kristen Lillvis

  13. 2018, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, Sami Schalk

Minor List (20th-21st Century Children's and Young Adult Literature

Fiction (early readers, chapter books, novels)

  1. 1908, Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maude Montgomery (ED)

  2. 1922, Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams --

  3. 1924, The Boxcar Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner (ED)

  4. 1926, Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne

  5. 1945, Stuart Little, E.B. White

  6. 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

  7. 1955, Beezus and Ramona, Beverly Cleary

  8. 1962, A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L’Engle (SadieC)

  9. 1963, The Watson’s Go To Birmingham, Christopher Paul Curtis

  10. 1967, The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton

  11. 1970, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume

  12. 1970, Sounder, William H. Armstrong

  13. 1971, Black Troubador: Langston Hughes by Rollins, Charlemae

  14. 1974, The Slave Dancer, Paula Fox

  15. 1975, Forever, Judy Blume

  16. 1978, Africa Dream, Eloise Greenfield--

  17. 1978, Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson (ED)

  18. 1979, Escape to Freedom, Ossie Davis

  19. 1983, Dicey’s Song, Cynthia Voigt

  20. 1987, The Whipping Boy, Sid Fleischman

  21. 1987, Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World, Mildred Pitts Walter

  22. 1989, Number the Stars, Lois Lowry

  23. 1994, The Giver, Lois Lowry

  24. 1994, Toning the Sweep, Angela Johnson

  25. 1995, Her Stories, Virginia Hamilton

  26. 1997, I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly,  Joyce Hansen

  27. 1997, Slam, Walter Dean Myers

  28. 1997, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

  29. 1999, Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson**

  30. 1999, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky

  31. 1999, Heaven, Angela Johnson

  32. 1999, Holes, Louis Sachar

  33. 1999, Monster, Walter Dean Myers

  34. 2000, Quinnie Blue, Dinah Johnson--

  35. 2002, Feed, M.T. Anderson

  36. 2002, Postcards from No Man’s Land, Aiden Chambers (MG)

  37. 2003, Bronx Masquerade, Nikki Grimes

  38. 2003, Boy Meets Boy, David Leviathan (ordered)

  39. 2003, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, Carolina Mackler

  40. 2005, Looking for Alaska, John Green

  41. 2006, An Abundance of Katherines, John Green

  42. 2006, Day of Tears, a Novel in Dialogue, Julius Lester

  43. 2006, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

  44. 2006, The Book Thief, Markus Zuzak (NS)

  45. 2007, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie

  46. 2007, Copper Sun, Sharon Draper

  47. 2007, Warriors Don’t Cry, Melba Pattillo Beals

  48. 2008, The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

  49. 2009, Going Bovine, Libba Bray

  50. 2009, When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead

  51. 2010, Shipbreaker, Paolo Bacigalupi

  52. 2010, Smile, Raina Telgemeier**

  53. 2011, Where Things Come Back, John Corey-Whaley

  54. 2011, Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor

  55. 2011, One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia

  56. 2012, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, Kadir Nelson

  57. 2012, Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein

  58. 2013, Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, KateDiCamillo

  59. 2014, El Deafo, Cece Bell **

  60. 2014, Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, Isabel Quintero

  61. 2014, This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki**

  62. 2015, Simon v. The Homo-Sapiens Agenda, Becky Albertalli (ED)

  63. 2015, The Crossover, Kwame Alexander

  64. 2015, Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson

  65. 2016, Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader’s Edition, Sara Schwebel

  66. 2016, The Serpent King, Jeff Zentner

  67. 2017, All American Boys, Jason Reynolds, Brendan Kiely

  68. 2017, The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas

  69. 2017, The Sun Is Also A Star, Nicola Yoon

  70. 2018, Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

  71. 2018, The Stars Beneath Our Feet by Moore, David Baraclay

  72. 2018, We Are Okay, Nina LaCour

  73. 2018, Merci Suárez Changes Gears, Meg Medina

  74. 2018, Piecing Me Together, Renee Watson

  75. 2019, Finding Langston, Lesa Cline-Ransome

  76. 2019, Frankly in Love, David Yoon

  77. 2019, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki

  78. 2019, The Stuff of Stars, Ekua Holmes

Non-Fiction

  1. 1970, Martin Luther King, Jr.: Man of Peace, Lillie Patterson

  2. 1972, 17 Black Artists by Fax, C. Elton

  3. 2001, Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado, Marc Arnson

  4. 2003, The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler, James Corss Giblin

  5. 2005, The Voice that Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights, Russell Freedman

  6. 2007, Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon, Catherina Themish

  7. 2010, Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, Tanya Lee Stone

  8. 2012, Balloons over Broadway:  The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade, Melissa Sweet

  9. 2013, Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America, Andrea Davis Pinkney

  10. 2018, Twelve Days in May: Freedom Ride 1961, Larry Dane Brimner

  11. 2019, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science, Joyce Sidman

  12. 2019, A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, Claire Hartfield