Here are 100 books that Citizen Illegal fans have personally recommended if you like
Citizen Illegal.
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I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
It’s funny because he wanted to call it My Nigs, but didn't like the idea of white people saying, I loved your collection My Nigs!
That first poem “My President” just floored me with how he heralded all his friends by nominating them for office, like “the boys outside Walgreens selling candy/ for a possibly fictional basketball team” or the guy who hooks him up with a free slice of pizza as long as Danez gives him time to say salat.
There’s a poem about getting beat up, at once an act of violence and an act of care for while they're beating you up, they’re weirdly making sure they don’t kill you.
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY
Danez Smith is our president
Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
Eve wrote a separate poem to incarcerated youth encouraging them to embrace their emotionality.
She said their tears were rain that they showed existed. It is a powerful poem, an incredible gesture to those working to overcome personal battles. Electric Arches, similarly, is everything you’d hope that a millennial would write. It updates the culture.
She has this poem about Emmett Till as an old man grocery shopping. The normalcy of this imagined life is the sadness of the piece. It basically said that if this man were alive, he'd be a regular guy going about his errands.
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances - Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. Electric Arches invites conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.
I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
If you want a mix tape full of vibrant poets, this anthology has everybody and their mother.
Some of the cats I mentioned in the entries above plus Mahogany Browne, Fatima Ashgar, and so on. Word smiths respected by the literary scene and those hailed by the spoken word movement. If you're interested in the postmodern Hip-hop canon, this is the book for you.
Just as blues influenced the Harlem Renaissance and jazz influenced the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop's musical and cultural force has shaped the aesthetics of and given rise to a new generation of American poets. Edited by poets Kevin Coval, Nate Marshall, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop is the first anthology of poetry from the hip-hop generation. The Breakbeat Poets are multigenerational and multiracial, employing traditional and wild style poetics to narrate a new landscape.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
God bless Neruda, old school favorite of all time. Everybody knows his love poems, but this dude's other poems were equally off the wall.
I guess the social activists would love “El Pueblo” which describes one working man and every working man all the same, how they are invisible but steadfast with their hammers on the coal, laboring day to day making the world go round. It’s the most wonderful memorial.
I also love his odes – “Ode to Criticism” the first one which is like, critics suck and then the second version which is like, well, maybe critics have some worth. There’s “Ode to the Dictionary”, too. We need to resurrect this man, for real.
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda offers the most comprehensive English-language collection ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez).
"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."
This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many…
Two books that I read as a young child were very important to me. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss made me think about riches, poverty, and the power that rich people have to make stupid rules; and poor people have no choice but to obey them. The Japanese Twins from Lucy Fitch Perkins' series on twins from different cultures gave me a life-long interest in cultural differences. Not only did they think differently, depending on their culture, they also had different skin colours. Later I learned about racism when I worked with unhappy displaced children and interpreted for asylum-seekers. I write from a child's perspective, making books accessible to all ages.
I learned from this story why families make the difficult decision to split up and send a father and a child on a dangerous journey for a better life. This family lives in Mexico, facing hunger and destitution. The father and his son became migrants. They walked to America, knowing that they could be split up or one of them die.
In this book, I learned about the Mexican-American War, and the atrocious US policy of splitting migrant children from their parents.
Join a young boy and his father on a daring journey from Mexico to Texas to find a new life. They'll need all the resilience and courage they can muster to safely cross the border - la frontera - and to make a home for themselves in a new land. AGES: 8 to 10 AUTHORS: Alfredo Alva is a stonemason from La Ceja, Mexico. He and his family live in Texas, where he designs architectural details from stone for local architects. He met Deborah Mills while working on a local architecture project, and they worked together to write his story…
My father was transferred to Southern California from Charlotte, North Carolina when I was fourteen years old. I was excited and my friends were jealous. At that point, all I knew about California was the music of the Beach Boys and the Gidget television series. I thought everyone lived on the beach and knew movie stars. I didn’t know there were neighborhoods like Reseda and Anaheim and Fountain Valley, places where people live lives that have nothing to do with the glamour and celebrity of Hollywood. California has been my home for more than fifty years. I still find it fascinating and puzzling, and I still feel like an outsider.
Flower, Grand, First is a collection of poems about Santa Ana, California and Jalisco, Mexico. The title comes from three streets in Santa Ana, where my husband’s family has lived for more than one hundred years. Hernandez’s poems are about place and displacement and examine what it feels like to be an outsider trying to make sense of life in a strange land, always searching for home. In the wonderful poem “My Father Shows Me Catalina” Hernandez writes: “Smile so you both know it’s okay that you are different. But once-in-a-while, the division is so clean it’ll cut into you.”
Gustavo Hernandez’s debut poetry collection, Flower Grand First, moves through the complex roads of immigration, sexuality, and loss. These poems are points plotted on maps both physical and emotional—the rural landscapes of Jalisco, the glimmering plains of memory, the busy cities of California, and the circular paths of grief. Hernandez’s stunning elegies float along a timeline spanning three decades, honoring family, recording a personal history, and revealing a vulnerable but resilient voice preoccupied with time, place, and what is left behind out of necessity.
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
As part of a multiethnic, multicultural family who has lived in multicultural and multiethnic cities on three continents, I am at ease in plural communities. It’s no surprise then that I’m fascinated by how different cultures intersect inside American communities. I’m especially drawn to novels that portray something broader: the shared civic spaces where immigrants from many backgrounds and longtime residents live side by side. As a novelist, I’m interested in how that chorus and multitude of voices intersect—sometimes clashing, sometimes connecting—and how ordinary encounters gradually shape a community. The books on this list stayed with me because they capture that living mosaic of cultures that continues to shape the American story.
Each resident of an apartment complex shares a glimpse of their life, and together those brief stories create a powerful portrait of immigrant experience. The novel reveals both the individuality of each character and the shared emotions that connect them—hope, uncertainty, longing, and resilience.
Reading it felt like listening to a neighborhood speak collectively about the challenge and courage involved in building a new life in America.
A stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love—a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American and "illuminates the lives behind the current debates about Latino immigration" (The New York Times Book Review).
When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, the son of one of their new neighbors, who sees…
I’ve been putting my passport to good use for the last thirty years or so. Few things make me happier than showing up in an unfamiliar place – whether a village in Ecuador, a town in Ireland, or a city in Ghana – and trying to become familiar with the people, the customs, the food, all of it. But I suppose what I love most is a good story. During those three decades, I’ve also become a Professor of English at Arizona State University, where my research has increasingly focused on how artists and ideas move across geographical and cultural boundaries. In my latest book, License to Travel, these various interests come together.
Relayed in the voice of his nine-year-old self, Solito tracks Zamora’s harrowing three-thousand-mile trek from his home in El Salvador to join his mother and father in California.
To reunite with his parents, he must leave behind everything else he has ever known: his village, his friends, his grandparents, and his beloved Tia Mali. What is supposed to be a two-week journey turns into a two-month odyssey, as he makes his way north by bus, boat, and foot, accompanied by a group of strangers who, in time, close ranks to nurture and protect him like a second family.
This affecting story, told with such innocence and immediacy, makes evident the individual, human costs that are too easily overlooked by reporting on US immigration and the staggering statistics that it invariably emphasizes.
New York Times Bestseller • Read With Jenna Book Club Pick as seen on Today • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography • Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award
A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this “gripping memoir” (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family.
Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • One of the New York Public Library’s Ten Best Books of the Year
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence…
I am convinced that my life would be better if I had read more books by Latina/Latine authors while growing up. To be able to see oneself in a story is powerful. I didn’t have that for a long time. It made me feel invisible. It made me feel like being an author was as realistic as becoming an astronaut or a performer in Cirque du Soleil. Now, as a professor of Creative Writing and author of several books (and more on the way!), I dedicated my life to writing the books I needed as a young Latina. I hope others find something meaningful in my stories, too.
Oh my goodness—this book! I couldn’t see the pages in those final chapters because I was crying for these characters and all they went through crossing the southern border into the United States.
To this day, I still remember vivid images and moments from the novel. I won’t spoil the story for you, but here’s one: a female character wearing a baseball cap and jacket and pretending to be a male because the journey north is often much harder and riskier for women. I know I will think about this trio of characters for a long time.
A poignant novel of desperation, escape, and survival across the U.S.-Mexico border, inspired by current events.
A Pura Belpré 2021 Young Adult Author Honor Book! A BookPage Best Book of 2020! A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best of 2020! A School Library Journal Best Book of 2020! A New York Public Library 2020 Top 10 Best Book for Teens!
Pulga has his dreams. Chico has his grief. Pequeña has her pride.
And these three teens have one another. But none of them have illusions about the town they've grown up in and the dangers that surround them. Even…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
At some point I decided that if I was going to teach US history, I better have a good sense of what the place looked like. So I drove across the country—and then back again—and then again, and then once more, each time at a different latitude. I drove through North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana and Idaho, Nebraska and Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, up and down California, Oregon and Washington, and on and on. I got addicted to seeing the landscape in all its amazing variety and vastness, and seeing the landscape made the histories come alive.
Miroslava Chavez Garcia’s parents were tragically killed when she was very young. As an adult, already an accomplished historian, she came across a trunk in her uncle’s closet filled with their letters to each other. Using those letters, she builds a deeply personal history. Her story adds dimensions we usually cannot know about migration and the emotional bonds it strains and sustains.
Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both ""here"" and ""there"" (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication hidden from public consumption and historical research, the letters provide a rare glimpse into the deeply emotional, personal, and social lives of ordinary Mexican men and women as recorded in their immediate, firsthand accounts. Chavez-Garcia demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in…
