The book appeared on bookshelves on this day last year and sold 725,000 copies on its first day in stores. It sold more than 1.4 million copies in its first week on sale. Within two weeks, the book had sold 2 million copies in North America, becoming the best-selling book of 2018.

By March, with 10 million copies sold, publishing executives were already saying that this memoir of an African American woman was on track to become one of the most successful memoirs in history. The canons of American literature and black women’s literature converged, as they rarely had before, in the form of Becoming, by Michelle Obama.

Weeks before the former first lady of the United States started packing basketball arenas with thousands of excited readers, she packed a small conference table with about a dozen serious readers. She wasn’t after platitudes or cheerleaders. She wanted some of the best black women writers around to tell her “what we all really and truly think,” Rhimes recounted. And they did. And “all of the women at the roundtable felt a deep connection to this memoir,” Dunbar later wrote. It was a connection so deep, they were all “caught up in Michelle’s embrace,” Jones added.

They discussed Becoming. And much more.

The end of the day neared. Obama sat back and said, “The other thing that several people mentioned is: When does a black woman from my background get to tell her own story in a way that will be read by millions of people? … We don’t have enough stories out there … We are blinded by our ignorance of what it means to be an American.”

Ibram X. Kendi: An anti-racist syllabus for Governor Ralph Northam

I, for one, am striving to overcome my ignorance about what it means to be an American by reading the stories of black women, by black women, who have developed an inimitable viewpoint of America as they overcome the confines of their gender, race, and often class. We still don’t have enough stories out there. But the stories are coming, especially from black women. And we should all be reading them to better compose our stories in our minds, on our pages. When I say we and our, I’m especially talking to us nonblack women.

On this, the one-year anniversary of the release of Becoming, I have compiled a list of 21 new releases from August to the year’s end—books of all kinds on my reading list—that showcase what black women’s literature this year is becoming, and what it has always been: essential to fully understanding the American story, the human story, and to what we are all becoming.

August 6, 2019

The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me, by Keah Brown

This creator of the viral #DisabledAndCute campaign offers an encouraging and refreshing collection of essays rooted unapologetically in self-love, in an ablest white America that struggles to love disabled people and black people, and especially disabled black people.