No one denies the greatness of Toni Morrison. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker — all are necessary components of the American literary canon. Most of us read them in school because their works are the stuff of classics.

For some readers, exposure to literature by African Americans stops there — but why should it? We don’t read Hemingway to skip Jonathan Safran Foer. We don’t put down Flannery O’Connor and say, “Cheryl Strayed? No thanks, I’m good.”

Classics are essential, but they only go so far. To read Zora Neal Hurston is to understand a generation of African-American writing that is quite different from the generation of Terry McMillan. And when it comes to genre, why are so many readers locked into the binary of black literature versus non-black literature (i.e. everything else)?

Spanning feminism to science fiction, here are nine great African-American writers that you probably didn’t read in class but definitely should check out now: