Conceição Evaristo is a writer and one of the most recognized voices in contemporary Afro-Brazilian literature. Born in Belo Horizonte, she has developed over decades a body of work that weaves together memory, Black identity, and female experience, becoming a reference in debates on literature and representation in Brazil.
The ten works she recommends reveal a reader committed to narratives of resistance and marginality. There is a strong presence of Black women authors — Toni Morrison, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Itamar Vieira Junior — alongside classics of testimony such as The Diary of Anne Frank and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. The curation favors stories of subalternized bodies that find in writing a way to exist and to speak out, which resonates directly with Evaristo's own poetics.
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”Another powerful book, a kind of autobiography by the writer Maya Angelou, who, making writing a form of therapy, tells much of her experience during a childhood and youth also marked by racism and by the segregation of North American society.”
”This work by Itamar Vieira struck me because of the story itself, in which the two central characters, two sisters bound together by a tragedy, merge as though they were a single voice recounting the struggle, the living conditions of the Brazilian sertão.”
”This work by Toni Morrison left me with a lump in my throat for days on end, such is the suffering of the central character, Decola, a Black girl who believes that life would be light and good for her if she turned into a white person with blue eyes.”
”The book by the writer Carolina Maria de Jesus carried in its pages a reality much like the one my family and I were living on the streets of Belo Horizonte. To read Carolina was to read our own life.”
”Reading Diário de Anne Frank in 1959: from the very first page, the image of a Jewish girl rises up, entangled with my own. She, the thirteen-year-old girl who wrote, and I, the girl who read, who also lived under an oppressive system, marked by poverty.”
