In celebration of Black History Month, we’ll be highlighting a diverse range of books – poetry, novels, memoirs and more – all written by Black American authors. Each of these works moved, engaged, delighted, enraged, and excited Island Free Library readers’ this past year, and we’ll be featuring one title every day through the month of February.
Today’s work is Jessie Redmon Faucet’s There Is Confusion – at once a novel of manners, a love story, and an exposé on the ways that class, race and respectability politics shape the lives of three Black siblings growing up in Philadelphia and NYC in the 1920s. Originally published in 1924, There Is Confusion was republished in 2020 for new audiences to discover.
Jessie Redmon Faucet was a novelist, poet, educator, and an editor of The Crisis, a NAACP magazine founded by W.E. B. Du Bois in 1910. Dissatisfied with white author’s portrayal of Black characters, Faucet decided to write her own books, as well as curate and promote the voices of other Harlem Renaissance authors through her work as an editor. Stay tuned for a new book tomorrow!
