Hands down Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” (1987). This masterful exploration of the Faulknerian notion of “not-history” is by turns disturbing, tragic, weird, funny and sad. The novel has one of my favorite lines in all of literature: “How much is a nigger supposed to take?” The line speaks volumes about what it means to be a black person in this country. Be that as it may, am I allowed to cheat and choose a second book? Gayl Jones was one of many significant writers whom Morrison published as an editor at Random House. Time and again I return to her first novel, “Corregidora” (1975), which is, as one of my friends puts it, “lean and mean.” I find it striking how Morrison learned from the writers she published like Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and the forgotten Leon Forrest.

I love the brilliant, bluesy use of vernacular of “Corregidora” (1975) by Gayl Jones, its unflinching treatment of sex, its haunting, ambiguous blending of characters and the way that it’s a deeply American novel that is also international in its scope.

I love how Zora Neale Hurston plays by her own rules on the page. Some people hate phonetic spelling in prose, but I’m fine with it. I was inspired and emboldened the first time I came across “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937). Her voice is so irreverent and full of hard-earned knowledge.

I’m really in awe of Lynn Nottage’s play “Intimate Apparel” (2004) and of the poetry embedded in it. Nottage’s hand is as subtle as her heart is passionate; she illuminates a forgotten corner of history, as if by its own light. It is crafted in such a way that the simplest of actions become revelations of love, loss, aspiration and heartbreak.

In “On Being Brought From Africa” (1773), Phillis Wheatley tells her Early American reader what they can’t know: how complicated it is to be her, to be there, to be in love with and inside a language and culture and yet to hear that same language and culture define you as, well, unrefined. It is the first American poem, I feel, that reports that living contradiction from within that contradiction. In the 20th century, it would be called the shock of the new; here it’s just a new shock, one that as a nation we are still trying to reconcile.

Before I saw Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959) onstage, I watched the [1961] movie with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. I was knocked out by the range of characters and her ability to bring the Younger family to life.

If we live in a world where Bob Dylan wins a Nobel Prize for literature and Kendrick Lamar is studied as poetry, I want to argue in favor of Nicki Minaj as my favorite female writer, specifically her writing on Kanye West’s “Monster” (2010). Thematically, her continued weaponization of the femme toward dominance is both radical and exhilarating. She brings to life a game of chess with a line like “You can be the king but watch the queen conquer” before going into blistering bars that essentially leave every male on a song with her in the dust. That’s Shakespeare or Keats in its verve.

What I love about the play “Is God Is” (2017) by Aleshea Harris, and her work in general, is how unapologetically black it is, how she embraces violence and ferocity as well as gentleness in a single scene. I think she is simply astonishing.

The beautifully rendered, interrelated stories in “Bailey’s Cafe” (1992) by Gloria Naylor provide a vastness and commonality of experience. The novel broadens the conversation about the notion of being “female” and how we view female sexuality — themes that are particularly relevant today, “since the place sits right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility,” as Naylor writes.

One of my favorite volumes of poetry is “Recyclopedia” (2006), which collects the first three books by Harryette Mullen (“Trimmings,” “S*PeRM**K*T” and “Muse and Drudge”), whose radiant playfulness with language (riffs and puns on received phrases) modeled for me a freedom to propel into sound, the primary foundation (function?) of all poetry, as a nonlinear means of signifying existence in multiple directions.

My favorite is “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (2011), by Lynn Nottage, because of how it pleases as much as it provokes, and because of the way Nottage creates the narrative space for a black-female-artist character to be comedic and complicated while also questioning history’s treatment of such a character.

What I love most about Toni Cade Bambara’s “Gorilla, My Love” (1972) is its unabashed celebration of blackness. Her preface about writing about family is classic: “It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn...” Notice, if you will, that there are no apostrophes in place of the missing g’s of her gerunds. I’d bet her decision to forgo them was a political one, for Bambara was, without doubt, a political artist — as we all are, if we’re telling the truth.

Toni Morrison’s prose in “Beloved” (1987) is astounding, and the subject matter intense. She managed to elevate the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants into a different kind of consideration; one in which these characters were given flesh, love and spirit, operating as actual human beings rather than creations of the white imagination. And what a dilemma the book poses: Should you murder your own children to spare them the degradation, dehumanization, humiliation and violence of that which is antebellum slavery? Are you ready to bear the ghostly weight of that decision? And what happens if you think you are but you aren’t really? The book is pure brilliance and a razor-sharp indictment of the country.

Safiya Sinclair’s debut book, “Cannibal” (2016), is a devastating and beautiful renegotiation — on her terms — of the English language. She’s interested in the many violences English and those who spoke it perpetrated either against themselves or especially against the black and brown peoples they colonized, and pushes into this history in all her work, be it poetry or prose. Yet all the while one hears — at least it’s clear to my ear — her still relishing in that English, making a new queendom of it, if only for its own lush, if sick, beauty. In this way, Sinclair stunts; she is a bougainvillea, demanding space for the “savage” and “feminine” to speak.

My favorite book is “Event Factory” (2010) by Renee Gladman. It changed my thinking about what a novel could do. One of the most interesting things about it is Gladman’s world building — the novel treats the reader as foreign, just as the country in which the protagonist finds herself treats her as foreign. Not only does it do things that seem strange in the world of the novel, but they seem un-fixedly strange — scenes shift suddenly, locations themselves move from place to place.

There are so many novels I could choose as my favorite, but if I were forced to select one, I would have to say “Beloved” (1987) by Toni Morrison, for it’s the first novel that ever made me weep.

My choice is Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017). It is a remarkable novel — a book that stands in conversation with all these iconic strands of American literature and yet is in no way defined by them. The book is wiser, more attuned to the ways race and class, violence and poverty have shaped and continue to shape this country than just about anything else I’ve encountered. There is also this fierce, irrepressible dignity and all these complicated, fraught gestures of love and attempts at love that make it hard to let this book go.

Jamaica Kincaid’s “Annie John” (1985) was, is and will no doubt remain for me an essential text. It’s not only a great novel powered by an unshakable sense of what the sentence — like a stethoscope — can discover within the human heart, it’s also a poignant map to a world that forms an essential part of who I am. Like Kincaid, I’m American but by way of Antigua, and it’s difficult to put into words what it’s like to read the small place where you’re from — a place so small that it sometimes doesn’t even appear on a map — dipped in amber by a great writer.

I admire Jamaica Kincaid’s work. It’s difficult to choose one over the other, but the novel “Mr. Potter” stands out in my mind because of its formal beauty and subversive intent. Kincaid creates a modernist literature from the Caribbean peasant experience and, in so doing, opens up colonial history in a way that is neither doctrinaire nor sentimental. She has nothing to do with folklore and yet is all about voice. Her ear is that of a poet’s, her sensibility that of a born anarch. She is an original.

“Sula” (1973) by Toni Morrison taught me so much about patriarchy by the way Morrison basically had Sula seek the same kind of freedom that men have. Her community was not cool with her “acting like a man.”

With two books coming out next year (“Magical Negro” and “Who Put This Song On?”), 2019 justly belongs to Morgan Parker. Her poems shred me with their intelligence, dark humor and black-hearted vision. Parker is one of this generation’s best minds, able to hold herself and her world, which includes all of us, up to impossible lights, revealing every last bit of our hopes, failings, possibilities and raptures.

Carolivia Herron’s novel “Thereafter Johnnie” (1991) — with lyrical grace and a concise rendering of the epic tradition — depicts the unraveling of a black middle-class family that is undone by incest and addiction yet revitalized by the journey of the youngest girl’s search for answers in the ruins. What stands out is the setting of the novel’s present time: an abandoned Washington, D.C. This post-apocalyptic representation, for me, echoes the potential for an unchecked patriarchy to not only destroy a family but also a nation.

When I first read “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” (2012) and saw how deeply Ayana Mathis had submerged herself into the study of complex relationships between mothers and their children, I knew I wanted to work with her. Having grown up as an only child, the novel speaks to so many questions I’ve had, for years, about large, northern, African-American families with Southern roots.

“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” The night I finished reading “Song of Solomon” (1977) by Toni Morrison, I dreamed I flew over a building near where I grew up in Kentucky. I later found out there used to be a slave market where this building now stood. For me, it’s about owning your history but shedding anything that enslaves your heart and mind, so that your spirit can soar.

“The Third Life of Grange Copeland” (1970) by Alice Walker taught me something incredible and essential: The cruelest of us are often victims, too. The book showed me that the world can make monsters out of the best of us, and in doing so helped me see that maybe there aren’t monsters at all. Only humans consumed, swept up and eaten by their own fear, their own pain. It taught me that getting a reader to love a character and hate a character are both huge, worthy tasks. Getting us to feel both things about the same character, that’s magic.

I would like to recommend the short story collection “Bloodchild and Other Stories” (the revised edition, published in 2005) by my one-time student Octavia E. Butler, and especially her story “Amnesty” (2004), contained in that volume. Several people, including the late editor David Hartwell and myself, felt this was among the most important stories written and published by anyone in the science fiction field to date. I think certainly it is among Butler’s finest works, and its image of possible interspecies cooperation and help is a great example of how differences might be overcome.

I have always loved my longtime comrade and collaborator Lisa B. Thompson’s dissertations and plays, and their inquiries into multifaceted women — like “Monroe” (2018), which recently had its world premiere at the Austin Playhouse. It explores how the threat and aftermath of racial terror dominates the psyches of young African-Americans while offering hope for a better future.

It’s a tremendous challenge to select a particular work by any of the many brilliant black women writers among us. But if I were tasked with assembling my own very particular list of favorite books by brilliant living black women poets I’ve learned from, and been led by, among them would be: “Crave Radiance” (2012) by Elizabeth Alexander, “Captivity” (1989) by Toi Derricotte, “Hemming the Water” (2013) by Yona Harvey, “Native Guard” (2007) by Natasha Trethewey, “Sleeping With the Dictionary” (2002) by Harryette Mullen, “Madwoman” (2017) by Shara McCallum, “Life on Mars” (2011) by Tracy K. Smith, and “Shake Loose My Skin” (2000) by Sonia Sanchez. Their work is in my work.

Vievee Francis’s poems are boiled in history, riddled with fists full of flora, straddled across fairy tale and fact and married in body and blood song. Her first three books rock with a profound and profane knowledge of self while chronicling America’s layered past. In “Blue-Tail Fly” (2006), ragged-voiced soldiers and survivors from the Mexican-American and Civil Wars remind us how empire twists borders and citizenry into line. “Horse in the Dark” (2012) grafts beast and woman, exploring defamation and reclamation of spirit. In “Forest Primeval” (2015), her powers are harrowing and transcendent. Francis is a poet’s poet whose ear bends toward common hurt and triumph.

I think N. K. Jemisin is one of the most exciting writers publishing today — without qualification or categorization. She is a writer for the age. I consider her award-winning novel “The Fifth Season” (2015) an instant classic. Her prose is intelligent and delicious; her imagination tackles our most central woes. But even more important, she is fun to read.

Lucille Clifton is one of the finest poets this country has been blessed to call its own, and “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980” (1987) is a masterpiece. She writes in a clear, declarative style that disguises the complexity of her subject matter: the triumphs and trials of being a black woman in the United States, the spiritual and the mythic, the ways history has a hold of us long after we think we’re free of it.

Renee Gladman is our greatest celebrant and investigator of the sentence. The anarchic drawings of her art-poetry collection “Prose Architectures” (2017) and the errant textures of the essay collection “Calamities” (2016) sound so deep and feel so hard that one can’t imagine how easily she requires and allows us to imagine. With fluent, dead-serious joy, Gladman refuses the distinction between practice and game as fearlessly as Allen Iverson, if Allen Iverson were also Gayl Jones. Her otherworldliness tells the truth about the world.

In “Coal” (1976), Audre Lorde writes: “I / is the total black, being spoken / from the earth’s inside.” And there, I was born afresh in that little hovel of a cottage during the early 2000s in an overly hot summer in Austin, Tex., the ladybugs sticking to the windows, the raccoons fighting the stray cats in the dry creek bed just to the west of my bedroom wall. Over and over, I read “Coal” to myself, out loud, to the mosquitoes, to the stray cats that would come up from their fighting; I read the poem to anyone who would listen because it spoke of the dark — “blackness” — as a kind of opening, as that which speaks, as that which makes love. I had never seen a poem take such possession of its ontological and epistemological self.