Bragg’s new study offers support for those wishing to re-examine the incorporation of popular fiction in their classrooms or scholarship. This new analysis of popular fiction places popular fiction alongside historical writing movements, offers feminist approaches to understanding the goals of black women authors’ fiction, and gives scholars a new foundation to build upon. Popular fiction is needed in the classroom and the canon, and would be a welcome addition to scholarly studies. Those interested and working with, or even considering, popular fiction should pick this study up as a framework for analysis.

English: Journal of the English Association

Beauty Bragg offers a concise, wonderfully readable, and persuasively argued black feminist study that forces us to reexamine our understandings of high and low in African American literature and culture.

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt University

Reading Contemporary African American Literature does the much-needed work required to help scholars and students alike understand the ways popular fiction speaks to many of the same discourses serious literature explores. The unparalleled popularity of books like Push and Coldest Winter Ever nudged us all to acquire an expanded understanding of the work popular fiction authored by African American women writers could do and in unprecedented ways—from building new audiences to offering uncompromising critiques of systemic forces that enable poverty and abuse, to celebrating the beauty of African American life in all of its iterations. Here, Bragg takes an important first step in helping us tear down imagined barriers between differing communities of readers who appreciate the ways African American women writers render the full range of these communities' experiences in narrative.

Dana Williams, Howard University