Diversifying the Curriculum: How to Design an Inclusive English Syllabus

In recent years, many English teachers have sought to diversify their curricula by adding more authors of color to their syllabi. This blog post aims to help more teachers accomplish that important goal by recommending literary texts appropriate to high school English courses.

The list below features highly teachable texts written by African-American, Asian-American, Latinx, and Native-American authors. It isn't a "canon" of texts supposedly endowed with "timeless truths"; nor is it merely a list of one teacher's "favorite" books. Rather, it's a list of literary texts endowed with a level of formal and thematic complexity which lends them to the kinds of activities emphasized in high-school English courses: close reading, lively class discussion, and thoughtful reflection on life-worthy topics. Topics like personality development and identity formation, social norms and personal values, equity and social justice, etc.

Why is it important to design a diverse and inclusive English curriculum?

• First, because students of color should see their cultures reflected in the English curriculum at their school. Our curricular decisions are one of the first ways in which we make sure that ever student feels seen, recognized, affirmed, and validated.
• Second, because all students deserve the opportunity to learn about other cultures, expand their perspectives, and develop the cultural competencies required to thrive in an increasingly diverse nation.
• Third, because the humanities classroom is one of few remaining places where young people can develop the deliberative habits and communicative virtues that are vital to a well-functioning democracy.

What criteria were used for choosing the literary texts on the list below? The texts listed below are endowed with a high degree of formal and linguistic complexity — reflected in features like ambiguity, paradox, and irony — which makes them useful for building skills in close reading, analytical writing, and democratic discussion. The texts also possess a level of conceptual and thematic complexity which allows them to be analyzed through a wide range of interpretive lenses: psychoanalytic, feminist, historicist, and so on. As a result, these texts would make great choices for courses such as Honors English, American Literature, and AP Literature and Composition. The texts listed in the "non-fiction/essays" section make great choices for AP Language and Composition.

This list of recommended teachable texts was compiled by Adam Jernigan, a Ph.D. who's taught English at high schools and colleges for over 20 years. Adam has published academic essays on authors like James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Sylvia Plath, and others. He designs top-quality teaching materials at Rigorous Resources.  

 

African-American Literature

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

This extraordinary coming-of-age novel focuses on a young black woman's journey of self-discovery. Janie Crawford is raised by a grandmother who was born into slavery, raped by her master, and wishes only for her granddaughter to marry a financial stable husband. But Janie finds that pursuing someone else's dream leaves her stuck in a loveless marriage. So she leaves her husband and sets out to discover what she values, what she needs in a romantic partner, and what it would feel like to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. If your students initially struggle with the vernacular language, just remind them that Hurston grew up in the rural South and eventually became an anthropologist whose fieldwork sought to dignify the vernacular speech, folkways, and metaphorical richness of the African-American community in Eatonville, Florida. Hurston's masterpiece is a perfect choice for advanced English courses because its themes work for the vast majority of FRQ3 prompts on the AP Literature Exam!

 

Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

This novel was a hundred years ahead of its time in both its psychologically complexity and its nuanced account of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality. Passing focuses on two childhood friends from a predominantly African-American neighborhood who end up pursuing very different trajectories in life: Irene conducts "uplift work" in the black community, while Clare chooses to pass as white. What happens when they accidentally reunite as adults? Why does Irene feel such deep and conflicting emotions toward Clare? Does this novel "pass" as a book about racial politics when its real focus is equally on class, gender, and same-sex desire? If you teach F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Larsen's Passing makes a great follow-up since Jay Gatsby might also be said to engage in "passing" — and it's fascinating to discuss the similarities and differences between the two novels.

 

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

Hansberry's masterpiece is the single most important work of Civil Rights Literature from the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on the plight of an African-American family that traveled north to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Due to residential segregation in Chicago, the five members of the Younger family are forced to cram themselves into a one-bedroom "kitchenette" apartment in the densely populated "Black Belt" of Chicago. When they receive a windfall inheritance, the members of the family express starkly different ideas about how the money should be invested. How have each character's dreams been shaped by gendered and/or generational forces? And how will the family resolve the tensions caused by their tight finances and even tighter living quarters? What's especially powerful about Hansberry's play is how it re-defines the "American Dream" by shifting its focus from wealth accumulation and home ownership to the affirmation of certain basic human rights and freedoms: the right to enjoy a comfortable standard of living, the freedom to live where one chooses, and the right to pursue one’s own version of happiness without being persecuted by other people’s narrow prejudices. This focus on the American Dream makes Hansberry's play another great follow-up to The Great Gatsby!

 

Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (1959)

Lorraine Hansberry entitled her play A Raisin in the Sun after a line from Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem" (1951). But few people realize that Hansberry initially planned to give her play the title "No Crystal Stair" — a line from Hughes's earlier poem, "Mother to Son" (1922). How do those two poems differ? More generally, how did Hughes's poems change as he became more skeptical about whether the U.S. would deliver on its foundational promise of freedom and equality? And why did Hansberry switch the title of her play? It can be fascinating to study these two authors alongside one another!

 

Toni Morrison, Desdemona (2011)

Over the course of my teaching career, I have taught a number of Toni Morrison's novels — among them The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987) — in courses like Honors English and AP Literature. While those novels are understandably admired by teachers, I have found that their sheer length, combined with traumatic content like rape and incest, can make them emotionally challenging for some modern-day teenagers. My preference is to teach Morrison's shorter works, especially her woman-centered play, Desdemona, her only short story, "Recitatif" (1983), and her book-length essay on the role of race in Western literature, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In the short play Desdemona, Morrison imagines what the tragic couple from Shakespeare's Othello would say to one another if they had a chance to converse in the afterlife. Morrison also gives a voice to one of Shakespeare's ghost characters (i.e. a character who is referenced in the script but given no speaking lines): Desemona's African nursemaid, Barbary. In Morrison's insightful reading of Othello, it is Barbary who not only tells Desdemona stories about far-flung places like the "Barbary Coast" but also makes her open to falling in love with a man like Othello. If you'll be teaching Shakespeare's Othello, I highly recommend that you follow with Morrison's fascinating play, Desdemona! 

 

Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

Paule Marshall's debut novel is a bildungsroman about a teenage girl growing up in Brooklyn during the 1940s. As she stretches into adolescence, protagonist Selina Boyce finds herself stunned by the compromises which her parents are willing to make in order to secure a future for the family. The novel tracks Selina’s attempts to arrive at a deeper understanding of her parents’ actions even as she begins to discover and affirm her own value system: one grounded in artistic expression and social justice. Paule Marshall has been praised for constructing female characters who are “unquestionably strong, capable, independent, assertive.” But the rewards of this novel derive as much from the author’s nuanced appreciation for the complexity of relationships between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, and the members of ethnic communities struggling to establish a home in America.

 

Other Top Picks

Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man (1965), Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), August Wilson's Fences (1985), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003), Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016), Clint Smith's Counting Descent (2016), Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019), and Percival Everett's James (2024).

Non-Fiction/Essays: Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son (1955), June Jordan's "Report from the Bahamas, 1982" (1985), Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015), Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Why Intersectionality Can't Wait" (2015), and Ross Gay's The Book of Delights: Essays (2019).  

 

Asian-American Literature

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (1999)

Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. The collection opens with a story that ranks among the very best pieces of short fiction ever written: "A Temporary Matter." What are the two protagonists trying to accomplish when the begin to share secrets with one another in the dark? The stories in this collection focus on how second-generation immigrants struggle to forge a meaningful life in America. Other stories which merit careful analysis include "This Blessed House" and "The Third and Final Continent" — as well as "Hell-Heaven" from her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). Lahiri ranks among the most exquisite prose stylists alive today!

 

Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine (2002)

Julie Otsuka is a Japanese-American novelist whose grandparents were sent to Internment Camps in the 1940s. In this short work of imaginative fiction, Otsuka tells the story of what internment must have felt like for the four members of an American family who are shipped to an Internment Camp in the Utah desert. Because each chapter is narrated by a different member of the family — mother, father, daughter, and son — Otsuka manages to inject levity and humor into an otherwise harrowing event. What does Otsuka's novel reveal about the experience — common to many groups throughout America's history — of being constructed as an internal enemy?

 

Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (1996)

This humorous bildungsroman is a great choice for any teacher designing a curriculum around the theme of identity. The novel focuses on Mona Chang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who perceived America as a land of economic opportunity. But Mona perceives America as promising a different kind of opportunity: "America means being whatever you want," she asserts, "and I happen to pick being Jewish." Mona converts to Judaism, changes her surname to Changowitz, and meets with a rabbi to determine how to be Jewish. Meanwhile, Mona’s older sister Callie seeks to recover what it would mean to be “authentically” Chinese. Does America really mean being whatever you want? When can a person change their identity? What risks and responsibilities might come with such a change?

 

Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge (1997)

Although many U.S. high schools cover the Vietnam War by reading soldier memoirs like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge was the first novel written about the war by a Vietnamese refugee — and gives voice to the experiences of female refugees of war. The novel explores what it meant for Vietnamese refugees to be "an awkward reminder of a war the whole country was trying to forget." The novel's title, Monkey Bridge, refers not only to the rickety bamboo bridges used for traversing rivers in rural Vietnam, but also to the adolescent protagonist's attempt to build a "memory bridge" back to the land of her birth. What really happened when Mai and her mother were attempting to leave Vietnam? Why didn't the father join them? Can one's culture of origin ever be fully recovered? While this powerful novel has flown under the radar of most high-school English teachers, it is beloved by college professors who specialize in twentieth-century American fiction!

 

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

Here's an autobiographical novel that's as lyrical and poetic as anything in the author's collections of poetry. The novel is written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother. The protagonist is a gay man who was abused by his mother and eventually falls in love with a white man who dies from an opioid addiction. This is a courageous, beautiful, and profoundly moving book which affirms how language can be a vehicle for self-healing. 

 

Other Top Picks

John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993), Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995), Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You (2014), Viet Thang Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015), Min Jin Lee's Pachinko (2017), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), and Susan Choi's Trust Exercise (2019).

Non-Fiction/Essays: Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), Kenji Yoshino's Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (2006), and Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning (2020).

 

Latinx Literature

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (1991)

Sandra Cisneros is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), a coming-of-age novel which would make a great addition to any 9th-grade curriculum. Cisneros began to write about more complex adult themes in her second work of fiction, Woman Hollering Creek. The title story of this collection focuses on Cleófilas, a Mexican woman named Cleófilas who moves to Texas with a husband only to find that he becomes abusive and unfaithful. As her isolation increases, Cleófilas becomes interested in the myth of la llorona, a "weeping woman" who drowns her own children after discovering that her husband has been unfaithful. But the protagonist of Cisneros's story ultimately decides to leave her abusive husband, to move back to her home in Mexico, and to choose life instead of death. The story is a great example of how a modern author re-works a traditional myth by giving it a positive feminist ending. It pairs well with other llorona stories such as Helena Maria Viramontes's "The Cariboo Café" from The Moths and Other Stories (1995).

 

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (2015)

Ada Límon is currently the Poet Laureate of the United States. Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2015. Although her next book, The Carrying (2018), would win that award, I believe that her best book remains Bright Dead Things. Limón's poems are unflinchingly honest, lyrically intimate, keenly insightful — and reflect an inquisitive reverence for the natural world. It's fascinating to read about how the poet's sense of self changes as she moves from New York City to a home in rural Kentucky. If you're not familiar with Limón's poetry, a good place to start would be her touching poem, "The Raincoat."

 

José Olivarez, Citizen Illegal (2018)

Olivarez's debut poetry collection is the strikingly bold volume that calls out the stigmatization and mistreatment of Mexican immigrants in the United States. In poems like "Mexican American Disambiguation," Olivarez uses humor to query the differences between "Mexican Americans," "Chicanos," and "mexicanos." Olivarez's second poetry collection, Promises of Gold (2023), was one of ten finalists for the National Book Award. In the "Author's Note," Olivarez describes the book as a collection of "love poems" which are complicated by "all the other pandemics that we've been living through our whole lives. Capitalism is a pandemic. The police is a pandemic. Colonialism is a pandemic. Toxic masculinity is a pandemic." My favorite poem from that collection is "Card Declined."

 

Rhina Espaillat, Water from Two Rivers (2017)

Rhina Espaillat is a Dominican-American poet who writes with insight and eloquence in both English and Spanish. In the foreword to Espaillat's book, Julia Alvarez writes, "I have been telling everyone I know about Rhina Espaillat's work, giving her books to friends as gifts, teaching her poems in my writing workshops, rereading them to renew and affirm my faith in the written word. She has been and continues to be one of my favorite American poets." Are you familiar with Espaillat's breathtakingly beautiful poem about the joys of becoming fluent in two languages, "Bilingual/Bilingüe"? How about her poem on the source of a writer's inspiration, "Workshop"? Or her poem on a friend's blindness, "Compensation"?

 

Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991)

This polyphonic novel tells the story of four sisters — Carla, Yolanda, Sandra, and Sofia — who grew up in the Dominican Republic until the Trujillo dictatorship forced them to flee to the United States. The novel paints a lucid picture of the hardships of immigration, the feelings of dislocation, the process of assimilation, and the confusion of identity experienced by many Caribbean immigrant families. The novel consists of fifteen interconnected short stories which are told in reverse-chronological order. 

 

Other Top Picks 

Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits (1982), Helena Maria Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (2017), Erika L. Sánchez's I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017), Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X (2018), and Hernan Diaz's Trust (2022).

Non-Fiction/Essays: Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987).

  

Native-American Literature

Tommy Orange, There There (2018)

Tommy Orange's There There has been my students' favorite book for the past five years in a row! What makes There There such a great choice for the high school classroom? Orange affirms the internal diversity of the Native-American community by writing a polyphonic novel where each chapter is narrated by a different character. Many of the characters are teenagers who grapple with dilemmas faced by many modern-day students: social media addiction, identity confusion, family conflict, etc. Writing at a time when the majority of indigenous people live not in rural areas or reservations but in large cities, Orange dissolves the stereotypes about Native Americans — stereotypes still evident in the "feathered image" of many U.S. sports mascots — by focusing on the trials and tribulations of what he calls "urban Natives." Should your students end up loving Orange's novel as much as mine have, they'll probably want to pleasure-read his newly released sequel, Wandering Stars (2024). Highly recommended! 

 

Louise Erdrich, The Round House (2012)

Erdrich's The Round House won the National Book Award in 2012. The opening chapters of this novel are much slower than those of Tommy Orange's There There — so keeping students engaged may require some additional work. The Round House is a mystery novel centered on the question of how Geraldine Coutts was violently raped on a reservation in North Dakota. Because the police fail to solve the case, it is taken up by the victim's thirteen-year-old son, Joe Coutts. Joe eventually finds out that his mother's attacker is a white man from outside the reservation who's immune from prosecution under tribal law. In an essay published in the New York Times, Erdrich notes that "federal prosecutors decline to prosecute 67% of sexual abuse cases" committed on reservation lands. The epidemic of violence against indigenous women is a central theme in both The Round House and There There.

 

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968)

Momaday's House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The novel focuses on a Native-American man named Abel who has returned to his home on a New Mexico reservation after serving in the World War II. Feeling that the war has severed his connection to the natural and spiritual world, Abel searches for connection in other places until he commits a crime and is sent to prison. Will the protagonist be able to pick up the pieces and restore a positive connection with himself and others when he's release from prison? Momaday's House Made of Dawn is a classic novel of alienation about a protagonist who experiences himself as being at home neither on the reservation nor in mainstream American society.

 

Other Top Picks 

Zitkala-Ša's American Indian Stories (1921), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984), Layli Long Soldier's Whereas (2017), Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017), Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise (2019), Natalie Díaz's Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), Angeline Boulley's The Firekeeper's Daughter (2021), and Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars (2024).

Non-Fiction/Essays: N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (2013).

 

Teaching Questions

Here are some of the essential questions that I've used in English courses which feature some combination of the texts above. Feel free to use and/or adapt any of these questions for your own purposes, whether on a syllabus or in class discussions. 

 

Essential Questions

• How has the literature written by authors of color changed over time in response to the socioeconomic conditions associated with different historical periods?

• How have writers of color constructed literary characters in a manner that serves to refute stereotypes and/or to generate affirming portrayals of their people?

• How has literature been shaped by different ways of thinking about race, class, gender, and sexuality? Conversely, how have our understandings of those categories been shaped by literary texts?

• How have African-American authors used their writings to combat segregation and foster a more egalitarian society?

• How have Asian-American and Latinx authors used immigration stories to complicate how we think about identity and community? What does it mean to have a hybrid or transcultural identity?

• How is it that some Americans have become the beneficiaries of racial, economic, and/or gender privilege? How should we respond to our privilege?

• What can literary texts written by authors of color reveal about whiteness?

• What does it mean to say that identities are intersectional? How might an intersectional approach to identity enable us to achieve a deeper understanding of ourselves and others?

• What does it mean to say that race and gender are socially constructed?

• What might it be like to live in a genuinely post-racial or post-gender world? Is that something we should want? Why or why not?

 

Pedagogical Questions

• How can we prepare our students to speak and write in informed ways about authors and texts from diverse cultural backgrounds?

• How do we teach about issues of inclusion and exclusion, equity and social justice? Which texts are best suited to facilitate those discussions?

• How might we design courses which motivate students to become excited about realizing a more inclusive and equitable world? 

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I'd love to hear your thoughts on those questions and more in the comments section! If you have recommendations for books that I should include in this post, please add those to the comment section too. I love hearing from fellow teachers who share a passion for great literature!

Note: Because I chose to focus this list on American literature, I will create another list about teachable texts by authors from other national literature traditions (a.k.a. "World Literature"). It will include authors like Khaled Hosseini, Marjane Satrapi, Chimamanda Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Athol Fugard, Trevor Noah, and others. 

 

Full-Year Curriculum with Daily Lessons

Are you a teacher in search of lesson plans on complex texts by diverse authors? Check out the full-year teaching bundles on sale at Rigorous Resources! The bundles linked below include daily reading quizzes, higher-order discussion questions, vocabulary lists, figurative language exercises, final writing assignments, and more. Save yourself hundreds of hours of prep time!

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