Black Boy Joy is a collection of short fiction celebrating the joys of being a young, black, and male in America. The book was published in 2021 under the editorial guidance of the creator of the Tristan Strong series of children’s books, Kwame Mbalia. Mbalia also contributes a three-part story. He has explained in interviews that the impetus behind the idea was stimulated by the repetitive nature of books aimed at young black readers which emphasizes the gritty darkness of their lives at the expensive of illuminating how amidst all the stories of poverty, gangs, drugs and drive-by shootings there is also the overlooked expressions of great joy in doing the exact same things that bring happiness to young white boys in America.
Although the seventeen stories included the collection are all relatively short works of fiction, they are not all traditional short stories. In addition to the splitting of Mbalia’s “The Griot of Gover Street” into three parts spread across the length and breadth of the book, there is Dean Atta’s Extinct which is a cycle of five different poems tell a non-linear story of a visit to the Natural History Museum told out of chronological order with individual poem titles like “Yesterday,” “Today,” and “Tonight.”
Jerry Craft, whose New Kid became the first graphic novel to ever win the most prestigious literary prize for children’s writing, the Newbery Medal, brings his revolutionary approach to telling stories about young black kids with the graphic short story “Embracing My Black Boy Joy” which uses a potent combination of words and imagery to tell its tale.
Although sports, game and athletics do show up in these stories of young black boys, that aspect of the black boy joy is perhaps a bit more understated than one might expect. On the other hand, superheroes and science fiction—two genres not typically associated with African American audiences—come to dominate the stories here more than any other.
Black Boy Joy was greeted with near-unanimous praise by critics across the country on its way earning distinctive recognition as one of the best books for middle school readership of the year. The collection was named one of the Best Books of 2021 by Publishers Weekly, Amazon, the Washington Post, and the New York Public Library among others.
