Morgan Jerkins Books in Order

Jerkins combines personal experiences with cultural criticism in linked nonfiction essays about being a Black woman in America. Race, feminism, beauty, history, and popular culture become lenses for examining identity and the intersecting pressures shaping her life.

Tracing her family's migration routes across America, Jerkins combines memoir with interviews and historical research. Her journey through Southern and Western communities examines Black cultural traditions, displacement, and the gaps between inherited stories and recorded history.

After repeated pregnancy losses, Laila seeks help from a Harlem family whose caul skin is believed to possess healing power. A child placed in that family's care links motherhood, inherited secrets, and exploitation in this novel of magical realism.

A love letter at a Harlem engagement party connects two families to lovers separated after the Civil War. Across generations of migration, heartbreak, and concealed history, their descendants face the lasting consequences of choices made more than a century earlier.