The world feels like it’s on fire. Let these champions show you other ways to live. After all, someone has to change the world. Maybe it’s you.

Slay by Brittney Morris

Gaming and the diversity of the African diaspora are Kiera’s secret passions. That’s why she invented Slay, her multi-player VR game strictly for black players. But when Slay gets infiltrated by outsiders it becomes more than she’s ever wanted, or ever imagined.

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Will is on his way to kill his brother’s killer. The gun is the waistband of his jeans. But when his elevator stops at each floor and the ghosts of neighborhood gang killings get on to tell him their stories, it makes him start to question the rules for killing that he’s grown up with.

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

Justyce is fourth in his class, a black student at his almost all-white prep school. But when he tries to do a good deed that police think is the exact opposite, he tries to make sense of the world by writing to his hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ship It by Britta Lundin

When superfan Claire asks the creators behind the TV show Demon Heart if the male protagonists, Heart and Smokey, will end up together as they do in her “SmokeHeart” fanfic, she is shut down. But the showrunners, desperate to boost their ratings, invite Claire on the rest of their convention tour. What follows is a battle of wills as Claire tries to get the writers to canonize “SmokeHeart”, while Forest, one of the star, tries to get them to do anything but that.

Beasts of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi

Taj and his fellow sin-eaters, or “aki”, who are impoverished outcasts, fight and consue sin-beasts to absolve others’ transgressions. When a coveted sin-eating position in the palace forces Taj to choose between living in luxury or working to improve the circumstances of all aki, he has a difficult choice. This Nigerian-inspired fantasy is the first in a trilogy.

Dread Nation: Rise Up by Justina Ireland

America is changed forever when the dead begin to rise on Civil War battlefields. The event creates a new nation and a new type of slavery in which Native and Negro children are forced to learn combat skills to put down the dead. Jane is almost through with her studies at Miss Preston’s School but when citizens of Baltimore begin to go missing she finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy which may take her life. First in a duology.