A literary warrant provides justification or authorization based on term usage found in texts, such as articles, books, reports, dictionaries, textbooks, or existing vocabularies.

Here’s the list of texts the project’s Advisory Committee used to develop terms under a literary warrant:

• Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017.
• Carney, Judith Ann, and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery : Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. University of California Press, 2011.
• Carver, George Washington. How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption. Applewood Books, 2022.
• Ceschel, Bruno. On Whiteness : the Racial Imaginary Institute. SPBH Editions, 2022.
• Civil, Gabrielle. Experiments in Joy. Accomplices, 2019.
• Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
• Cooke, Michael G. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century : the Achievement of Intimacy. Yale University Press, 1984.
• Cotera, Mari?a Eugenia. Native Speakers : Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonza?lez, and the Poetics of Culture. University of Texas Press ; Combined Academic [distributor], 2010.
• Cruz, Kleaver. The Black Joy Project. Mariner Books, 2024.
• Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, and Carl Pedersen. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Drew, Kimberly, and Jenna Wortham. Black Futures. One World, 2020.
• Ellis, Carl F. Free at Last? : the Gospel in the African-American Experience. 2nd ed. InterVarsity Press, 1996.
• Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy : Essays. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2022.
• Glasrud, Bruce A., and Cary D. Wintz. The Harlem Renaissance in the American West : the New Negro's Western Experience. Routledge, 2012.
• Glaude, Eddie S. We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking for. Harvard University Press, 2024.
• Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Serpent's Tail, 2019.
• Hersey, Tricia. Rest Is Resistance : a Manifesto. Little, Brown Spark, 2022.
• Hill, Marc Lamont, Frank Barat, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. We Still Here : Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility. Haymarket Books, 2020.
• Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Sexual Politics : African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. Routledge, 2004.
• Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Women in White : Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950. Indiana University Press, 1989.
• Hooks, Bell. All about Love : New Visions. 2018 ed. William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2022.
• Hurston, Zora Neale, and Toni Cade Bambara. The Sanctified Church. New edition ed. Marlowe & Company, 1997.
• Hurston, Zora Neale, Alice Walker, and Mary Helen Washington. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive : a Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Feminist Press, 1979.
• Lewis-Giggetts, Tracey M. Black Joy : Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration. Gallery Books, 2022.
• Lorde, Audre, Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta B. Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. I Am Your Sister : Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More than Survive : Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon Press, 2019.
• Marin, Natasha, and Steven Dunn. Black Imagination : Black Voices on Black Futures. McSweeney's, 2020.
• Miles, Tiya. Night Flyer : Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Penguin Press, 2024.
• Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture : an Anthropological Perspective. Beacon Press, 1992.
• Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-regard : Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, 2019.
• Morrison, Toni, and Carolyn C. Denard. What Moves at the Margin : Selected Nonfiction. University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
• Muhammad, Gholdy. Unearthing Joy : a Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Curriculum and Instruction. Scholastic Professional, 2023.
• Parry, Tyler D. Jumping the Broom : the Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
• Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion : the 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South. Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Shakur, Tupac, Afeni Shakur, Nikki Giovanni, and Leila Steinberg. The Rose That Grew from Concrete. Pocket Books, 2009.
• Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake : on Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
• Steele, Catherine Knight. Digital Black Feminism. New York University Press, 2021.
• Stewart, Lindsey. The Politics of Black Joy Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism. Northwestern University Press, 2021.
• Stewart, Lindsey. The Politics of Black Joy Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism. Northwestern University Press, 2021.
• Sutherland, Tonia. Resurrecting the Black Body : Race and the Digital Afterlife. University of California Press, 2023.
• Tipton-Martin, Toni. Jubilee : Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking: A Cookbook. Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale, 2019.
• Waheed, Adreinne. Black Joy and Resistance. Waheedpix, 2018.
• Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens : Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
• Wall, Cheryl A. On Freedom and the Will to Adorn : the Art of the African American Essay. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Wekker, Gloria. The Politics of Passion : Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. Columbia University Press, 2006.
• Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence : Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Duke University Press, 2016.
• Wiggins, William H. Jr. O Freedom! : Afro-american Emancipation Celebrations. Univ Tenn, 1990.