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 is a list of texts used by the project’s Advisory Committee 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.