Welcome, fans of Street Lit!
Photo by Julie Pactor, 1/29/18. Used with permission
This guide is designed to help you (and your librarian) find the titles you want to read in the FSCJ collection.
This first page is an introduction to street lit for people who may not be familiar with the genre. Feel free to skip to the next two tabs (How to find Street Lit and Featured Titles) to find your next great read.
Street Lit is know by many names: Urban fiction, ghetto lit, hip-hop lit, and gangsta lit. Whatever you call it, Street lit is exploding in popularity and for many students it is their preferred genre for pleasure reading.
Yet, many librarians are unfamiliar with this emerging genre. The purpose of this Libguide is to assist Street Lit fans and their librarians in finding the titles they want to read in the FSCJ collection.
According to Vanessa Irvin Morris, author of The Reader's Advisory Guide to Street Literature (2012), Street lit incorporates the following elements:
Drawing from the above list, we can define Street Lit as high-octane stories set in low-income neighborhoods and featuring tough African-American characters doing whatever it takes to survive and thrive on the street.
Recommended reading for librarians interested in the Street Literature genre:
The Readers' Advisory Guide to Street Literature by
(PRINT)Street lit, also known as urban fiction, addresses with unflinching grit the concerns and problems of city living. Controversial in some quarters, it is also wildly popular, and this readers' advisory by street lit expert Morris.
Urban Grit by
(PRINT) Offering more than 400 street-lit titles, this guide helps readers' advisors and other librarians to better understand the genre and collect and recommend titles ranging from romance and coming-of-age stories to action stories and erotica. * More than 400 titles fully described and organized according to subgenre, making it easy to identify read-alikes * Explains the history and evolution of the street lit genre and its appeal to readers * Contains a comprehensive bibliography of core collections for adults and young adults in public libraries that lists street lit titles by theme
