Amber McBride books

Anthologies

Penguin Poets Reading Order

Poetry Collections

Standalone Novels

Amber McBride writes at the intersection of poetry and fiction, using the verse novel form to explore subjects that resist straightforward prose. Her debut, Me (Moth), received immediate critical attention, earning a National Book Award nomination and introducing a voice that draws on folk traditions, grief, and the complicated inheritance of Black American history. Her subsequent novels have continued in a similar direction, pairing emotional openness with formal inventiveness.

Beyond her own novels, McBride appears in the Penguin Poets catalog and contributed to the anthology Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a collection that gathers contemporary Black poetry for young readers. Her 2024 poetry collection Thick with Trouble brought her directly into the poetry world alongside the verse fiction she had already established. Her writing across all these forms shares a preoccupation with how language holds what ordinary speech cannot.