Ijeoma Oluo Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo, born December 30, 1980 in Denton, Texas, and is a writer, Internet Yeller, and speaker based in Seattle, Washington. Ijeoma has also worked as a storyteller and a standup comedian.

Her work focuses mainly on issues about feminism, identity, race, mental and social health, the arts, social justice, and personal essay. Her writing has been featured in Elle Magazine, NBC News, The Washington Post, The Stranger, TIME, and the Guardian, among other places.

Oluo’s work began appearing in The Guardian and The Stranger from 2015 through 2017, and has contributed to Medium, Jezebel, and The Establishment, which is a publication that she helped launched and an editor-at-large.

Quite a few of her pieces have gone viral, owing significance of her critiques of race as well as the erasure of black women’s voices in America.

She was the winner of the Feminist Humanist Award by the American Humanist Society, was listed as one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, and was one of the fifty Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met.

Oluo began writing because she needed somebody to talk to. That said, she wasn’t intending to be a writer, however, it was then that she realized that her voice could possibly do something that she could get used to speaking her mind, and possibly there some reason that she had such a strong desire to do it.

She started her career in digital marketing and technology. She began writing during her mid-thirties after Trayvon Martin’s death in the year 2012, who was the exact age as Malcolm, her son, at the time. Fearful for her child as well as her little brother, who was a musician traveling on tour, she started sharing her long-held concerns on a blog that she had previously devoted to writing about food.

She has described these initial forays of writing about food as a huge influence on her style of writing, as she believed that sharing personal tales would be a way to connect to and activate her mainly white community in the city of Seattle.

Ijeoma has also stated that she was disappointed by the response she got initially, and that many of her existing friends “fell away” instead of engaging in the issues she began to raise. Mainly black women, however, she had not known in the past reached out to express to her their appreciation. From here, Oluo’s profile as a writer started to grow, with different publications asking to reprint her work from her blog and they eventually commissioned some new writing from her.

Ijeoma wrote about Rachel Dolezal even though she really didn’t want to. She was extremely surprised that she actually said yes. If anyone other than Charles Mudede (her editor)asked her, she would have said no. She also doesn’t believe that it would’ve been anywhere close to the same essay if she hadn’t work with him on it. Charles also helped her get to the core of what she truly wanted to say in the piece.

Oluo began writing “So You Want to Talk About Race” at her agent’s suggestion, who proposed Ijeoma write a guidebook discussing the topics she already wrote regularly about. Oluo, in the beginning, was reluctant to take this project on, feeling that she already spent way more time than she wanted dealing with race.

As she pondered the idea, many people reached out to her with topics, and she felt that a book might’ve saved her from having to answer those same questions again and again. She also hoped a book’s tangible form might reach some people in a different way altogether than her online work already did. She would have the chance to give people something that people would be able to hold in their hands.

Her dad, named Samuel Lucky Onwuzip Oluo, is from Nigeria and her mom, named Susan Jane Hawley, is white and from Kansas. Her younger brother, named Ahamefule J. Oluo and is married to Lindy West, a Seattle writer.

She is close with her sister and brother. She and her brother are eighteen months apart.

From 2001 to 2005, she was married to Chad R. Jacobson, with whom the first of her two kids was born.

She graduated in the year 2007 from Western Washington University with a BA in political science.

“So You Want to Talk About Race” is a non-fiction book and was released in the year 2018. Widespread reporting on certain aspects of white-supremacy- from the mass incarceration of Black Americans to police brutality- has put a huge media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, this is a tough subject to discuss. How can you tell your roommate that her jokes are in fact racist? How do you go about explaining white privilege to your white and privileged friend? Why would your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked if you could touch her hair, and how can you possibly make things right?

In the book, Ijeoma guides the reader of any and all race through subjects that range from “model minorities” to intersectionality and affirmative action to try and make the seemingly impossible possible. Have honest conversations about racism and race, and how they infect just about every single aspect of American life.

“Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America” is a non-fiction book and was released in the year 2020. After Donald Trump’s election, and the escalation of white male rage and increased hostility expressed toward immigrants that came with him, Ijeoma found herself conversing with Americans all over the country. The whole time, she pondered just one question: How did we even get here?

In this survey of the previous century of American history, she answers this question by pinpointing white man’s deliberate attempts to subvert people of color, the disenfranchised, and women. Through interviews, research, and the personal and powerful writing that she’s been celebrated for, she investigates the backstory of America’s growth, from immigrant migration. To the national ethos around ingenuity, from shaping of economic policy to the protection of sociopolitical movements that fortify the power of males.

In the end, she displays how white men have long kept a stranglehold on leadership and just how they have sorely undermined the pursuit of happiness for all.