Reading Resource List

This Reading Resource List offers a bibliography of secondary sources to enhance readers’ experience of Stumbling Blocks. If you’re interested in how Phillips’s novel was received when it was published, please check out the Reviews resource.

Phillips’s First Novel

The Darkest Child (2004) and Reprint (2018), Soho Press.

On The Darkest Child

Harris, Trudier. “Image Shatterer: Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child.” Mothers who Kill, ed. by Charlotte Beyer and Josephine Savarese, Demeter Press, 2022.

Jones, Tayari. Introduction. The Darkest Child, by Delores Phillips, Soho Press, 2018.

Jones, Tayari. “By the Book.” New York Times book review, 6 Feb. 2018.

Philo, Kaila. “Agency, Activism, and the Black Domestic Worker in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Delores Phillips’ The Darkest Child.” Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past & Present, Salem Press, 2017. Pp. 253-269.

Steverson, Delia. “Recovering a Literary Legacy: The Life of Delores Phillips.” Literature and Medicine, Vol. 41. 1 (2023): 45-49.

Steverson, Delia. “‘Where’s the dummy?’: Deafness, Race, and Labor in Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child.” The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Vol. 15. 2 (2021): 187-202.

Recovery Work and African American Literature

Alice Walker – “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (1975) in Ms. Magazine

Maryemma Graham – The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker (2022)

Companion Texts to Stumbling Blocks

Poetry Section

Gwendolyn Brooks – “the mother” (1945)

James Baldwin – “Sonny’s Blues” (1957)

Nikki Giovanni – “For Saundra” (1968)

Ray Charles – “Georgia on My Mind” (1960) *song

Paul Laurence Dunbar – “The Haunted Oak” (1913)

Gladys Knight and the Pips – “Midnight Train to Georgia” (1973) *song

Audre Lorde “What My Child Learns of the Sea” (1963)

Claude McKay – “The Lynching” (1922)

Richard Wright – “Between the World and Me” (1935)

Short Stories Section

William Faulkner – Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950)

Randall Kenan – If I had Two Wings: Stories (2020)

Toni Morrison – “Recitatif” (1983)

Alice Munro – Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)

Novels Section

Charles W. Chesnutt – The Conjure Woman (1899)
Zora Neale Hurston – Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
Toni Morrison – Sula (1973)
Gloria Naylor – Mama Day (1988)
Alice Walker – The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and The Color Purple (1982)