Walk into Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison this month, and you’ll run into a small, colorful surprise: a New Books Display Shelf stacked with some of the most exciting African fiction to hit shelves in the last few years, cocktail umbrellas and all.

The display brings together titles spanning the continent and its diaspora — among them Ignatius T. Mabasa’s The Mad, Ryad Assani-Razaki’s The Hand of Iman, Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water, alongside other recent arrivals making their way through the catalog, from A Song of Legends Lost and Water Baby to The Road to Country. It’s a snapshot of just how much new African writing is moving through university library systems right now and how much of it students are discovering by simply walking past a shelf.

The shelf is the work of librarians Martha Catherine Poniewaz and Leanne Lenhart, who assemble it each month with an eye toward range, representing a wide spread of author countries and subjects that reflects, as they put it, “the sheer vastness of the library’s holdings”. Contemporary fiction gets particular priority, since it’s what tends to catch students looking for something fun to read rather than another research text. That emphasis is also a corrective: many patrons don’t realize how dynamic Memorial Library’s collection really is. Alongside its deep well of academic material, it holds a surprising amount of popular fiction, graphic novels, and comics, the kind of thing a passerby might not expect to find between the stacks.

When asked what goes into making the book choices that make it to the shelves, we got to know that cover design plays into the selection too; Poniewaz and Lenhart are drawn to books with eye-catching art that can stop a student mid-stride. And because literature from around the world can be genuinely hard to come by in the U.S., they’re deliberate about using the display to help close that gap. Everything on the African Fiction shelf has been published within the last few years, which is where the “New Books” name comes from.

Poniewaz and Lenhart both joined UW–Madison in January 2024, which makes them relatively new custodians of a much older collection, they point to colleagues Emily and Kimberly Rooney as the ones spearheading its long-term development. Still, cataloging the incoming titles has given the pair a close-up view of where African literature at the library is growing. They’ve noticed a strong showing of South African titles moving through, along with a steady stream of work from Francophone and Lusophone African countries, including graphic novels that have made for particularly fun additions to catalog. It’s a collection they’re watching expand in real time, and they’re clearly glad to be along for it.

For students and Madison-area readers, the New Books Display Shelf is on rotation at Memorial Library, worth a detour next time you’re between the stacks.

Some pictures below: