Gina Yashere Shares Her Favorite Horror Reads and Black Female Authors

Gina Yashere has been an avid book reader since she was a child and it very much shows in Marie Claire’s latest episode of Shelf Portrait (opens in new tab), in which celebrities, influencers, and famous bookworms show off their personal libraries.

In the video, the stand-up comic, co-creator of CBS' Bob Hearts Abishola, and author of Cack-Handed: A Memoir (opens in new tab), reveals that her favorite genre is horror and her all-time favorite writer is Stephen King. The actress divulges that she read It (opens in new tab) in just three days when she was only 14 years old and then quickly picked up King's Pet Sematary (opens in new tab).

Yashere also enjoys supporting Black female writers, including Octavia E. Butler—she'd gladly buy the rights to Butler's Kindred (opens in new tab) and turn it into a movie; Buchi Emecheta—Yashere's mother and the late Emecheta were very good friends so Yashere read Second Class Citizen (opens in new tab) as a kid; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Yashere also recommends reading Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer (opens in new tab), which combines her love of horror and Black women authors.

Watch Yashere's Shelf Portrait video, above, and then order some of her favorite books for yourself, below. You can catch the season three premiere of her show Bob Hearts Abishola (opens in new tab) on September 20.