Fifteen years after the mysterious death of Minette Swift, an assertive 19-year-old black girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive, mostly white liberal arts college near Philadelphia, her former roommate, Genna, begins an unofficial inquiry into her death. In reconstructing the girls' tumultuous freshman year at the college, Genna is lead also to reconstruct her life as the daughter of a famous "radical-hippie-lawyer" of the 1960s. Black Girl/White Girl is a double portrait of "black" and "white" in America in the years of crisis following the end of the Vietnam War.

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller, The Falls, which is available as a Sound Library® audiobook.