The thesis Black lives, literary lives (1978-2020) has the general objective of analyzing the literary lives of black Brazilian writers during the period between 1978 and 2020. The temporal and spatial milestones are justified by the articulation between literary and political actions related to the theme: in 1978, the literary series Cadernos Negros was created and in the same period the Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement) emerged; in 2020, there was an increase in black publications by Brazilian publishers and in that same year there was an intensification of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is understood that the lives of black writers are affected by structural racism and necropolitics, either in a general way, as it happens to every black Brazilian individual, or in a specific way, in the reduction (and expansion) of opportunities for production and circulation of literary works. The research is of exploratory, descriptive, and quantitative type and constitutes its theoretical framework from texts on literary life (Broca, 2005; Moriconi, 2006), structural racism (Almeida, 2019), epistemicide (Carneiro, 2005), necropolitics (Mbembe, 2018), black-Brazilian literature (Cuti, 2010), publishing market (Dalcastagnè, 2011, 2014; Oliveira, Rodrigues, 2016), escrevivência (Evaristo, 2009) and of a selection of the literary repertoire (fiction and poetry) produced by black male and female writers in the period delimited for this thesis. The reading of this repertoire identified a thematic recurrence about the vulnerability to death of the black population constitutes an important material to be analyzed in dialogue with the concepts of black-brazilian literature, ancestry, and survival. This selection of texts contributes to the analysis of the literary life of this group of black writers. It is understood that this literary life, articulated by strategies of production, dissemination and circulation of works, carried out in the period between 1978 and 2020, although, in its majority, distant from the privileged spaces of legitimation of literature, integrates the mosaic of Brazilian literary life and claims to researchers the experimentation of a (flexible and inclusive) model of description, inscription, mapping and approach, as, for example, the one carried out by Broca (2005) in the book A vida literária no Brasil - 1900.