All Books
- David's Diary #1: The Summer Camp Disaster
David's Diary #1: The Summer Camp Disaster
$8.99Meet David Jesse King, a precocious nine-year-old whose first time at church camp is turning out to be not-so-fun, in this hilarious, highly illustrated new chapter book series from bestselling author Bunmi Laditan.
David is absolutely thrilled to be at a real, honest-to-goodness, actual sleepaway camp! He can’t wait to jump into the lake, climb an oak tree, see a brown bear, fly down the mountain on the zip line—it’s going to be the best week of David’s life!
But when another kid dumps a huge bowl of chocolate pudding on him, David’s first time at church camp is ruined. Can he fix things by getting revenge? Or is there another way for David to still have a fun week?
The Summer Camp Disaster is the first book in the new David's Diary series, starring a neurodivergent kid whose good intentions often get him into trouble! Written in diary entries, each title will include engaging four-color illustrations on almost every page.
And don’t miss book two in the David's Diary series, The Science Fair Sabotage, set to also release on June 30, 2026!
- Training School for Negro Girls
Training School for Negro Girls
$17.95When you're black and female in America, society's rules were never meant to make you safe or free. In this "flawlessly executed work [that] reinvigorates the short fiction genre," Camille Acker's relatable yet unexpected characters break down the walls of respectability politics, showing that the only way for black women to be free is to be themselves (BUST).
In her debut short story collection, Camille Acker unleashes the irony and tragic comedy of respectability onto a wide-ranging cast of characters, all of whom call Washington, DC, home. A "woke" millennial tries to fight gentrification, only to learn she's part of the problem; a grade school teacher dreams of a better DC, only to take out her frustrations on her students; and a young piano player wins a competition, only to learn the prize is worthless.
Ultimately, they are confronted with the fact that respectability does not equal freedom. Instead, they must learn to trust their own conflicted judgment and fight to create their own sense of space and self.
- Our Gen: A Contemporary Novel for Terry McMillan Fans – Sexagenarian Friendship and Secrets in a Philadelphia Retirement Community
Our Gen: A Contemporary Novel for Terry McMillan Fans – Sexagenarian Friendship and Secrets in a Philadelphia Retirement Community
Sold out“Our Gen is warm and smart, accessible yet meaningful, a beach read with strong writing and emotional heft.”—BookPage
Residents of an active-living retirement community revert to lives of youthful indulgence, even as time-bomb secrets of their pasts tick toward explosion.
The Gen—short for Sexagenarian—is an upscale fifty-five-plus community located in the bucolic suburbs of Philadelphia. Main character Cynthia befriends the Gen’s two other Black residents, Bloc and Tish, as well as Lavia, who everyone assumes is from India. They regularly convene to smoke weed, line dance, and debate politics and philosophy as the wine goes down like silk. Their camaraderie is exhilarating.
But beneath the fun and froth, storms gather. With its walls of windows gushing light and air, the Gen becomes the catalyst for secrets to be exposed.
Shifting the narrative between the characters’ pasts and the present day, Diane McKinney-Whetstone deftly builds suspense as she captures with insight, poignancy, and humor, the scars, tenderness, and swagger of those not yet old, but no longer young, coming to the mean acceptance that life is finite after all, who knew.
- PRE-ORDER: The Siren
PRE-ORDER: The Siren
$24.99The new novel from acclaimed, three-time instant #1 New York Times–bestselling author Tomi Adeyemi blends shocking contemporary storytelling with a sinister dark academic flair to create a blockbuster about rage, longing, and a woman’s darkness that will leave readers breathless.
When Emery steps foot onto Dartmouth’s campus, she knows what she has to do: keep her scholarship, take her meds, and pray no one ever finds out about the past she left behind.
But that all changes when Emery meets an intoxicating girl named Roux, her disarming stepbrother named Eli, and the mystical band of girls Roux calls “The Sirens.” Each Siren is as beautiful as the last, and their lives on campus are shrouded in extravagance and secret parties. Before the girls became Sirens, they were outcasts, yet under Roux, their wildest dreams come true. When Roux offers Emery the chance to join them, Emery will do whatever it takes to make it in.
Even if it costs Emery her life.
- PRE-ORDER: All Hours: Crazy Good Food for Whatever, Whenever: A Cookbook
PRE-ORDER: All Hours: Crazy Good Food for Whatever, Whenever: A Cookbook
$40.00Around the clock recipes, from “the most important chef in America” (San Francisco Chronicle), the visionary behind Tatiana, the New York Times #1 Restaurant in New York City.
Chef Kwame Onwuachi is always on the go. But no matter when—or where—he’s eating, you know it’s going to be good. In All Hours, Kwame shares the bold, craveable recipes that keep him going, 24/7, so that everyone can get a taste of his home cooking (even when you can’t get a table at one of his red-hot restaurants).
From morning glories like Corn Milk French Toast and the ultimate Bodega BEC to afternoon delights like Souped-Up Top Ramen and Red Stew Chicken Parm, these are recipes for quiet nights in and ragers with friends, cookouts with family and snacking on the go—and everything in between.
Filled with the mad-genius creations and cross-cultural mash-ups that only a great chef could dream of: Drunken Noodles alla Vodka, Creole Sausage Roll-Ups, Brussels Sprout Suya—plus showstopping dishes from Kwame’s restaurants (Tatiana’s legendary Cosmic Brownie with Powdered Donut Mousse!) and his own spins on New York classics (Bougie Chopped Cheese!)—this is killer home cooking, with a little je ne sais kwame.
- Vampires of El Norte
Vampires of El Norte
$20.00Vampires, vaqueros, and star-crossed lovers face off on the Texas–Mexico border in this supernatural Western from the author of The Hacienda.
As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters—her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead.
Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago.
Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind.
When the United States invades Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer, striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion—and Nena’s rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago—is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh.
And unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.
- White Shoes
White Shoes
$60.00White Shoes is a collection of self-portraits taken in locations around New York that were central to the city’s once pivotal – and now largely obscured and unacknowledged – involvement in the slave trade. Nona Faustine depicts herself at the sites of slave auctions, burial grounds, slave-owning farms, and the coastal locations where slave ships docked, posing nude apart from a pair of white high-heeled shoes. Documenting herself in places where history becomes tangible, Faustine acts as a conduit or receptor, in solidarity with people whose names and memories have been lost but are embedded in the land. Through quiet but defiant self-representation, Faustine responds to a history of depiction of Black people that is shaped by subjugation, phrenology, and pseudo-science. Her complex large-format images refer and respond to a range of sources including daguerrotypes of slaves and photographs commissioned by naturalists, while her nudity ― expressive of fearless self-possession as well as vulnerability – subverts the legacy of Black and female nudes in Western art. Running throughout the images, the talismanic white shoes that give the series its name suggest the many adaptations to dominant White culture that were and are still demanded of people of colour. At once historical and speculative, White Shoes confronts the relationship between the visible and invisible, between what is displayed and what is kept from view. Includes newly commissioned texts by Pamela Sneed, Jessica Lanay, Jonathan Michael Square and Seph Rodney, together with an interview of the artist by Jessica Lanay.
- DEANA LAWSON
DEANA LAWSON
$40.00'Deana Lawson', the first scholarly publication on the artist Deana Lawson, surveying fifteen years of her photography, will be published to accompany the first comprehensive museum survey exhibition featuring Lawson’s artwork. A singular voice in contemporary photography, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of black identities in the African American and African diaspora for over fifteen years. Her work samples numerous photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and found images, creating narratives of family, love, and desire. Lawson’s photographs are made in collaboration with her subjects, who are sometimes nude, embracing, and directly confronting the camera, destabilizing the notion of photography as a passively voyeuristic medium. Whether in posed photographs or assembled collages, Lawson’s works channel broader ideas about personal and social histories of black life, love, sexuality, family, and spiritual beliefs. This publication will include selections from Lawson’s personal family photographs and archives of vernacular images that have profoundly informed her work. Accompanies an exhibition at ICA/Boston from 3 November, 2021 - 27 February, 2022; MoMA PS1 from 14 April - 5 September, 2022; and High Museum of Art from 7 October, 2022 - 19 February, 2023. Includes essays by Eva Respini and Peter Eleey (curators of the exhibition), Kimberly Juanita Brown (Professor at Dartmouth College), Tina M. Campt (Professor at Brown University), Alexander Nemerov (Professor at Stanford University), Greg Tate (writer, musician, and producer), and a conversation between the artist and Deborah Willis (Professor at New York University).
- The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis)
The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis)
Sold outLonglist, National Book Awards 2021 for Nonfiction
A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers
Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed―marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier, Deb Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged.
With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle―from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing; responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and―most predominantly―African American resilience.
The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance.
- Brown Girl, Brownstones
Brown Girl, Brownstones
$18.00The beloved novel about a New York City girlhood that heralded a renaissance in Black women’s literature, with a new foreword by Nicole Dennis-Benn, the bestselling author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun
One of The New York Times Magazine’s 25 Most Significant New York City Novels from the Last 100 Years
A Penguin Classic
Selina Boyce comes of age in 1940s New York as the daughter of two immigrants from Barbados: a free-spirited father she adores and who dreams of returning to his Caribbean island home, and a disciplined, hardworking mother she admires and who is determined to purchase their Brooklyn brownstone. When her father comes into an unexpected inheritance, Selina is torn between his nostalgia for the past and her mother’s ambition for the future, all while negotiating racism, sexuality, Depression-era poverty, and the competing values of African Americans and her West Indian immigrant community.
First published in 1959, Brown Girl, Brownstones opened a window into the rich inner life of Black women and today ranks with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as one of the great New York City novels. With her autobiographical debut, Paule Marshall paved the way for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Maya Angelou—and took her place in the American literary canon.
Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Free at Last: A Juneteenth Poem
Free at Last: A Juneteenth Poem
$17.99This lyrical celebration of Juneteenth, deeply rooted in Black American history, spans centuries and reverberates loudly and proudly today.
After 300 years of forced bondage;
hands bound, descendants of Africa
picked up their souls—all that they owned—
leaving shackles where they fell on the ground,
headed for the nearest resting place to be found.Deeply emotional, evocative free verse by poet and activist Sojourner Kincaid Rolle traces the solemnity and celebration of Juneteenth from its 1865 origins in Galveston, Texas to contemporary observances all over the United States. This is an ode to the strength of Black Americans and a call to remember and honor a holiday whose importance reverberates far beyond the borders of Texas.
- Juneteenth (A We Celebrate Book): A Board Book
Juneteenth (A We Celebrate Book): A Board Book
$9.99This inspiring photographic board book celebrating Juneteenth is from the ALA Stonewall Award–winning team Little Feminist team
Freedom feels like hugs and kisses, unity, strength and pride.
Freedom feels like a million steps forward―together with every stride.From award-winning indie publisher Little Feminist Press comes an engaging board book celebrating Juneteenth and its powerful history. Bursting with beautiful, community-sourced photographs, this board book features powerful images of Black joy, allyship from all demographics, and the many ways people can celebrate this important American holiday.
Showcasing real families and communities, young readers will see festivities and merriment in action as kids, their adoring adult caretakers, and their neighbors share stories, prepare meals, listen, hug, dance, show kindness, demonstrate bravery, and step in to help their families and communities.
The book also includes family discussion questions and a note for grown-ups on how to use this book with young children.
- Red River
Red River
$24.99Hailed as "powerful," "accomplished," and "spellbinding," Lalita Tademy's first novel Cane River was a New York Times bestseller and the 2001 Oprah Book Club Summer Selection. Now with her evocative, luminous style and painstaking research, she takes her family's story even further, back to a little-chronicled, deliberately-forgotten time...and the struggle of three extraordinary generations of African-American men to forge brutal injustice and shattered promise into a limitless future for their children...
For the newly-freed black residents of Colfax, Louisiana, the beginning of Reconstruction promised them the right to vote, own property-and at last control their own lives. Tademy saw a chance to start a school for his children and neighbors. His friend Israel Smith was determined to start a community business and gain economic freedom. But in the space of a day, marauding whites would "take back" Colfax in one of the deadliest cases of racial violence in the South. In the bitter aftermath, Sam and Israel's fight to recover and build their dreams will draw on the best they and their families have to give-and the worst they couldn't have foreseen. Sam's hidden resilience will make him an unexpected leader, even as it puts his conscience and life on the line. Israel finds ironic success-and the bitterest of betrayals. And their greatest challenge will be to pass on to their sons and grandsons a proud heritage never forgotten-and the strength to meet the demands of the past and future in their own unique ways. An unforgettable achievement, a history brought to vibrant life through one of the most memorable families in fiction, Red River is about fathers and sons, husbands and wives-and the hopeful, heartbreaking choices we all must make to claim the legacy that is ours.
- Growing Papaya Trees: Nurturing Indigenous Solutions for Climate Displacement
Growing Papaya Trees: Nurturing Indigenous Solutions for Climate Displacement
Sold outLeading Binnizá and Maya Ch'orti' scientist Jessica Hernandez, PhD, weaves together Indigenous knowledge, environmental science, and personal family stories in her highly anticipated follow-up to the LA Times best-seller Fresh Banana Leaves.
Not every environmental problem is a result of climate change, but every environmental and climate change problem is a result of colonialism.
Dr. Jessica Hernandez offers readers an Indigenous, Global-South lens on the climate crisis, delivering a compelling and urgent exploration of its causes—and its costs. She shares how the impacts of colonial climate catastrophe—from warming oceans to forced displacement of settler ontologies—can only be addressed at the root if we reorient toward Indigenous science and follow the lead of Indigenous peoples and communities.
Growing Papaya Trees explores:
* Energy as a sociopolitical issue
* The interconnectedness of natural disasters, sociopolitical turmoil, and forced migration
* Our oceans, our forests, and our Indigenous futures
* Moving Indigenous science from mere acknowledgement into real action
* How to nourish Indigenous roots when displaced beyond bordersDr. Hernandez asks: what does it mean to be Indigenous when we’re separated from our lands? How do we nurture future generations knowing they, too, will have to live away from their ancestral places? She illuminates that cultures are not lost, even amid genocide, turmoil, war, and climate displacement—and shows us how to be better kin to each other against the ecological violence, colonial oppression, and distorted status quo of the Global North.
- Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior)
Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior)
Sold outThe lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South
Despite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched views of white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery―compared to areas that were not―are more racially hostile and less amenable to policies that could promote black progress. A groundbreaking look at the ways institutions of the past continue to sway attitudes of the present, Deep Roots demonstrates how social beliefs persist long after the formal policies that created those beliefs have been eradicated.
- Hip Hop Studies and Queer Black Feminism (California Series in Hip Hop Studies) (Volume 7)
Hip Hop Studies and Queer Black Feminism (California Series in Hip Hop Studies) (Volume 7)
Sold outHip Hop Studies and Queer Black Feminism presents a dynamic and much-needed fresh analysis of Black gendering and racialized sexualities in the sphere of Hip Hop. Editors Elaine B. Richardson, Gwendolyn D. Pough, and Treva B. Lindsey bring together established and rising scholars to examine the work of Hip Hop creators and practitioners, using the genre as a lens to address the crises of this historical moment, marked by attacks on bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ rights, education, and Black studies. Tracing legacies of queer Black feminist activism and expression through Hip Hop culture and music, this timely anthology recenters queer Black feminism and cements its place in (Black) culture, liberation movements, and education.
- Nat Turner: A Graphic Novel
Nat Turner: A Graphic Novel
$19.99Nat Turner is the fascinating and action-packed true story of an American freedom fighter, written and illustrated by Kyle Baker as a graphic novel—collecting all four issues of his critically acclaimed miniseries.
“A hauntingly beautiful historical spotlight. A-” —Entertainment Weekly
The story of Nat Turner and his slave rebellion—which began on August 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia—is known among school children and adults. To some he is a hero, a symbol of Black resistance and a precursor to the civil rights movement; to others he is a monster—a murderer whose name is never uttered.
In Nat Turner, acclaimed author and illustrator Kyle Baker depicts the evils of slavery in this moving and historically accurate story of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. Told nearly wordlessly, every image resonates with the reader as the brutal story unfolds.
“Baker’s storytelling is magnificent.” —Variety
- Goldenborn
Goldenborn
$19.99A girl with a mission. A god with a deal. A story that could change everything.
When 17-year-old Akoma Addo stumbles into a world of ancient gods and modern magic, she’ll have to choose between saving her father… or staying true to everything she’s ever believed.
Akoma Addo has one rule: don’t get too close to the supernatural.
Ever since a blazing orb of light left her father in a coma, she’s buried herself in her secret job investigating magical crimes in San Francisco’s AfricaTown -- just enough to keep her grief at bay. But when a body turns up in a pool of molten gold and ash, Akoma’s pulled into something much bigger -- and far more dangerous. At the center of it all is Anansi, the trickster god of stories, who makes her an impossible offer: help him catch a killer and awaken the ancestral magic buried deep in her blood... and in return, he’ll give her a chance to bring her father back. To take the deal, Akoma will have to lie to everyone she loves and embrace the very power she’s spent years trying to deny. And as her connection grows with Xander, the new guy in town with secrets of his own, Akoma must decide who she can trust -- especially when she’s no longer sure she can even trust herself. Rooted in Ghanaian mythology and packed with mystery, danger, and slow-burning romance, Goldenborn is a gripping fantasy about legacy, lies, and what it really means to rewrite your story.
- Level Up
Level Up
Sold outFrom the author of Hide and Seeker comes a new thriller where an iconic childhood game turns creepy.
Keenan is used to running. He loves it. He is good at it. He is a track star, after all. Now he and his mother are escaping his father, trying to start a new life in Tennessee.
But he has never been on the run like this before. This new town has monsters of its own. The students in his school seem to be under some sort of trance, and Keenan is the only one who isn’t affected. Which means he is the only one who can do anything about it.
It’s time for Keenan to stop running and face his fears.
He cannot let the monsters win.
- I Am the Dream Come True
I Am the Dream Come True
$19.99From family roots to big dreams, global change makers Marley Dias, Dr. Janice Johnson Dias and Scott Dias show how change starts with one brave step...
In this bold affirmation of empowerment, strength, and purpose, activists and global change makers Marley Dias, Dr. Janice Johnson Dias, and Scott Dias introduce their family’s legacy of blazing new trails, rising to meet opportunities, and choosing to seek new lands of promise. When Marley launched the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign, she showed the world that young people can make a difference through action. Now, in this deeply personal narrative, Marley and her parents share the ancestral histories that have forged new opportunities for future generations by reaching for their dreams.
- Girl from the Ashes
Girl from the Ashes
$18.99Two friends must dig into their town's forgotten past and uncover the forgotten truth -- before their whole town goes up in flames. For fans of Small Spaces and Mary Downing Hahn, a spooky ghost story from the award-winning author of The Forgotten Girl and The Girl in the Lake.
Burn it all down.
Gianna and Carter John are best friends, but they couldn’t be more different. Gianna is small for her age, gets straight A’s, and is the teacher’s favorite. Meanwhile, Carter John gets in trouble no matter what he does, just because he’s tall and his voice is loud.
Then one day while working on a class project in the town library, Carter John gets in trouble yet again and reaches his breaking point. As his anger builds, a stack of books flies off the shelf, hitting the librarian.
Now everywhere he goes, strange things are happening. The smell of smoke hangs in the air. Sparks fly when Carter John gets in trouble. And he hears the voice of a young girl singing a song . . . a song about burning . . .
When fires start breaking out around town, Carter John and Gianna are determined to figure out who’s responsible. They are certain that these are no normal fires . . . Something terrible once happened where the town library now stands, and someone’s trying to send them a message about it.
But who is she―and why is she determined to get revenge?
From the author of The Forgotten Girl and The Girl in the Lake, this is both a bonechilling ghost story, and a book about the history of segregated libraries.
- New Skin: A Novel
New Skin: A Novel
$29.00A scalding, darkly humorous debut following an enmeshed mother-daughter duo, both best friends and enemies, and the plastic surgery addiction that warps their lives into a perilous spiral
At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny’s orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny’s latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home.For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA’s bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny’s disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables.
But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother’s medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of American success that is at the fraught heart of their relationship. - Blue Beach
Blue Beach
$19.99Perfect for fans of Promise Boys, this gripping historical mystery follows a teenager who finds a murdered girl on her family's California beach—a discovery that will reveal the racism rampant in her world.
Fifteen-year-old Blue Collins’s parents own the only Black beach in Santa Monica in 1929. She loves spending time there with her handsome friend Ben Clark. It’s a quiet spot where they can be alone and where Ben’s darker skin won’t be judged by onlookers—or Blue’s own family.
During a sunset rendezvous after a summer parade, the pair discovers the body of Dottie Whitehouse, a white debutante. Blue Beach is already threatened by local white property owners. Now their whole community could be at risk. In their panic, Blue and Ben move Dottie’s body into the waters of a nearby white beach.
Dottie’s body washes ashore, and it isn’t long before all eyes are on Ben. Everyone saw how Dottie teased him and how they shared smiles. And their history goes deeper than Blue ever realized. But to save Ben from the outraged white townspeople, she’ll need to do whatever she can to dig up the truth and prove his innocence. Ben isn’t the only one whose life depends on it.
- Houston and the Permanence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History
Houston and the Permanence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History
$34.952025 Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters
A history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond.
Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a “raceless democracy,” these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead “decades of capture”: times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the “rule of law” compelled black Houstonians to view injustice as a sign of progress, and how antiblack terror undermined Houston’s narrative of itself as a “heavenly” place.
Today, Houston is one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, and at the same time it remains one of the most starkly segregated. Ponton’s study demonstrates how and why segregation has become a permanent feature in our cities and offers powerful tools for imagining the world otherwise.
- Prairie View: A Study in Public Conscience, 1878–1946, Volume I (Prairie View A&M University Series)
Prairie View: A Study in Public Conscience, 1878–1946, Volume I (Prairie View A&M University Series)
Sold outIn 1962, George Ruble Woolfolk, perhaps the foremost Black historian in Texas at the time, published his most well-known work Prairie View: A Study in Public Conscience, 1878–1946, a history of the state’s first institution of higher education for African Americans. Recording the university’s first six decades of existence, Woolfolk’s book also chronicled the many social and educational challenges faced by Black Texans during what was still the Jim Crow Era in Texas and the American South.
Now, historian and scholar Ronald E. Goodwin has edited and annotated Woolfolk’s influential book, making it available and accessible to current scholars and students, as well as those interested in the early history of not only Prairie View A&M University but also of historically Black colleges and universities. Students and scholars in African American studies or the history of education will find Goodwin’s updated edition a valuable resource for study, research, and a more complete understanding of the historical contexts of higher education for people of color.
Published in coordination with the sesquicentennial of Prairie View A&M University, this new edition of Woolfolk’s classic work reintroduces a new generation of scholars and students to a vital and foundational work.
- Unburying the Bones: Poems (Volume 1) (VersoFrontera)
Unburying the Bones: Poems (Volume 1) (VersoFrontera)
Sold outUnburying the Bones is a book of poetry that serves as an ode to those with grief lingering in their bodies, latent or bubbling—but always present—either in the firm of their ribcage or the soft of their thighs. The poems bring to the fore pain made corporeal, the roots of misogyny, femicide, and the depths of matrilineality. It is an exploration of intimacy while reflecting on the lengths society has gone to subdue women. The writer reclaims sex as pleasure, her body as home, and her fear into drive.
- We Are Nature Defending Itself: An Anthology of Women on Bodies, Borders, and Place (Wittliff Collections Literary Series)
We Are Nature Defending Itself: An Anthology of Women on Bodies, Borders, and Place (Wittliff Collections Literary Series)
Sold outIn the words of series editor Steven L. Davis, We Are Nature Defending Itself: An Anthology of Women on Bodies, Borders, and Place is “a revelation, a multicultural blend of well-known and emerging writers who come together to give nature a voice in our literature and our lives.” Not least of the many benefits to readers are its contributions from prominent Latina writers, presented here as advocates for the environment. Though this theme has long existed in Chicana literature, it has never been positioned as front and center as it is in this anthology.
Volume editor Cordelia E. Barrera also includes notable Anglo, African American, and Indigenous contributors, crafting a true cultural blend of distinctive writing that will appeal to older generations while inspiring new ones. By incorporating these border voices, this collection effectively challenges long-dominant mythologies of the American West and offers a prominent place for literatures of social justice and the environment.
The mix of poems, stories, and essays are divided into three sections: Bodies, Landscape, and Practices. Part I begins with the idea of experiencing and feeling a history of the body’s contact with landscapes and places as repositories of knowledge. Part II extends beyond particulars of private or public life to consider issues of place as sites and locations of radical action. Part III features ruminations and traditions of remembering, highlighting reciprocal relationships to the natural world that extend outward to the ways “women’s work” in and around the home shapes communal processes that reinforce continuity across time and space.
We Are Nature Defending Itself adds important new work to the growing canon of nature and borderlands writing by women of color. In turn, these new voices deepen and broaden our understanding of humanity and its relationship to the natural environment.
- When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (The Visual Arts of Africa and its Diasporas)
When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (The Visual Arts of Africa and its Diasporas)
$25.95In When Home Is a Photograph, Leigh Raiford asks how Black people use photography to make home in the world. Raiford focuses on a selection of Black American activists and artists, including Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver to explore the complex relationship between racialized subjects and the medium of photography. As they traveled the world for study, for work, for pleasure, or for survival, these artists and activists took and collected photographs to express their political platforms and personal sense of self. Raiford considers the everyday image-making practices that these Black Americans employed to improve the condition of Black lives globally by imagining, identifying, inhabiting, leaving, defending, and destroying “home.” When Home Is a Photograph shows how these figures did not merely utilize photography to emplace themselves in the world—they demonstrated how the use of photography is itself a way to mediate one’s relationship to the world.
- Major Gift: An 831 Stories Romance
Major Gift: An 831 Stories Romance
$14.99The widow of a tech mogul is determined to give her wealth away—and keep one secret from the journalist tasked with telling her story. A hot new take on the billionaire romance.
When Ndidi Davis’s husband unexpectedly dies, she’s left bereft—and with $2.1 billion in the bank. She channels her grief into launching a charitable foundation, but the endeavor is made more complicated by Geoffrey Campbell, an ambitious, perceptive journalist assigned to profile her philanthropic pursuit. Geoffrey’s reporting slowly uncovers Ndidi’s whole heart—and some parts of her past she’s worked hard to keep out of the public eye.
- The Voices of Martyrs
The Voices of Martyrs
$18.99From visionary Afrofuturist Maurice Broaddus comes the re-release of this seminal collection, with an all-new introduction and notes from the author. Fourteen stories meld history, folktales, horror, fantasy, and science fiction into electric moments scattered through ten centuries of Black experience.
An outcast West African warrior takes on evil spirits, and the brutal priest who creates them. A freedwoman reveals what a spirit stone truly commemorates. A museum of grief houses a widower’s memories—and a child’s. Visiting his mother’s Jamaican home, an American inherits a strange spirital inheritance. A 1970s quad skater flees time-traveling Afronauts convinced he can find the mothership groove. Steamfunk revolution foments in communities underneath robot-run Indianapolis. A lieutenant of the Evangelical States of America navigates first contact with an unexpected alien race.
Through war and enlightenment, alongside vampires, obeah men, and common injustice, Broaddus’s lyrical prose delivers epiphanies wrapped in page-turning excitement.
- No!: The Art and Activism of Complaining
No!: The Art and Activism of Complaining
$17.95An assembly of refusals portraying the radical power of “no” by the renowned scholar and author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, Sara Ahmed.
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.
Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where—Ahmed’s accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say “No!” and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.
- Cathedrals
Cathedrals
Sold outLia fled her home after a brutal crime decades ago, but family, and the truth, will never let you go.Thirty years ago, in an empty plot of a quiet neighbourhood, a teenage girl's body was found quartered and burned. The investigation ended with no arrests and her family – middle class, educated, Catholic – quietly disintegrated. Three decades later, the hidden truth comes to light thanks to the father's ongoing love for the victim. That truth will reveal the raw realities lurking behind appearances, the cruelty of those who prioritize obedience and religious fanaticism, the complicity of the fearful and the indifferent, and the loneliness and desperation of those who seek to follow their own path, ignoring the dictates of their elders.Just as she did with Elena Knows and A Little Luck , Claudia Piñeiro delves into family ties, social prejudice, and the ideologies and institutions that affect our inner worlds to deliver a brave, moving novel that strikes at the heart of these private dramas.
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