All Books

Availability

Price

$
$

More filters

  • HBCU Made: A Celebration of the Black College Experience

    by Ayesha Rascoe

    Sold out

    *This item will ship or be ready for pick up in 7-10 business days

    In this joyous collection of essays about historically Black colleges and universities, alumni both famous and up-and-coming write testimonials about the schools and experiences that shaped their lives and made them who they are today.

    Edited by the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Ayesha Rascoe—with a distinguished and diverse set of contributors including Oprah Winfrey, Stacey Abrams, and Branford Marsalis, HBCU Made illuminates and celebrates the experience of going to a historically Black college or university. This book is for proud alumni, their loved ones, current students, and anyone considering an HBCU.

    The first book featuring famous alumni sharing personal accounts of the Black college experience, HBCU Made offers a series of warm, moving, and candid personal essays about the schools that nurtured and educated them. The contributors write about how they chose their HBCU, their first days on campus, the dynamic atmosphere of classes where students were constantly challenged to do their best, the professors who devoted themselves to the students, the marching bands and majorettes and their rigorous training.

    For some, the choice to attend an HBCU was an easy one, as they followed in the footsteps of their parents or siblings. For others, it was a carefully considered step away from a predominantly white institution to be educated in a place where they would never have to justify their presence. And for some authors here, it was an HBCU that took them in and cared for them like family, often helping them to overcome a rough patch.

    For all, the pride in their choice is abundantly clear. HBCU Made is a perfect gift for each generation of prospective students and brand new alumni to come.

  • Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

    by Antonia Hylton

    $19.99

    In the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, that New York Times bestselling author Clint Smith describes as “a book that left me breathless.”

    On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.
     
    In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
     
    As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.
     
    In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.

  • Get The F*ck Out Your Own Way: A Guide to Letting Go of the Sh*t that’s Holding You Back

    by MJ Harris

    Sold out

    Amazon Editors Pick for Best Biographies & Memoirs

    It ain’t easy getting your shit together, but this book is the solution. And Tabitha Brown says, “you can trust him.”

    If any of this sounds like you, it’s best you start reading this book now!

    • You seek more fulfilling relationships and dating experiences
    • You’re ready to shake off shame about past mistakes and step into your power
    • You want to say “see ya” to the toxic people and emotional gut-punchers
    • Your “people pleaser” days are over and it’s time to learn how to effectively say no
    MJ Harris has got a lot of “best friends”—over five million to be exact. His hilarious, straightforward, raw advice has made him the go-to person across social media for everything you need to know about getting your shit together. 
     
    MJ knows you need help—whether financial, spiritual, or in a relationship—but because you never learned how to properly handle the hurt and anger you’ve experienced in the past, it has become the emotional trash in the way of being your best self. Don’t nobody want that!
     
    Whether it’s fixing your family issues, relationships, situationships, money, or frenemies, MJ offers sage advice about how to stop blocking yourself from bigger and better.
     
    This isn’t your gentle guide on breathing or journaling. MJ serves up no holds barred principles on how to navigate your emotions that will help you disrupt cycles of trauma, create boundaries, and transform into a goddess of emotional wholeness. Get the F*ck Out Your Own Way will help you learn how make better decisions that will set you on the right path for a happier emotional life once and for all.
  • Your First Million: Why You Don’t Have to Be Born into a Legacy of Wealth to Leave One Behind

    by Arlan Hamilton with Rachel L. Nelson

    Sold out

    *ships in 5-7 business days

    Build lasting wealth and impact with lessons from the “bold and relentless disruptor” changing the face of entrepreneurship in America (Black Enterprise).

    Having lived nearly her entire life below the poverty line before going on to attain wealth and success as an entrepreneur and investor, Arlan Hamilton knows that entrepreneurship is the quickest path to money and power—particularly for those who haven’t had much of it in the past. In Your First Million,  she shows how anyone—no matter what they look like or how much money they have—can tap into all the new tools they already have at their disposal to get their million-dollar idea off the ground.

    Readers will learn: how to identify unmet needs, raise money, choose the right collaborators, create multiple income streams, and turn their unique knowledge and experience into a profitable businesses—while reinvesting in their communities and empowering others to do the same.

    If we can change who gets to decide what new ideas are worthy, and who gets to turn those ideas into reality, not only can we change our own circumstances—we can change the world.

  • That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon

    by Kimberly Lemming

    $18.99

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    Spice trader Cinnamon’s quiet life is turned upside down when she ends up on a quest with a fiery demon, in this irreverently quirky rom-com fantasy that is sweet, steamy, and funny as hell.
     
    All she wanted to do was live her life in peace—maybe get a cat, expand the family spice farm. Really, anything that didn’t involve going on an adventure where an orc might rip her face off. But they say the goddess has favorites, and if so, Cin is clearly not one of them.
     
    After Cin saves the demon Fallon in a wine-drunk stupor, Fallon reveals that all he really wants to do is kill an evil witch enslaving his people. And who can blame him? But now he’s dragging Cinnamon along for the ride whether she like it or not. On the bright side, at least he keeps burning off his shirt.…

  • African Icons: Ten People Who Shaped History

    by Tracey Baptiste

    Sold out

    In this expansive collection of history, meet ten real-life kings, queens, inventors, scholars, and visionaries who lived in Africa thousands of years ago and changed the world.

    Black history begins thousands of years ago with the many cultures and people of the African continent. Through portraits of ten heroic figures, bestselling author Tracey Baptiste takes readers on an empowering, energetic journey through time to meet some of the great leaders and thinkers whose vision built nations and shaped the course of history:

    • Menes: Creator of Dynasties
    • Merneith: A Queen Erased
    • Imhotep: From Peasant to God
    • Aesop: The Wisest Man in the Ancient World
    • Hannibal Barca: Unparalleled Military Strategist
    • Terence: North African Playwright
    • Amanirenas: Warrior, Diplomat, Queen
    • Tin Hinan: Founder of a City on the Dunes
    • Mansa Musa: The Richest Man of All Time
    • Queen Idia: Kingmaker

    Illustrator Hillary D. Wilson's brilliant portraits accompany each profile, along with vivid, information-filled landscapes, maps, and graphics for readers to pore over and return to again and again. This rich and thrilling work, which celebrates Black excellence and provides an essential correction to Eurocentric tellings of history, will enthrall readers of all ages.

    “In African Icons, Baptiste engages in the hard work of unveiling the myths about the African continent to young readers . . . This is a great beginner’s guide to pre-colonial Africa.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist  

  • Blackouts: A Novel

    by Justin Torres

    $20.00

    From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories—personal and collective.

    Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

    A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.

  • A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

    by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Sold out
    The major collection of King’s essential writings and speeches, now newly packaged to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the “I Have A Dream” speech

    “We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis’s Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968. “But it really doesn’t matter to me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

    These prophetic words, uttered the day before King’s assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his “promised land” of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last 12 years of his life. These words and others are commemorated here in the only major one-volume collection of this seminal twentieth-century American prophet’s writings, speeches, interviews, and autobiographical reflections. A Testament of Hope contains Martin Luther King Jr.’s essential thoughts on nonviolence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more.


  • God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

    edited by Hilton Als

    Sold out

    Baldwin’s life and legacy as remembered by a pantheon of artists and writers: from Jamaica Kincaid and Barry Jenkins to Richard Avedon and Alice Neel

    When author James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work: novels, poems, film scripts and, perhaps most indelibly, essays. A friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was a critical voice in the civil rights movement. After reaching acclaim in his early career as a writer, he struggled to retain the author’s “I,” while taking on the “we” of the people.
    Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als and growing out of his landmark exhibition at David Zwirner in 2019, God Made My Face brings together an impressive assembly of contributors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, to create a memorial mosaic: one that not only mirrors Baldwin’s various tones but also closely examines his singular contributions to cinema, theater, the essay and Black American critical studies. These essays are illustrated by artwork from modern and contemporary artists who were either personal contemporaries of Baldwin or directly inspired by his work. In each piece assembled here, the authors speak from a personal, informed perspective, illuminating Baldwin’s deeply anguished and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately—because we are human—we share the potential to love, connect and live together in all our glory.
    Artists include: Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Don Bachardy, Alvin Baltrop, Anthony Barboza, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, George McCalman, Alice Neel, Elle Pérez, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, James Welling, Larry Wolhandler.
    Authors include:Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, Darryl Pinckney.

  • King: The Complete Edition: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

    by Ho Che Anderson

    $29.99
    A landmark graphic novel about the civil rights leader, complete in one volume.

    This groundbreaking body of comics journalism collects Anderson's entire biography of the renowned civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Over a decade in the making, the saga has been praised for its vivid recreation of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history and for its accuracy in depicting the personal and public lives of King, from his birth to his assassination. King probes the life story of one of America's greatest public figures with an unflinchingly critical eye, casting King as an ambitious, dichotomous figure deserving of his place in history but not above moral sacrifice to get there. Anderson's expressionistic visual style is wrought with dramatic energy; panels evoke a painterly attention to detail but juxtapose with one another in such a way as to propel King's story with cinematic momentum. Anderson's successful use of the graphic novel to tell a major work of nonfiction has drawn favorable comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Osamu Tezuka's Adolph.

    King not only recreates the major events in King's public life, but chronicles the daily, rough-and-tumble, behind-the-scenes political maneuverings and strategic compromises that were required to mobilize millions of people toward a common goal. His internal debates with Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson and his hardball negotiations with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are dramatized. Anderson's achievement is not merely a political biography filled with names and dates, but a fully rounded portrait of a fallible human engaged in a superhuman effort his fears, his doubts, his relationship with his wife Coretta King, and his children are compassionately and truthfully rendered.

    Anderson's visual approach includes the use of photographs, realistic portraiture, and expressionistic imagery alternating between stark black and white chiaroscuro and painterly full color. The dialogue is unflinchingly naturalistic and accurately reflects the moral urgency and labyrinthine political and practical complexities that King was navigating, from his deeply felt, personal commitment to a public cause to the wider political eruptions the country was experiencing. This is a respectful, unsparing, truthful biography of a man and his times that captures the moral and political gravitas of the cause as well as its human dimension. A major work of comics, depicting a major work of history.

  • Churro Stand

    by Karina N. González

    $18.99

    *ships in 7 - 10 business days*

    From award-winning author-illustrator duo Karina N. Gonzálezand Krystal Quiles comes Churro Stand, a heartwarming picture book celebrating love, community, and the POP, SIZZLE, and CRUNCH of a perfect churro—inspired by the author’s relationship with her own mother.
     
    Everybody loves churros!
     
    On a hot summer’s day, Lucía and her brother accompany their mother to sell delicious, sugary churros on the bustling streets of New York City. But when a thunderstorm rolls in, and the customers are chased away, Lucía’s mother must improvise with a little bit of magic and lots of amor.

  • Sister Friend

    by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow

    $18.99

    Perfect for fans of The Day You Begin and Evelyn Del Rey Is Moving Away, author Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow and illustrator Shahrzad Maydani’s Sister Friend is a heartwarming new picture book celebrating the unique joy of cultivating friendships within your cultural community.
     
    Ameena feels invisible. It’s been that way since she started at her new school. But now there is another new girl in class. Ameena sees her brownness and her hijab, even though the other kids do not.
     
    Ameena wants to be her friend, but she can’t seem to find the right words or do the right things. Until one day, they find them together: “Assalamu Alaikum, Sister. Welcome.”

  • My Daddy Is a Cowboy

    by Stephanie Seales

    $18.99

    A young girl and her father share an early morning horseback ride around their city in My Daddy Is a Cowboy, a picture book celebration of “just-us time,” perfect for fans of My Papi Has a Motocycle.
     
    Tall. High as the clouds.
    Strong as a horse’s back.
    Like a cowboy.
     
    In the early hours before dawn, a young girl and her father greet their horses and ride together through the waking city streets. As they trot along, Daddy tells cowboy stories filled with fun and community, friendship, discovery, and pride. Seeing her city from a new vantage point and feeling seen in a new way, the child discovers that she too is a cowboy—strong and confident in who she is.
     
    Thoughtfully and lyrically written by debut author Stephanie Seales, with vibrant illustrations from award-winning artist C. G. Esperanza, this beautiful picture book is a celebration of Black joy, outdoor play, and quality time spent between child and parent.

  • Peaches

    by Gabriele Davis

    $18.99

    In Peaches, a hopeful multigenerational story of love and healing from author Gabriele Davis and illustrator Kim Holt, a girl holds her mother’s memory close while carrying on an important family tradition: making peach cobbler together.
     
    Summer Sundays begin with picking.
    Rosy-ripe peaches dipping low to the ground,
    Sun-warmed and soft like Grandma’s lap.
     
    Side by side with Daddy and Grandma, a young girl is determined to take part in her family’s tradition of baking the perfect peach cobbler—just like her mama used to. From picking fruit to stirring and mixing to kneading the dough, it’s a little bit messy. But with sure hands to guide the girl step-by-step—and her mother’s memory hanging sweet in the air—she has the recipe for making Mama proud.
     
    This warmhearted and ultimately hopeful picture book shows that with a house full of love, everything can feel peach-perfect.

  • I Have a Dream - 60th Anniversary Edition

    by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    $19.99

     

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    With new forewords and an afterword by Martin Luther King III, Dr. Bernice A. King, and Dexter Scott King

    A beautiful collectible edition celebrating the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s legendary speech at the March on Washington, part of Dr. King’s archives published exclusively by HarperCollins.

    On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before thousands of Americans who had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in the name of civil rights. Including the immortal words, “I have a dream,” Dr. King’s keynote speech would energize a movement and change the course of history.

    With references to the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, Shakespeare, and the Bible, Dr. King’s March on Washington address has long been hailed as one of the greatest pieces of writing and oration in history. Profound and deeply moving, it is as relevant today as it was sixty years earlier.

    This beautifully designed edition presents Dr. King’s speech in its entirety, paying tribute to this extraordinary leader and his immeasurable contribution, and inspiring a new generation of activists dedicated to carrying on the fight for justice and equality. 

  • The Black Joy Project

    by Kleaver Cruz

    Sold out

    This special, totally singular, nearly uncomp-able book is a LITERARY *and* VISUAL love letter to the role of joy in Black life  giving a full, 360-degree picture of how Black people resist oppression and thrive.


    (The book is to be savored in the read and in the aesthetics.)

    “Unlike happiness, joy is a lasting state that can be sustained even when everything is not the way we want it to be.”  bell hooks

    Black Joy is everywhere. From the bustling streets of Lagos to hip-hop blasting through apartment windows in the Bronx. From the wide-open coastal desert of Namibia to the lush slopes of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. From the thriving tradition of Candomblé in Bahia to the innovative and trendsetting styles of Soweto, and beyond, Black Joy is present in every place that Black people exist. 

    Too often, though, Blackness gets represented with pain, suffering and violence. Yet what is always in the mix—what is always constant, no matter the historical atrocity or systemic injustice—is Black Joy. Amplifying Black Joy is not about dismissing or creating an “alternative” narrative that ignores the realities of collective hurt. Rather, it is about holding the hurt, in tension with the joy, because that is how Black people around the world actually live. Joy deserves more credit for the self-preservation and survival of Black communities than it tends to get.

    Enter The Black Joy Project.

    Created by educator and activist Kleaver Cruz, The Black Joy Project is a digital and real-world affirmation that Black Joy is a source of healing, resistance, and regeneration, for Black people of all backgrounds and identities. The book expands on a simple question at the root of the project: “What does Black Joy mean to you?” Cruz’s powerful treatise on the subject, combined with stunning, vibrant images of Black Joy in everyday life, present a necessary, perspective-shifting work. Each page of The Black Joy Project is a reprieve for the spirit and, in capturing life across the diaspora, offers an opportunity to do what Black Joy does best: reimagine new ways of being.

  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
    $19.99
    In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.


    Drawing on untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. Instead, Khalidi traces a century of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He explores the key events in this war, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless, futile peace process.

    Neither a chronicle of victimization nor a whitewash of mistakes made by Palestinian leaders, this history offers an original and illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

  • Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

    by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    $16.00

    *Ships/ready for pick up in 5-8 business days*

    In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.

  • Black Love Letters

    by Cole Brown & Natalie Johnson

    Sold out
    One of W magazine’s Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2023

    "We reserve this space for our humanity in all of its fond, ironic, elated, grief-stricken, confused glory . . . When you find yourself alone and downtrodden, when the news is too much, return to these pages. This one is for you." —from the introduction by Cole Brown and Natalie Johnson


    "There's something particularly special about Black Love. When you consider the history of our people, the strife and adversity we've overcome, love seems an almost illogically ambitious act of resistance." —from the foreword by John Legend

    From celebrated Black writers, creators, and thinkers—and with a foreword by John Legend—comes a collection of letters and original illustrations on the subject of Black love, a powerful and heartfelt celebration of Blackness in all its many forms.


    In this exquisite anthology of letters and illustrations, Cole Brown and Natalie Johnson bring together a constellation of influential Black figures to write to the people, places, and moments that mean the most to them. With a foreword from John Legend and contributions from Brontez Purnell, Morgan Jerkins, Reverend Al Sharpton, and Dr. Imani Perry, among many others, Black Love Letters is an ode to a phenomenal community: a testament to the fact that where there has been pain and suffering, there has also always been immeasurable, irrepressible joy and love.

    With letters from: Akili King • Reverend Al Sharpton • Alexandra Elle • Allisa Charles-Findley • Barbara Edelin • Belinda Walker • Ben Crump • Bill Whitaker • Bilquisu Abdullah • Brianna Holt • Brontez Purnell • Cole Brown • Danez Smith • Dick Parsons • Deborah Willis • Doug Jones • Douglas Kearney • Imani Perry • Jamila Woods • Jan Menafee • Jayne Allen • Jeh Charles Johnson • Jenna Wortham • Jonathan Capehart • John Legend • Joel Castón • Joy-Ann Reid • Justus Cornelius Pugh • Kwame Dawes • Lynae Vanee Bogues • Mahogany Browne • Malachi Elijah • Michael Eric Dyson • Morgan Jerkins • Nadia Owusu • Natalie Johnson • Raka Reynolds • Rhianna Jones • Chef Rōze Traore • Sojourner Brown • Tarana Burke • Tembe Denton-Hurst • Topaz Jones • Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts • VJ Jenkins
  • Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History

    by Nur Masalha

    Sold out
    Beginning with the late Bronze Age and moving through to the present day, this is the definitive history of Palestine and its people.

    This rich and magisterial work traces Palestine's millennia-old heritage, uncovering cultures and societies of astounding depth and complexity that stretch back to the very beginnings of recorded history.

    Starting with the earliest references in Egyptian and Assyrian texts, Nur Masalha explores how Palestine and its Palestinian identity have evolved over thousands of years, from the Bronze Age to the present day. Drawing on a rich body of sources and the latest archaeological evidence, Masalha shows how Palestine’s multicultural past has been distorted and mythologised by Biblical lore and the Israel–Palestinian conflict.

    In the process, Masalha reveals that the concept of Palestine, contrary to accepted belief, is not a modern invention or one constructed in opposition to Israel, but rooted firmly in ancient past. Palestine represents the authoritative account of the country's history.

  • The Rebel King

    by Kennedy Ryan

    $17.99

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    The conclusion to the deeply romantic, emotionally complex love story in the All the King's Men duology from beloved award-winning author Kennedy Ryan. Lennix Hunter has lost everything with Maxim's betrayal and she's determined not to give him the upper hand again, but the connection between them is undeniable and if she wants the world, she'll need Maxim's help.

    Raised to resist. Bred to fight. Survival is in their blood, and surrender is never an option.

    Though surrender is what Maxim Cade demanded of Lennix Hunter’s body and heart, she had other plans. They were fast-burning fascination and combustible chemistry, the son of an oil baron and the Apache daughter at war with his family, but she trusted him, and he turned out to be a thief who stole her love.

    Still, if what they had was a lie, why had it felt so real?

    Now, the man she swore to hate is about to have it all, and he wants Lennix at his side. But when the two of them are forced to face the unthinkable, their rocky foundation is tested, as is the invisible thread that seems to wind their fates together. As they navigate a treacherous political landscape in their quest for justice, Maxim and Lennix soon learn that power is a game, and they are merely the pawns and players. Facing insurmountable odds, will they win the world, or will they lose it all?

  • The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960
    $18.00

    Undoubtedly the most influential black intellectual of the twentieth century and one of America's finest historians, W.E.B. DuBois knew that the liberation of the African American people required liberal education and not vocational training. He saw education as a process of teaching certain timeless values: moderation, an avoidance of luxury, a concern for courtesy, a capacity to endure, a nurturing love for beauty. At the same time, DuBois saw education as fundamentally subversive. This was as much a function of the well-established role of educationfrom Plato forwardas the realities of the social order under which he lived. He insistently calls for great energy and initiative; for African Americans controlling their own lives and for continued experimentation and innovation, while keeping education's fundamentally radical nature in view.


    Though containing speeches written nearly one-hundred years ago, and on a subject that has seen more stormy debate and demagoguery than almost any other in recent history, The Education of Black People approaches education with a timelessness and timeliness, at once rooted in classical thought that reflects a remarkably fresh and contemporary relevance.

  • Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human

    by Cole Arthur Riley

    $22.00

    A collection of prayers, poems, and spiritual practices centering Black interior lives, from the New York Times bestselling author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies

    For years, Cole Arthur Riley was desperate for a spirituality she could trust. Amid ongoing national racial violence, the isolation of the pandemic, and a surge of anti-Black rhetoric in many Christian spaces, she began dreaming of a more human, more liberating expression of faith. She went on to create Black Liturgies, a digital project that connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black memory, and the Black body.

    In this book, she brings together hundreds of new prayers, along with letters, poems, meditation questions, breath practices, scripture, and the writings of Black literary ancestors to offer forty-three liturgies that can be practiced individually or as a community. Inviting readers to reflect on their shared experiences of wonder, rest, rage, and repair, and creating rituals for holidays like Lent and Juneteenth, Arthur Riley writes with a poet’s touch and a sensitivity that has made her one of the most important spiritual voices at work today.

    For anyone healing from communities that were more violent than loving; for anyone who has escaped the trauma of white Christian nationalism, religious homophobia, or transphobia; for anyone asking what it means to be human in a world of both beauty and terror, Black Liturgies is a work of healing and empowerment, and a vision for what might be.

  • Words Are Magic! (Step into Reading)

    by Zaila Avant-garde

    $5.99

    Scripps National Spelling Bee champ Zaila Avant-garde shares her love of words with new readers in this level 1 Step Into Reading book. Words are magic! Have you heard? Pick a letter. Make a word! New readers will find joyful encouragement in this level 1 easy reader that sings out about the magic of words. Encouraging kids to mix words, match words, shout and rap words, Scripps National Spelling champ Zaila Avante-garde takes readers along on a noisy and boisterous celebration of letters, sounds, and reading. It's the perfect first step for new readers, full of fun and energy, from one of America's most exciting and unique young voices. Step 1 Readers feature big type and easy words for children who know the alphabet and are eager to begin reading. Rhyme and rhythmic text paired with picture clues help children decode the story. Also available by Zaila Avant-garde: Words of Wonder from Z to A It's Not Bragging If It's True

  • My Block Looks Like

    by Janelle Harper

    $18.99

    A love letter to the hustle, the bustle, the joy, and the grit of city life by debut author and Bronx native, Janelle Harper, and two-time Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner, Frank Morrison. "My block looks like a collision of cultures a melting pot of cool a burst of life my favorite groove . . .No matter what happens I’ve seen it for myself my block looks like the coolest place I’ve ever been." A lyrical and proud picture book that recognizes the beauty of the bodegas, subways, and playgrounds that characterize everyday life in the Bronx and pays homage to the ways that its residents have shaped pop culture through music, visual art, and dance. Perfect for fans of I Am Every Good Thing and Last Stop on Market Street , My Block Looks Like offers kids a reaffirming message to celebrate and uplift their communities in an energetic text that begs to be read aloud.

  • Rashid Johnson

    edited by Claudia Rankine, Sampada Aranke & Akili Tommasino

    Sold out

    The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

    ‘Johnson is a leading voice of his generation.’ – New York Times

    The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

    Working with a variety of media that includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, Rashid Johnson has created a nuanced and iconographic body of work that connects literature, music, and art. Personal references and pervasive cultural narratives are interweaved with the legacy of modernist abstraction, producing what critics have labelled ‘conceptual post-black art’. A precocious talent (his work was included in the seminal ‘Freestyle’ exhibition in New York in 2001), Johnson received the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, which honours contributions in the field of African-American art.

  • The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks

    by Toni Tipton-Martin

    Sold out

    Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award, 2016
    Art of Eating Prize, 2015
    BCALA Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, 2016

    Women of African descent have contributed to America’s food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype of an illiterate “Aunt Jemima” who cooked mostly by natural instinct. To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American, and especially southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind.

    The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics by authors such as Edna Lewis and Vertamae Grosvenor. The books are arranged chronologically and illustrated with photos of their covers; many also display selected interior pages, including recipes. Tipton-Martin provides notes on the authors and their contributions and the significance of each book, while her chapter introductions summarize the cultural history reflected in the books that follow. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights. The Jemima Code transforms America’s most maligned kitchen servant into an inspirational and powerful model of culinary wisdom and cultural authority.

  • Black Friend : Essays

    by Ziwe

    $16.00
    Ziwe made a name for herself by asking guests like Alyssa Milano, Fran Lebowitz, and Chet Hanks direct questions. In Black Friend, she turns her incisive perspective on both herself and the culture at large. Throughout the book, Ziwe combines pop-culture commentary and personal stories, which grapple with her own (mis)understanding of identity. From a hilarious case of mistaken identity via a jumbotron to a terrifying fight-or-flight encounter in the woods, Ziwe raises difficult questions for comedic relief.

    From Black Friend’s Introduction:

    “Today, I learned that my book is ranked as the #1 new release in ‘Discrimination and Racism’ on Amazon. Wow. This is a huge honor, especially considering my stiff competition in the self-published manifestos space. Unfortunately, this victory is bittersweet. I worry that people may get the wrong idea and think that I am pro-racism when in actuality, I am indifferent. Still, I’d love to thank everyone who made this possible. I solemnly swear to write the most discriminatory book in American history. I hope I can make you proud.

    “Just kidding . . . I will not marginalize you . . . unless that’s your kink. This book of essays offers moments of extreme discomfort (and the subsequent growth) in my life around the role of ‘black friend.’ Black friends come in all shapes and sizes. Yet the archetype is often a two-dimensional character meant to support the non-black protagonists’ more complex humanity. Some black friends exist as the comic relief, like Donkey in any of the Shrek movies. Some are the sassy friend, like Louise from St. Louis in Sex and the City. Still others are the inexplicably sagacious companion, like Morpheus in The Matrix. It’s impossible for these individual portraits to reflect my complicated reality. To start, they are fictional. One of them is a talking ass. I do not exist just to move plot. While I am a supportive friend, I am not a supporting character. I am the protagonist of my perfectly imperfect story.”

  • Mural

    by Mahmoud Darwish, John Berger

    $15.95

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Mahmoud Darwish was the Palestinian national poet. One of the greatest poets of the last half century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession and exile. His poems display a brilliant acuity, a passion for and openness to the world and, above all, a deep and abiding humanity. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works. Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger, Mural is a testimony to one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.

  • Black Meme: The History of the Images that Make Us

    by Legacy Russell

    $19.95

    Representations of Blackness have always been integral to our understanding of of the modern world. In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the construct, culture, and material of the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to present day. Mining both archival and contemporary media Russell explores the impact of Blackness, Black life, and death on contemporary conceptions of viral culture, borne in the age of the internet.

    These meditations include: the circulation of Lynching postcards; Jet Magazine’s publication of a picture of Emmett Till in his open casket; how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma enters the nation’s living room and changed the debate on civil rights; how a citizen-recorded video of the Rodney King beating at the hands of the LAPD became known as the “first viral video”; what the Anita Hill hearings tell us about the media’s creation of the Black icon; Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the photos of her enslaved ancestors, Renty and Delia, from Harvard’s archive; the Facebook Live recording by Lavish “Diamond” Reynolds of the murder of her partner Philando Castile by the police after being stopped for a broken tail light; and more.

  • Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States

    by Charisse Burden-Stelly

    Sold out
    A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government’s anti-communist repression.
     
    In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.
     
    Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.
     
    Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.
  • Those Bones Are Not My Child: A Novel

    by Toni Cade Bambara

    Sold out
    ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • This suspenseful novel portrays a community--and a family--under siege, during the shocking string of murders of black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s.

    Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who calls Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

    Having elected its first black mayor in 1980, Atlanta projected an image of political progressiveness and prosperity. But between September 1979 and June 1981, more than forty black children were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered throughout "The City Too Busy to Hate." Zala Spencer, a mother of three, is barely surviving on the margins of a flourishing economy when she awakens on July 20, 1980 to find her teenage son Sonny missing. As hours turn into days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children just beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on a desperate search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions.

Stay Informed. We're building a community committed to celebrating Black authors + artisans. Subscribe to keep up with all things Kindred Stories.