All Books
- Born Driven
Born Driven
by Saxton Moore Jr.
Sold outBased on the true story of the first African American NASCAR champion Wendell Scott, Born Driven is an uplifting tale celebrating the power of persistence and big dreams.
Like many other boys, Wendell Scott had a big dream: to become a race car driver. He loved to race anything and everything! Although he faced many difficulties as an African American boy in the South, Wendell had the willpower to overcome these obstacles. Join Wendell Scott for the time he challenged himself to compete in his town’s soapbox derby. - Inner Field Trip: 30 Days of Personal Exploration, Collective Liberation, and Generational Healing
Inner Field Trip: 30 Days of Personal Exploration, Collective Liberation, and Generational Healing
by Leesa Renée Hall
Sold out*ships in 7 - 10 business days*
A powerful 30-day workbook journey intended to help the reader lovingly confront their inner oppressor and come to terms with their own internalized biases.
Based on mental wellness advocate and writer Leesa Renee Hall's longstanding work, Inner Field Trip provides a user-friendly, nonjudgmental, and introspective template for exploring our inner biases about race and other forms of inequity. The cornerstone of Hall's model involves confronting one's "Inner Oppressor."
The Inner Oppressor is a manifestation of internalized cultural messages that drive us to judge others but also works to sabotage our own needs. This 30-day program in workbook form takes readers—who become active participants in the experience—on a deep dive from which they will emerge changed. - Self-Care for Black Men: 100 Ways to Heal and Liberate
Self-Care for Black Men: 100 Ways to Heal and Liberate
by Jor-El Caraballo
$16.99A self-care guidebook full of activities for Black men everywhere pursuing joy, creating connections, confronting racism, and working through intergenerational trauma.
Black men desperately need care and restoration. But what does that restoration look like when you’re a Black man in today’s world? How do you take care of your mental health when men who look like you die at the hands of police? How do you find peace and refuge when you’re not sure how to keep up with your partner? Or navigate a challenging workplace? While scrolling through social media feeds, you may feel like you don’t have access to wellness like women do. But Black men need a space for self-care too.
In Self-Care for Black Men, you will find practical answers to your questions. This book contains self-care strategies that address some of the most common issues Black men face, such as dealing with racism, navigating prejudice in the workplace, managing romantic relationships, and working through intergenerational trauma.
This is your guide to wellness and self-discovery written specifically for Black men. There will opportunities to learn new skills to manage your mental health, as well as do more deep reflection on your own terms. It’s time to take your health firmly within your own hands and Self-Care for Black Men will help you do that. - The ABCs of Baby's Needs: A Sign Language Book for Babies
The ABCs of Baby's Needs: A Sign Language Book for Babies
by Little Bee Books
$9.99Teach your baby to communicate their basic wants and needs (with words and sign language), all as they easily learn the letters of the alphabet.
Help your baby express themselves! This adorable board book teaches your little one the letters of the alphabet while also reinforcing phrases that communicate their basic needs. A is for All Done. B is for Bath. C is for cold. Beautiful illustrations are accompanied by a sign language guide to help non-verbal babies, making this the perfect gift for any family. - The African Samurai: A Novel
The African Samurai: A Novel
by Craig Shreve
$17.99*ships in 7-10 business days*
Set in late 16th-century Africa, India, Portugal, and Japan, The African Samurai is a powerful historical novel based on the true story of Yasuke, Japan’s first foreign-born samurai and the only samurai of African descent—for readers of Esi Edugyan and Lawrence Hill.
In 1579, a Portuguese trade ship sails into port at Kuchinotsu, Japan, loaded with European wares and weapons. On board is Father Alessandro Valignano, an Italian priest and Jesuit missionary whose authority in central and east Asia is second only to the pope’s. Beside him is his protector, a large and imposing East African man. Taken from his village as a boy, sold as a slave to Portuguese mercenaries, and forced to fight in wars in India, the young but experienced soldier is haunted by memories of his past.
From Kuchinotsu, Father Valignano leads an expedition pushing inland toward the capital city of Kyoto. A riot brings his protector in front of the land’s most powerful warlord, Oda Nobunaga. Nobunaga is preparing a campaign to complete the unification of a nation that’s been torn apart by over one hundred years of civil war. In exchange for permission to build a church, Valignano “gifts” his protector to Nobunaga, and the young East African man is reminded once again that he is less of a human and more of a thing to be traded and sold.
After pledging his allegiance to the Japanese warlord, the two men from vastly different worlds develop a trust and respect for one another. The young soldier is granted the role of samurai, a title that has never been given to a foreigner; he is also given a new name: Yasuke. Not all are happy with Yasuke’s ascension. There are whispers that he may soon be given his own fief, his own servants, his own samurai to command. But all of his dreams hinge on his ability to protect his new lord from threats both military and political, and from enemies both without and within.
A magnificent reconstruction and moving study of a lost historical figure, The African Samurai is an enthralling narrative about the tensions between the East and the West and the making of modern Japan, from which rises the most unlikely hero. - Fantasma (Ghost Spanish Edition)
Fantasma (Ghost Spanish Edition)
by Jason Reynolds
$7.99*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*
A National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Ghost wants to be the fastest sprinter on his elite middle school track team, but his past is slowing him down in this first electrifying novel of the acclaimed Track series from Newbery honoree Jason Reynolds.
Ghost. Lu. Patina. Sunny. Four kids from wildly different backgrounds with personalities that are explosive when they clash. But they are also four kids chosen for an elite middle school track team—a team that could qualify them for the Junior Olympics if they can get their acts together. They all have a lot to lose, but they also have a lot to prove, not only to each other, but to themselves.
Running. That’s all Ghost (real name Castle Cranshaw) has ever known. But Ghost has been running for the wrong reasons—it all started with running away from his father, who, when Ghost was a very little boy, chased him and his mother through their apartment, then down the street, with a loaded gun, aiming to kill. Since then, Ghost has been the one causing problems—and running away from them—until he meets Coach, an ex-Olympic Medalist who sees something in Ghost: crazy natural talent. If Ghost can stay on track, literally and figuratively, he could be the best sprinter in the city. Can Ghost harness his raw talent for speed, or will his past finally catch up to him? - Stuntboy, In-Between Time
Stuntboy, In-Between Time
by Jason Reynolds
$14.99From Newbery Medal honoree and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds comes the sequel to the hilarious, hopeful, and action-packed middle grade novel Stuntboy, in the Meantime about the greatest young superhero you’ve never heard of, jam packed with illustrations by Raúl the Third!
Portico Reeves is the greatest superhero a lot of people have never heard of. He likes it that way—then no one can get in the way of him from keeping other other people safe. Super safe. He’s Stuntboy. He’s got the moves. And the saves. Except. There’s been one major fail.
He couldn’t save his parents from becoming Xs. Which is a word that sounds like coughing up a hairball. But don’t talk to him about the divorce, because of the hairball thing, and also, it gives Portico the frets.
What’s also giving him frets is his parents living on two separate floors in their apartment building. He’s never fully with one parent or the other. He’s in-between, all the time. The in-between time. And the elevator is busted, so to get between floors means getting past the bullies who hang in the stairwells.
So when Portico and new friend, Herbert, and best best friend, Zola, discover an empty apartment, unlocked, they are psyched. It’s a perfect hideout, and hangout, and it’s not half anyone’s…it’s all theirs. So they decide to make it their own…let’s say with stunts of the drawing kind. Problem is, that gives some Grown Up People the frets, which leads to double frets for Portico. And he’s not sure his arsenal of stunts can combat that. - Noah Davis: In Detail
Noah Davis: In Detail
by Noah Davis
$75.00*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*
Designed as a companion to the hugely successful monograph Noah Davis, this volume offers further insight into the impact and legacy of the revolutionary Los Angeles artist and activist.
“Embedding his dreams on canvas and in the community, visionary American artist Noah Davis created a mighty legacy.” — Rachel Willcock, ArtReview (2022)
Looking to literature, film, architecture, and art history, Noah Davis imbued his ethereal paintings with emotion and imagination. Muted colors, fantastic scenes, and blurred subjects create an intoxicating vision. Attuned to the power of his medium, Davis layered his paintings—figuratively and literally—using a unique dry paint application to depict quotidian life at an enigmatic, almost magical remove. Featuring sumptuous close-ups throughout, this important new book brings into focus the rich, painterly variety and luminous detail of Davis’s canvases.
With a special focus on the groundbreaking Underground Museum, which Noah Davis co-founded with his wife, Karon Davis, Noah Davis: In Detail includes a special conversation, moderated by Helen Molesworth, between Fred Moten, Glenn Ligon, Thomas Lax, and Julie Mehretu. This renowned group of artists and thinkers share personal experiences of the powerful and emotional impact of The Underground Museum and its connection to the larger artistic environs of Los Angeles. Franklin Sirmans contributes a new essay and Lindsay Charlwood, a lifelong friend of Noah’s, authors a chronology of his life, contextualizing his artistic and social achievements. - Creep: Accusations and Confessions
Creep: Accusations and Confessions
by Myriam Gurba
$27.00Ships in 7-10 business days
A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.
A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.
Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.
With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility. - The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future
The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future
by Robert P. Jones
$29.99
Taking the story of white supremacy in America back to 1493, and examining contemporary communities in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma for models of racial repair, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy helps chart a new course toward a genuinely pluralistic democracy.
Beginning with contemporary efforts to reckon with the legacy of white supremacy in America, Jones returns to the fateful year when a little-known church doctrine emerged that shaped the way five centuries of European Christians would understand the “discovered” world and the people who populated it. Along the way, he shows us the connections between Emmett Till and the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto in the Mississippi Delta, between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth and the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, and between the murder of 300 African Americans during the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa and the Trail of Tears.
From this vantage point, Jones shows how the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but, rather, the continuation of acts of genocide and dispossession flowing from the first European contact with Native Americans. These deeds were justified by people who embraced the 15th century Doctrine of Discovery: the belief that God had designated all territory not inhabited or controlled by Christians as their new promised land.
This reframing of American origins explains how the founders of the United States could build the philosophical framework for a democratic society on a foundation of mass racial violence—and why this paradox survives today in the form of white Christian nationalism. Through stories of people navigating these contradictions in three communities, Jones illuminates the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of a pluralistic democracy. - Between Two Brothers
Between Two Brothers
by Crystal Allen
$9.99A powerful and uplifting story about thirteen-year-old Isaiah, who has always worshiped his older brother, Seth, until a devastating accident forces him to step up and find a way to support his brother the way Seth has always supported him—from the acclaimed author of How Lamar's Bad Prank Won a Bubba-Sized Trophy and the Magnificent Mya Tibbs series.
Inspired by real events, Between Two Brothers is a big-hearted story about forgiveness and the power of a family’s unconditional love, perfect for readers who loved Fish in a Tree and Out of My Mind.
Isaiah "Ice" Abernathy has always worshiped his older brother, Seth. For years they’ve been not just brothers but best friends—and as Seth starts his senior year, Ice is eager to spend as much time with his brother as he can, making memories before Seth goes to college.
But when Seth announces he’s leaving much earlier than expected, and then he misses an important event—one he'd promised to attend—it causes a major fight.
Filled with regret, Ice plans to apologize to Seth later the next day, but later never comes, as he finds out Seth was in an accident—one that leaves him in the hospital. And the doctors say he may never recover.
Racked by fear and guilt, Ice chooses to step up, defy the experts, and help Seth recover in a way only he can—by trusting in their bond and the undying love between two brothers.
- Out of Body
Out of Body
by Nia Davenport
$19.99A high-stakes, propulsive young adult thriller with a body-swap twist thoughtfully explores themes of friendship and identity, perfect for fans of Tiffany D. Jackson.
Seventeen-year-old Megan has been jumping from friend group to friend group in her Atlanta-area suburb, trying on identities like outfits. Nothing ever felt right. Until she meets LC, the adventurous, charismatic girl who appeared at Megan’s favorite coffee shop like magic. They’ve been inseparable ever since, and Megan feels like she’s coming into who she’s really meant to be: someone like LC.
But LC has secrets—dangerous ones. On the night of their friendiversary, LC offers Megan a drug that makes Megan pass out at a party. When she awakens, she realizes that she and LC have swapped bodies and even worse . . . LC is already at Megan’s house, pretending to be Megan.
Now Megan has to fight against the horror of being trapped in someone else’s body while trying to figure out how to get her life back. The only way to do that is to own what makes Megan Megan . . . or die trying.
- Plantains and Our Becoming: Poems
Plantains and Our Becoming: Poems
by Melania Luisa Marte
$17.00A powerful poetry collection in the vein of BLACK GIRL CALL HOME and IF THEY COME FOR US, about identity, culture, home and belonging.
PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING is an imaginative, blistering, beautifully written poetry collection about identity and history on the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black Diasporic experience.
Through the exploration of the themes of self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational traumas, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots Black stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood, one that is deeply grounded in the heirlooms and teachings of Black celebration as well as preservation.
The collection is structured in the following sections: Part I: Daughter of Diaspora, exploring immigration and identity within the U.S. Part II: A History of Plantains, exploring the aftermath of colonialism, displacement and gentrification for Afro-descendants. - Holler, Child: Stories
Holler, Child: Stories
by LaToya Watkins
$18.00A short story collection in the vein of Danielle Evans and Bryan Washington, about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness.
HOLLER, CHILD is a short story collection packed with extraordinary and unforgettable writing and scenes, that explores concerns and issues that press at the bruises of guilt, betrayal, and forgiveness.
Set in the same Black community in Texas as PERISH, LaToya's debut novel, each story focuses on unique characters that illuminate life in Texas; they offer briliant, heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful perspectives from the women and men in the community, and touch on big themes like race, power, inequality, and more.
In one story, the appearance of a horse in a man's suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police, while in another, following the mass suicide of his entire congregation, the mother of a cult leader tries to honor him in a way she couldn't while he was alive.
Fresh and urgently told, HOLLER, CHILD is a wise follow-up to LaToya's debut novel. - Vampires of El Norte
Vampires of El Norte
by Isabel Cañas
$28.00*ships in 7-10 business days*
Vampires and vaqueros 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. - The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel
by James McBride
$19.00From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird. - Accidentally in Love
Accidentally in Love
by Danielle Jackson
$17.00*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*
When Sam is stuck sharing the streets for Chicago’s summer festivals with a man she can’t stand, she’ll find it’s often a bumpy road that leads to love….
As office manager of the city’s leading luxury boudoir and pinup photography studio, lovable grump Samantha Sawyer has everything under control. With an eventful summer season on the horizon, Sam is balancing an insane workload while preparing the Buxom Boudoir “Photobus,” a vintage coach bus converted into a mobile photobooth and meeting space, to make the rounds at Chicago’s bustling summer street festival roster. Sam’s busy schedule makes avoiding the difficult parts of her life much easier, but there’s one person who can see right through her to-do lists and icy façade, really see her…and Sam hates him for it.
A lot has changed in the last year for Russell Montgomery. Years of odd jobs and couch surfing around the country had left him scrambling, but after reconnecting with his brother, Reid (and coming as close to settling down as he’s ever been), Russ now works at a hot local restaurant. Russ has been welcomed into his newly engaged brother’s circle of friends—all except a close friend and coworker of Reid’s fiancée, an intriguingly stormy woman named Sam.
Luckily, Sam is certain that the insanity of her calendar will ensure their distance, and she won’t have to deal with Russ or his irritating, handsome smile. But when Russ is charged with the launch of a restaurant food truck for the festival circuit, the sizzling Chicago heat is no match for the fire between them…. - Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas
Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas
edited by Yolanda Covington-Ward & Jeanette S. Jouili
Sold outThe contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and negotiation of social relationships and collective identities throughout the Black diaspora.
The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent.
Contributors. Rachel Cantave, Youssef Carter, N. Fadeke Castor, Yolanda Covington-Ward, Casey Golomski, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Nathanael J. Homewood, Jeanette S. Jouili, Bertin M. Louis Jr., Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Aaron Montoya, Jacob K. Olupona, Elisha P. Renne - Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
$20.00By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.
Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind.
Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction. - Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900–1930
Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900–1930
by Timothy E. Nelson
$26.95Blackdom, New Mexico, was a township that lasted aboutthirty years. In this book, Timothy E. Nelson situates the township’s storywhere it belongs: along the continuum of settlement in Mexico’s Northern Frontier.Dr. Nelson illuminates the set of conscious efforts that helped Black pioneersdevelop Blackdom Township into a frontier boomtown.
“Blackdom” started as an inherited idea of a nineteenth-centuryAfrotopia. The idea of creating a Blackdom was refined within Blackinstitutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903,thirteen Black men, encouraged by the 1896 Plessy decision, formed the BlackdomTownsite Company and set out to make Blackdom a real place in New Mexico, wherethey were outside the reach of Jim Crow laws.
Many believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However,new evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth continued toexist throughout the twentieth century in other forms. During Blackdom’s boomtimes,in December 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from aregenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. Nelson hasuncovered new primary source materials that suggest for Blackdom a newlydiscovered third decade. This story has never been fully told or contextualizeduntil now.
Reoriented to Mexico’s “northern frontier,” oneobserves Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black freemasons whocolonized as part of the transmogrification of Indigenous spaces into theAmerican West. Nelson’s concept of the Afro-Frontier evokes a “Turnerian West,”but it is also fruitfully understood as a Weberian “Borderland.” Its history highlightsa brief period and space that nurtured Black cowboy culture. While Blackdom’scivic presence was not lengthy, its significance—and that of the Afro-Frontier—isan important window in the history of Afrotopias, Black Consciousness, and thenotion of an American West. - Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph
by Deana Lawson
$85.00*ships in 7-10 business days
Deana Lawson is one of the most powerful photographers of her generation. Her subject is black expressive culture and her canvas is the African Diaspora. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe black identities, through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals.Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an extensive interview with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.
Deana Lawson is one of the most intriguing photographers of her generation. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. Throughout her work, which invites comparison to the photography of Diane Arbus, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful in black life. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa. - Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies
Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies
by Elizabeth McHenry
$39.95Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded. Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women's clubs--which flourished during the 1890s--encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey's book club.
- In and Out of This World : Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam
In and Out of This World : Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam
by Stephen C. Finley
$26.95Stephen C. Finley offers a new look at the religious practices and discourses of the Nation of Islam, showing how the group and its leaders used multiple religious and esoteric symbols to locate black bodies as sites of religious meaning.
With In and Out of This World Stephen C. Finley examines the religious practices and discourses that have shaped the Nation of Islam (NOI) in America. Drawing on the speeches and writing of figures such as Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammad, and Louis Farrakhan, Finley shows that the NOI and its leaders used multiple religious symbols, rituals, and mythologies meant to recast the meaning of the cosmos and create new transcendent and immanent black bodies whose meaning cannot be reduced to products of racism. Whether examining how the myth of Yakub helped Elijah Muhammad explain the violence directed at black bodies, how Malcolm X made black bodies in the NOI publicly visible, or the ways Farrakhan’s discourses on his experiences with the Mother Wheel UFO organize his interpretation of black bodies, Finley demonstrates that the NOI intended to retrieve, reclaim, and reform black bodies in a context of antiblack violence. - Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
by E. Patrick Johnson
$30.95Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises. Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.
- The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s
The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s
by Emily J. Lordi
$26.95Examining the work of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Solange Knowles, Flying Lotus, and others, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of soul, showing how it came to signify a belief in black resilience enacted through musical practices.
In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition. - A Quitter's Paradise : A Novel
A Quitter's Paradise : A Novel
Elysha Chang
$27.95*Ships in 7-10 business days*
In A Quitter’s Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own.
Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she’s keeping secrets from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on illegitimately procured mice. And, true, her mother is dead, and Eleanor has yet to go through her things. But what else is she supposed to do? What shape can grief take when you didn’t understand the person you’ve lost?
Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path toward confronting her present. As Eleanor’s avoidance of her feelings results in a series of outrageous—often hilarious—choices, her actions begin to threaten all she holds most dear. Meanwhile, glimpses of Eleanor’s childhood and family history in Taiwan unfurl, revealing long-held secrets, and Eleanor starts to realize that she will never be able to escape her grief, or her family, despite her wildest attempts. But will she be brave enough to withstand the reckoning she’s hurtling toward?
At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter’s Paradise is an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of grief, family bonds, and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves.
- My Darkest Prayer: A Novel
My Darkest Prayer: A Novel
by S. A. Cosby
$17.99Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby’s debut novel, republished in a new edition, with a new introduction from the author.
“I handle the bodies.”
Whether it's working at his cousin's funeral home or tossing around the local riffraff at his favorite bar, Nathan Waymaker is a man who knows how to handle the bodies. A former marine and sheriff's deputy, Nathan has built a reputation in his small Southern town as a man who can help when all other avenues have been exhausted. When a beloved local minister is found dead, his parishioners ask Nathan to make sure the death isn’t swept under the rug.
What starts out as an easy payday soon descends into a maze of mayhem filled with wannabe gangsters, vicious crime lords, porn stars, crooked police officers, and a particularly treacherous preacher and his mysterious wife. Nathan must use all his varied skills and some of his wit to navigate the murky waters of small town corruption even as dark secrets of his own threaten to come to the surface. - The Wedding Crasher: A Novel
The Wedding Crasher: A Novel
by Mia Sosa
Sold outThe USA Today bestselling author of The Worst Best Man is back with another hilarious #ownvoices rom-com about two strangers who get trapped in a lie and have to fake date their way out of it…
Just weeks away from ditching DC for greener pastures, Solange Perreira is roped into helping her wedding planner cousin on a random couple’s big day. It’s an easy gig... until she stumbles upon a situation that convinces her the pair isn’t meant to be. What’s a true-blue romantic to do? Crash the wedding, of course. And ensure the unsuspecting groom doesn’t make the biggest mistake of his life.
Dean Chapman had his future all mapped out. He was about to check off “start a family” and was on track to “make partner” when his modern-day marriage of convenience went up in smoke. Then he learns he might not land an assignment that could be his ticket to a promotion unless he has a significant other and, in a moment of panic, Dean claims to be in love with the woman who crashed his wedding. Oops.
Now Dean has a whole new item on his to-do list: beg Solange to be his pretend girlfriend. Solange feels a tiny bit bad about ruining Dean’s wedding, so she agrees to play along. Yet as they fake-date their way around town, what started as a performance for Dean’s colleagues turns into a connection that neither he nor Solange can deny. Their entire romance is a sham... there’s no way these polar opposites could fall in love for real, right?
- Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance
Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance
by Francesca Royster
$26.00*Ships in 7-10 business days*
A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides
As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.
Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.
- Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities
Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities
by Veronica Davis
Sold outTransportation planners, engineers, and policymakers in the US face the monumental task of righting the wrongs of their predecessors while charting the course for the next generation. This task requires empathy while pushing against forces in the industry that are resistant to change. How do you change a system that was never designed to be equitable? How do you change a system that continues to divide communities and cede to the automobile?
In Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, transportation expert Veronica O. Davis shines a light on the inequitable and often destructive practice of transportation planning and engineering. She calls for new thinking and more diverse leadership to create transportation networks that connect people to jobs, education, opportunities, and to each other.
Inclusive Transportation is a vision for change and a new era of transportation planning. Davis explains why centering people in transportation decisions requires a great shift in how transportation planners and engineers are trained, how they communicate, the kind of data they collect, and how they work as professional teams. She examines what “equity” means for a transportation project, which is central to changing how we approach and solve problems to create something safer, better, and more useful for all people.
Davis aims to disrupt the status quo of the transportation industry. She urges transportation professionals to reflect on past injustices and elevate current practice to do the hard work that results in more than an idea and a catchphrase.
Inclusive Transportation is a call to action and a practical approach to reconnecting and shaping communities based on principles of justice and equity. - The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
by Asma Naeem
Sold outA sweeping survey of hip hop’s resounding impact on contemporary art and culture across the past 20-plus years
Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition originating at the Baltimore Museum of Art, this book captures the extraordinary influence of hip hop, which has driven innovations in music, visual and performing arts, fashion, and technology and grown into a global phenomenon since its emergence in the 1970s. It features approximately 70 objects by both established and emerging artists, design houses, streetwear icons and musicians working in a wide range of mediums to demonstrate hip hop’s proliferation from the street to the runway, the studio to the museum gallery, and countless sites in between. The exhibition also explores how hip hop has and continues to challenge structures of power, dominant cultural narratives, and political and social systems of oppression.
This fully illustrated monograph documents the exhibition and contains texts and interviews from more than 30 artists and scholars
Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Dionne Alexander, Maxwell Alexandre, Devin Allen, Alvaro Barrington, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grace Wales Bonner, Mark Bradford, Jordan Casteel, Willy Chavarria, Caitlin Cherry, Troy Chew II, William Cordova, Carl Jones, Stan Douglas, John Edmonds, Gajin Fujita, Monica Ikegwu, Shabez Jamal, Kahlil Joseph, Nia June, LA II, Deana Lawson, Eric N. Mack, Emmanuel Massillon, Julie Mehretu, Murjoni Merriweather, Jayson Musson, Rashaad Newsome, Yvonne Osei, Zéh Palito, Gordon Parks, Adam Pendleton, Robert Pruitt, Rammellzee, Sheila Rashid, Rozeal, Joyce J. Scott, Tschabalala Self, Tariku Shiferaw, Devan Shimoyama, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Abbey Williams, Pharrell Williams and Wilmer Wilson IV.
Authors include: Ebony Haynes, Todd Boyd, Lester Spence, Jordana Moore Saggese, Greg Tate, Misa Hylton, Elena Romero, Ekow Eshun, Devin Allen, Michael Holman, Simone White, Salome Asega, Alphonse Pierre, David A.M. Goldberg and Tahir Hemphill, Jacolby Satterwhite, Wendel Patrick, Simon Reynolds, Seph Rodney, Jesse McCarthy, Danez Smith, Noriko Manabe, Lindsay Knight and Charity Marsh, Shaheem Sanchez, Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Sekou Cooke, Jessica N. Pabón-Colón, Martha Cooper, Skeme, Alex de Mora and Lawrence Burney. - Sing Me to Sleep
Sing Me to Sleep
by Gabi Burton
$19.99*ships in 7-10 business days
In this dark, seductive YA fantasy debut, a siren in hiding must choose between protecting her family and following her heart.
Saoirse Sorkova survives on lies. As a soldier, she lies about being a siren to avoid execution. At night, working as an assassin, Saoirse lies about her true identity. And to her family, Saoirse tells the biggest lie of all: that she can control her powers and doesn’t constantly grapple with the impulse to kill.
When Saoirse is forced to accept a job guarding the crown prince, she expects to hate Prince Hayes. After all, his father enforces the kingdom’s brutal creature segregation laws. But Saoirse finds herself drawn to him—especially when they’re forced to work together to stop a deadly killer. There’s only one problem: Saoirse is that deadly killer.
With a forbidden romance and a compulsively dark plot, this fantasy is perfect for fans of A Song Below Water and To Kill a Kingdom.
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