This one-of-a-kind treasure trove of Black cultural ephemera, from the entrepreneurs behind the vintage shop BLK MKT Vintage, expands on their mission to curate vintage objects that tell Black stories and celebrate the contributions Black people have made to our American consciousness.
 
Jannah Handy and Kiyanna Stewart have spent years scouring piles, stacks, bookshelves, and dilapidated boxes in search of themselves and their history, Black history. Through their Brooklyn brick-and-mortar BLK MKT Vintage and online shop, they have uncovered tens of thousands of items including vintage literature, vinyl records, clothing, art, decor, furniture and more.
 
BLK MKT Vintage: Reclaiming Objects and Curiosities That Tell Black Stories invites readers into Handy and Stewart’s work and partnership as they pick, collect, curate, design, and reimagine futures for the objects of the past. Brimming with more than 300 photographs of vintage pieces of ephemera, the book is a beautiful, ephemeral object itself calling to mind a scrapbook or family album that has a surprise on every page whether that’s 1972 celluloid pins from Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign, early 1800’s hand-drawn maps of the African continent, or 1920’s bound yearbooks from various HBCUs. The book also explores the various concepts that ground Handy and Stewart’s work; interviews with Black archivists, artists, memory workers and collectors – including a foreword from Spike Lee; a look into their private collection of thousands of items they have discovered over the years; an explanation of the different players in the antiques and vintage world; and tips and tricks on how to begin your own collection and curate physical spaces that reflect your identity and experience.

Evan Wilde is a poor working-class girl. She writes contracts on behalf of wealthier folks who want to exchange a bit of their life for minor deals with devils. It’s not until she is bleeding out, the unwilling victim of an outlawed contract sacrifice, that Evan draws a contract for herself: A devil can take the last of her life―all she wants is revenge.

With the help of a devil named Jack, Evan infiltrates the upper class by posing as one of their own to bring them down from the inside.

For the first time, Evan finds friends and maybe even love. And with time she realizes that for all their corruption, the upper class’s magic is what keeps the devils at bay. Can she condemn the world to ruin to satisfy her need for vengeance?

But a contract cannot be broken, except at a devil’s mercy. And Jack has none.

A teenager on the run from his past finds the family he never knew existed and the community he never knew he needed at an HBCU for the young, Black, and magical. Enroll in this fresh fantasy debut unlike anything you've seen before.

Ten years ago, Malik's life changed forever the night his mother mysteriously vanished and he discovered he had uncontrollable powers. Since then, he has kept his abilities hidden, looking out for himself and his younger foster brother, Taye. Now, at 17, Malik is finally ready to start a new life for both of them, far from the trauma of his past. However, a daring act to rescue Taye reveals an unexpected connection with his long-lost grandmother: a legendary conjurer with ties to a hidden magical university that Malik’s mother attended.

At Caiman University, Malik’s eyes are opened to a future he never could have envisioned for himself— one that includes the reappearance of his first love, Alexis. His search for answers about his heritage, his powers, and what really happened to his mother exposes the cracks in their magical community as it faces a reawakened evil dating back to the Haitian Revolution. Together with Alexis, Malik discovers a lot beneath the surface at Caiman: feuding covens and magical politics, forbidden knowledge and buried mysteries.

In a wholly unique saga of family, history and community, Malik must embrace his legacy to save what's left of his old family as well as his new one. Exploring the roots and secrets that connect us in an unforgettable contemporary setting, this heart-pounding fantasy series opener is a rich tapestry of atmosphere, intrigue, and emotion.

BloodFresh is a creative collection of honest poems and short stories that take risks in pulling itself out of disappointment, loss, and trauma only to operate in triumph by way of survival. This body of work speaks to the inner child, the everyday person, and future happy self told through Ebony Stewart also known as the Gully Princess. Welcome to BloodFresh.

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"Master of craft and narrative" Walter Mosley returns with this crowning achievement in the Easy Rawlins saga, in which the iconic detective's loyalties are tested on the sun-soaked streets of Southern California (National Book Foundation) 

It is 1969, and flames can be seen on the horizon, protest wafts like smoke though the thick air, and Easy Rawlins, the Black private detective whose small agency finally has its own office, gets a visit from a white Vietnam veteran. The young man comes to Easy with a story that makes little sense. He and his lover, a beautiful young woman, were attacked in a citrus grove at the city’s outskirts. He may have killed a man, and the woman and his dog are now missing. Inclined to turn down what sounds like nothing but trouble, Easy takes the case when he realizes how damaged the young vet is from his war experiences—the bond between veterans superseding all other considerations.
 
The veteran is not Easy’s only unlooked-for trouble. Easy’s adopted daughter Feather’s white uncle shows up uninvited, raising questions and unsettling the life Easy has long forged for the now young woman. Where Feather sees a family reunion, Easy suspects something else, something that will break his heart.
 
Blood Grove is a crackling, moody, and thrilling race through a California of hippies and tycoons, radicals and sociopaths, cops and grifters, both men and women. Easy will need the help of his friends—from the genius Jackson Blue to the dangerous Mouse Alexander, Fearless Jones, and Christmas Black—to make sense of a case that reveals the darkest impulses humans harbor. 
 
Blood Grove is a novel of vast scope and intimate insight, and a soulful call for justice by any means necessary.

Blood In My Eye was completed only days before it's author was killed. George Jackson died on August 21, 1971 at the hands of San Quentin prison guards during an alleged escape attempt. At eighteen, George Jackson was convicted of stealing seventy dollars from a gas station and was sentenced from one year to life. He was to spent the rest of his life -- eleven years-- in the California prison system, seven in solidary confinement. In prison he read widely and transformed himself into an activist and political theoretician who defined himself as a revolutionary.

This summer, beware of sharks...

Mega bestselling and award-winning author Tiffany D. Jackson (The Weight of Blood; White Smoke) makes her thrilling middle-grade debut with a can't-put-it-down murder mystery set on Martha's Vineyard.

Brooklyn girl Kaylani McKinnon feels like a fish out of water. She's spending the summer with family friends in their huge house on Martha's Vineyard, and the vibe is definitely snooty. Still, there are beautiful beaches, lots of ice cream, and a town full of fascinating Black history. Plus a few kids her age who seem friendly.

Until the shocking death of a popular teenage boy rocks the community to its core. Was it a drowning? A shark attack? Or the unthinkable--murder?

Kaylani is determined to solve the mystery. But her investigation leads her to uncover shocking secrets that could change her own life as she knows it... if she survives.

New York Times bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson makes her thrilling middle-grade debut with this heart-pounding mystery packed with twists and turns that will keep readers guessing until the end.

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Voya Thomas may have passed her Calling to become a full-fledged witch, but the cost was higher than she’d ever imagined.

Her grandmother is gone.
Her cousin hates her.
And her family doesn’t believe that she has what it takes to lead them.

What’s more, Voya can’t let go of her feelings for Luc, sponsor son of the genius billionaire Justin Tremblay—the man that Luc believes Voya killed. Consequently, Luc wants nothing to do with her. Even her own ancestors seem to have lost faith in her. Every day Voya begs for their guidance, but her calls go unanswered.

As Voya struggles to convince everyone—herself included—that she can be a good Matriarch, she has a vision of a terrifying, deadly future. A vision that would spell the end of the Toronto witches. With a newfound sense of purpose, Voya must do whatever it takes to bring her shattered community together and stop what's coming for them before it’s too late.

Even if it means taking down the boy she loves—who might be the mastermind behind the coming devastation.

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A rich, dark urban fantasy debut following a teen witch who is given a horrifying task: sacrificing her first love to save her family’s magic. The problem is, she’s never been in love—she’ll have to find the perfect guy before she can kill him.

After years of waiting for her Calling—a trial every witch must pass in order to come into their powers—the one thing Voya Thomas didn’t expect was to fail. When Voya’s ancestor gives her an unprecedented second chance to complete her Calling, she agrees—and then is horrified when her task is to kill her first love. And this time, failure means every Thomas witch will be stripped of their magic.

Legend says long ago werewolves had traveled to Mira’s small hometown to protect humans from vampires. But that’s a fairy tale Mira had stopped believing in years ago. She’d stopped believing in a lot of things, after her mom left when she was thirteen.

Now, starting her freshman year of college, Mira just wants everything to be normal. And everything is―except for Julian, a mysterious boy with golden eyes, and a coldness directed at Mira for reasons she can’t understand and he won’t explain.

But when a Blood Moon rises, Mira finds herself caught in the middle of a long-standing battle, with Julian on the other side of the line. She discovers there’s more truth to the old town legends than she could ever have anticipated―and her family’s historic role in it will change her world forever.

A dance with vengeance. A dangerous new world. And a trial of acceptance.

Joceline Fuentes wanted one night of fun. But when a little indulgence at the Avery Hotel turns deadly, she wakes up to find herself in a pool of her own blood, forced to come to terms with her new existence as a vampire Protégé.

Saved by Rhys, her vampire Lord, she joins him in the underworld of Dallas, full of Brutes, Mystics, Paramours, and more. Maneuvering her transition proves to be more difficult than she imagined as she balances the intricacies of vampire society with her new abilities. Throughout her journey, she finds unlikely allies, a budding tension between them, and a thirst for more than just blood. Haunted by her trauma, Joceline is guided by revenge to find the one who stole her mortality.

To find the retribution she seeks, Joceline must rediscover her humanity while battling the anguish of her death. But will she lose the last of it in her pursuit of vengeance?

Blood Of My Blood is a paranormal psychological thriller and sensual drama about a woman’s quest to find herself after a debilitating trauma that causes her to lose all she had left, including her life, while seeking her humanity in the most unlikely place—revenge.

“A sumptuous tapestry of magic spells and memories.”—Los Angeles Times

A stunning collection of spells and stories to infuse our lives with ritual, history, and magic from the visionary artist and infamous witch Bri Luna, founder and creative director of “The Hoodwitch”

Blood Sex Magic is an invitation and an awakening—a guide to a life of connection to self and spirit, to seen and unseen realms, and to magical traditions past and future. Born with both Mexican/Indigenous and African roots, Bri Luna honors the traditions of tarot, nature, and root working, and celebrates magic that is “from dirt and blood, jewels and bones, moon and sun.”

Full of stunning photography and color illustrations, and brimming with incantations, spells, stories, vignettes, and warnings, Blood Sex Magic is divided into three sections:

* BLOOD uncovers Bri’s roots, with guides on setting boundaries, protection, and honoring the dead
* SEX reveals the art of love magic and celebrates the goddess, lust, and femininity, with spells for seduction and reclaiming your power
* MAGIC offers meaningful daily rituals, including those for self-love, peace, beauty, and prosperity

An instant classic and timeless resource for both new and experienced witches alike, this beautiful collection shows us how to access the untapped magic within and encourages us to see and channel that same magic in the world around us.

For readers of Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, this ingenious reimagining of the vampire origin story set during the early days of American slavery blends alternate history with supernatural horror, as the last surviving member of an ancient African vampire tribe meets a slave desperate for freedom, and together, they lead an army of enslaved people in a cinematically blood-soaked battle for freedom and revenge.

What if nobody ever freed the slaves…because they freed themselves – 150 years before the Civil War?

In the Province of Carolina, 1710, freedom seems unattainable for Willie, for his beloved Gertie, and for their unborn child. They live, suffer, and toil under their brutal master, James “Big Jim” Barrow, whose grand plantation was built by the blood, sweat, and tears of the enslaved. To flee this hell on earth is be hunted and killed. Until one strange night Willie is offered a dark hope by Rafazi, an enigmatic slave with an irresistible and blood-chilling path to liberation.

Hailing from the Kingdom of Ghana, Rafazi is the lone survivor of the Ramanga, an African vampire tribe rendered nearly extinct by plague. Rafazi has roamed the world for centuries with an undying desire to replenish the power that once defined his heritage. In Willie, Rafazi has found his first biddable subject to be turned and to help in a hungry revolt. And Willie desires nothing more than to free his people from malicious bondage. Whatever it takes.

One by one, as an army of blood slaves thirsting for revenge is gathered, the headstrong Gertie fears that no good can come from the vampiric legacy that courses through Rafazi’s veins. Willie knows that only evil can fight evil. And when the woman he loves stands between the reemergence of the Ramanga and the justified slaughter of the oppressors, Willie must make an irreversible decision. Only one thing is certain: on the Barrow plantation, and beyond, blood will spill.

Part historical drama, part supernatural horror, and part alternate history, Blood Slaves is an ingenuous and defiant new creation myth of the vampire, one rooted in both justice and the sometimes-violent means necessary to achieve it.

A hardcover edition of Octavia E. Butler's bestselling short story collection Bloodchild, with a new cover design and new introduction by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward

Bloodchild and Other Stories is renowned author Octavia E. Butler's only collection of shorter work and features the Hugo and Nebula award-winning stories "Bloodchild" and "Speech Sounds." These works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. Butler proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature's strongest voices.

A maternal gothic tale of new motherhood and the torment of a centuries-old haunting

Before the shadow appeared, Sofia thought mothering would be all sun-drenched light and white linen sheets, as seen advertised by the momfluencers of Instagram. In her gorgeous home anchored in a posh suburb, far removed from her origins, Sofia revels in her success.

Motherhood seems like the natural next step, but when her husband travels for a work trip, leaving Sofia all alone with their unnamed three-week-old baby, she can’t quite square how mothering falls solely in her lap. Nobody seems able or willing to help her: not her husband, not her best friend, and certainly not the zealot mother she cut off long ago.

Her postpartum reality is overtaken by an ominous figure. Sleep-deprivation collides with a darkness that creeps in and begins to spread, threatening to consume her entirely. As her grip on reality slips away, Sofia learns of an insidious haunting that has plagued the eldest daughters in her family for generations. With her baby’s safety on the line, Sofia realizes she must confront her murky history or risk losing more than just the veneer of perfection.

The powerful sequel to the instant New York Times bestselling and award-winning Legendborn—perfect for fans of Cassandra Clare and Margaret Rogerson!

The shadows have risen, and the line is law.

All Bree wanted was to uncover the truth behind her mother’s death. So she infiltrated the Legendborn Order, a secret society descended from King Arthur’s knights—only to discover her own ancestral power. Now, Bree has become someone new:

A Medium. A Bloodcrafter. A Scion.

But the ancient war between demons and the Order is rising to a deadly peak. And Nick, the Legendborn boy Bree fell in love with, has been kidnapped.

Bree wants to fight, but the Regents who rule the Order won’t let her. To them, she is an unknown girl with unheard-of power, and as the living anchor for the spell that preserves the Legendborn cycle, she must be protected.

When the Regents reveal they will do whatever it takes to hide the war, Bree and her friends must go on the run to rescue Nick themselves. But enemies are everywhere, Bree’s powers are unpredictable and dangerous, and she can’t escape her growing attraction to Selwyn, the mage sworn to protect Nick until death.

If Bree has any hope of saving herself and the people she loves, she must learn to control her powers from the ancestors who wielded them first—without losing herself in the process.

A self-empowering wellness guide that celebrates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women. Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don’t know where to begin. 

Self-care isn’t a trend among Black women; it has always been a throughline in our heritage. Consider Coretta Scott King, who along with fellow activists Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers-Williams, would enjoy “girls’ trips” to take a break from the stress of the Civil Rights Movement. Remember their contemporary Rosa Parks attended (and led) yoga classes while on the front lines for Black rights in Detroit.

Think of the enduring friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, a sisterhood in which they have leaned on each other for nearly forty years while thriving in the glaring media and entertainment spotlight.

Picture Toni Morrison’s overflowing gardens and lush houseplants she tended while writing classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye.

Recall Audre Lord’s enduring declaration written after her second cancer diagnosis: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Bloom How You Must explores and expands on this self-care legacy and shows how it can help every Black woman today.

Tara Pringle Jefferson excavates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women and transforms her findings into a blueprint women can follow in their daily lives. A blend of guidebook and journal, Bloom How You Must explores several distinct pillars of wellness, featuring:

* Research from leading wellness experts
* Interviews with women aged 19–99
* Stories of personal experience
* Overviews and explanations of each component of self-care
* Dedicated pages for readers to reflect on each chapter
* Exercises to put wellness into practice
* Easy-to-follow explanatory graphics and sidebars

With its diversity of insights,practical skills and multigenerational focus, Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don’t know where to begin. Bloom How You Must gives them the tools they need to improve their health and their daily lives.

Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth—not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island’s seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former lives. Yet, even there, outside of time, the souls are not totally insulated from the world in which they were enslaved. Each time a Black person anywhere is harmed, a piece of Blue Basin disintegrates: an earthquake leaves hundreds of thousands dead, and bricks crumble on the island; when police kill a Black child asleep in her bed, the blue paint on homes throughout the island drips and then runs from the walls. Lucille must hold the island together, but she struggles to juggle the responsibility of ensuring everyone’s safety while also seeking and losing her own private love. Grounding the story in African folklore and dipping into the rich literary tradition around African people with the power of flight, Zoë Gadegbeku visualizes the destination at the end of the flight and the new life that awaits them.

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The latest work from the veteran novelist called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin and “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis

Written by playwright and novelist Wesley Brown, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, mere weeks after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of the New York City Police Department outside of the Birdland jazz club. In the aftermath, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and his wife, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently cajoled into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis’ temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse—reckons with her upbringing in Christian Science and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his sports car. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker and the stilted world of the Black middle class he’s left behind.

A brutal homicide sets an ex-cop and his former partner on the hunt for an enigmatic killer in a gripping thriller by the author of Under Color of Law.

When former detective Trevor “Finn” Finnegan became a PI, he adopted a new mandate: catch the LAPD’s worst in the act. While on surveillance in Venice Beach, Finn tails two potentially dirty cops: Detective Martin Riley and Finn’s ex-partner, Detective Sally Munoz. Things take a deadly turn when an unknown assailant executes Riley and wounds Munoz. In an instant, Finn goes from private eye to eyewitness.

Munoz needs Finn to help find Riley’s killer, but doing so could blow his cover. She’s an officer shaded by rumors. Maybe she’s still a good cop―but maybe she’s not. Finn’s reluctance ends when his dear “uncle,” an ex-LAPD detective, is murdered, and it might be connected to Riley’s death.

To prevent more bloodshed and avoid becoming the next targets on the killer’s list, Finn and Munoz will have to bury their complicated past, trust each other, and come face-to-face with painful secrets that could destroy them both.

“A profound poetic talent.”―Ada Limón

Blue Opening, Chet’la Sebree’s brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins―of illness, of language, of the universe―as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.

With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is “unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith.”

From his childhood in the Jim Crow South to his triumphant reign as the King of Blues, Blues Boy tells the aspirational story of American music icon B.B. King. For readers of Trombone Shorty, When Marian Sang, and Drum Dream Girl. Includes a timeline, author’s note, and suggestions for reading and listening.

At twelve years old, Riley B. King borrowed fifteen dollars from his boss to buy a used guitar. Before long, he was playing his music for jubilant crowds all over the world. Blues Boy chronicles B. B. King’s inspiring journey from his childhood in the Jim Crow South to global stardom. It is a compelling biography about the widely known and celebrated American music figure as well as a beautifully illustrated picture book with themes of family, community, history, kindness, empathy, and justice.

Acclaimed author Alice Faye Duncan makes B.B. King’s story both accessible and inspiring for young readers. The text is sometimes uplifting and sometimes heart-wrenching, but always carries emotional depth, much like the music it celebrates. Illustrator and visual artist Carl Joe Williams provides artwork that is rich and distinctive, bringing B.B. King’s story to life on every page. Blues Boy will find a place on the shelf with books like Trombone Shorty and Radiant Child. Includes backmatter.

From acclaimed writer Diane McKinney-Whetstone, a richly spun tale of love and passion, betrayal, redemption, and faith, set in contemporary Philadelphia.

My aunt says if you smell butter on a foggy night you're getting ready to fall in love.

For the last twenty years, the beautiful Verdi Mae has led a comfortable life with Rowe, the conservative professor who rescued her from addiction when she was an undergrad. But her world is about to shift when the smell of butter lingers in the air and Johnson—the boy from the back streets of Philadelphia who pulled her into the fire of passion and all the shadows cast from it—returns to town.

In "this story of self-discovery that moves seamlessly between the early 1970s and early 1990s" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), McKinney-Whetstone takes readers into a world of erotic love, drugs, and political activism, and beautifully illustrates the struggle to reconcile passion with accountability and the redemptive powers of love's rediscovery.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

An award-winning play from one of America’s most brilliant writers about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. • "A play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes, a roar of protest in its throat." —The New York Times

James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion. 

In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence, James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.

For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry Books

From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works—both polished poems andraw, unfinished, works-in-progress written from 1921-1927—curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith.

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems see Hughes finding his voice and experimenting with style and form. Beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. 

Blues in Stereo is a collection of select early works, all written before the age of twenty-five, in which we see Langston Hughes with fresh eyes. From the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he ventures to the American South and Mexico, sails through the Caribbean, and becomes the only Harlem renaissance poet to visit Africa. His poems and journal entries celebrate love as a tool of liberation. His songs showcase the musicality of verse poetry. And the collection even includes a play he cowrote with Duke Ellington with a full score that experiments with rhythm and structure.

Blues in Stereo portrays a young man coming of age in a changing world. Page by page, a young, fresh-faced Hughes contends with matters beyond his years with raw talent. And by keeping his original, handwritten notations found in archival material, we get to witness a genius’s earliest thought process in real time. National Book Award-nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions that Hughes early work contains. Beautifully rendered and thoughtfully curated, Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come.

"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." — Langston Hughes

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."

So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America—not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”

“The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.”

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.