A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

From Law Roach, award-winning celebrity stylist and the world’s only image architect, comes a groundbreaking guide to becoming your ultimate, confident self.

Law Roach is the mastermind behind looks that have broken the Internet time and again—from Zendaya at the Met Gala to Anya Taylor-Joy at the Golden Globes, from Lewis Hamilton’s iconic streetwear to Céline Dion’s style renaissance. Nobody knows better than Law how to turn an outfit into a moment of fashion history.

In a little over a decade, he’s gone from industry outsider to the most celebrated name in style, having been honored two consecutive years with the Hollywood Reporter’s prestigious Stylist of the Year award and receiving the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s inaugural Stylist Award in 2022.

Now, for the first time ever, Law shares the secrets of his approach. With How to Build a Fashion Icon, he takes readers behind the scenes of his process and journey, revealing his tips, tricks, and most memorable styling moments to show readers how to live their most iconic and fashionable lives.

Part self-help guide, part manifesto, this book guides readers step-by-step through that process, and along the way, Law weaves in personal anecdotes—from his childhood in the Southside of Chicago to the first time he styled Zendaya—with practical exercises to help readers cultivate the most essential feature of iconic style: confidence.

How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected.

These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.

How to Dodge a Cannonballis a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.

How to Dodge a Cannonball is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.

Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler―until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate―until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.

His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle’s satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone’s definition of loyalty.

Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while it’s still legal.

In the final book of the best-selling Mindfulness Essentials series, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to realize our dreams in this very moment.

We all want our lives to be useful and meaningful. The aspiration to transform suffering—our own, each other’s, and the Earth’s—can give us the energy we need to continue on a wholesome path. In How to Dream, Thich Nhat Hanh explains how to let our deep desire nourish us and, in turn, how to keep that desire alive.

With inspiring illustrations throughout, this pocket-sized book explains how to:

• Get in touch with our deepest dream
• Live our dream in every moment of daily life
• Keep our dream alive with the help of a community
• Protect our dream from the dampening effects of our fast-paced modern life
• Direct energy towards lasting personal, social, and political change

If our aspiration is lost, depleted, or if we’ve slowly let it go, we must rekindle it. Whatever our role in society—activist, businessperson, teacher, parent, or politician—we can live into our deep aspiration and change the direction of civilization. And together, as a community with a collective aspiration, we have the energy to realize our dream.

Turn disagreements and conflicts into opportunities for growth, compassion, and reconciliation. 

The sixth book in the bestselling Mindfulness Essentials series, a back-to-basics collection from world-renowned Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh that introduces everyone to the essentials of mindfulness practice.

Nhat Hanh brings his signature clarity, compassion, and humor to the ways we act out in anger, frustration, despair, and delusion. In brief meditations accompanied by whimsical sumi-ink drawings, Thich Nhat Hanh instructs us exactly how to transform our craving and confusion. If we learn to take good care of our suffering, we can help others do the same, and reach reconciliation between family members, coworkers, and even nations.

How to Fight is pocket-sized with two-color original artwork by California artist Jason DeAntonis.

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Makeda Hicks has lost her job and her girlfriend in one fell swoop. The last thing she’s in the mood for is to rehash the story of her grandmother’s infamous summer fling with a runaway prince from Ibarania, or the investigator from the World Federation of Monarchies tasked with searching for Ibarania’s missing heir.

Yet when Beznaria Chetchevaliere crashes into her life, the sleek and sexy investigator exudes exactly the kind of chaos that organized and efficient Makeda finds irresistible, even if Bez is determined to drag her into a world of royal duty Makeda wants nothing to do with.

When a threat to her grandmother’s livelihood pushes Makeda to agree to return to Ibarania, Bez takes her on a transatlantic adventure with a crew of lovable weirdos, a fake marriage, and one-bed hijinks on the high seas. When they finally make it to Ibarania, they realize there’s more at stake than just cash and crown, and Makeda must learn what it means to fight for what she desires and not what she feels bound to by duty.

From award-winning dating coach and matchmaker Francesca Hogi, How to Find True Love is an intelligent, practical guide for anyone searching for love, holding on to the hope that true love exists, and ready to empower themselves to find it.

We all know dating sucks. It hasn't gotten any easier since it was invented, in fact, it can be argued that the advent of online dating, apps like Tinder and Hinge, and now AI has made it nearly impossible to find love even thought we're more connected than ever. And yet, as challenging as it is to meet someone, we're all still desirous of love, because we're humans, and we're facing a loneliness epidemic and many report feelings of touch-deprivation from experiencing little to no physical contact, which it turns out can negatively affect your mental health. 

With How to Find True Love, matchmaker and dating expert Francesca Hogi provides a better, more realistic plan for actually finding real love--and no, not the kind we see in rom coms and animated movies. Hogi seeks to bring purpose to modern dating and optimism to the hearts of cynical daters everywhere. With her advice, exhausted romantics will find comfort in releasing the impossible ideal of one perfect person being their “one true love,” and instead understand that true love is first and foremost a type of relationship, not an individual person, and that true love is really an inside job. Co-creating a true love relationship with another is a choice, and it’s available to everyone who wants healthy love. To do this, readers will work on improving their:
* Mindset: empowering readers to expand how they think of love
* Heartset: energizing the reader's feelings about love particularly by leaning into self-love
* Skillset: equipping the reader with the skills necessary to navigate modern dating 
* Soulset: helping readers embody the energy of love 

As Hogi says, you don't need to be an expert to see that the dating pool has pee in it. Modern dating is broken. How to Find True Love is a necessary fix, because it's time for a true love revolution.

The simple, refreshing meditations of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh give us the tools to cultivate concentration. Practicing mindfulness brings concentration, and concentration brings insight and understanding.

With our world experiencing the deep effects of loneliness, digital overload, and a proliferation of potential distractions, this pocket-sized How To book reminds us of the value of developing our concentration, so we can let go of misperceptions and cultivate the clarity of mind that is the basis for understanding ourselves, each other, and the world.
 
Written with characteristic simplicity and kindness, these wise meditations teach us that by practicing mindfulness in daily life, we are cultivating the power of concentration and fostering the conditions that bring insight, liberating us from misperceptions and misunderstanding.

The Mindfulness Essentials series is a back-to-basics collection from world-renowned Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh that introduces readers to the essentials of mindfulness practice. All Mindfulness Essentials books are illustrated with playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis.

Winner of the 2022 Modern Language Association First Book Prize

Winner of the 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; and in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, among many others. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes what he calls "mad methodology"—where madness informs and animates ways of reading, ways of thinking, ways of feeling, ways of telling, ways of being, and ways of life. Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.

Since launching his TikTok account in December 2019, Marcus Bridgewater, known as Garden Marcus, has been compared to Bob Ross and Mister Rogers for the genuine warmth, compassion, and enthusiasm he conveys. His unique approach to botany and humanity combines with content grounded in plant care as a metaphor for personal growth, which has garnered praise and a huge audience. 

Whether his audience finds solace in his daily doses of wisdom, or simply enjoy his how-to guides caring for plants, Marcus Bridgewater creates a space for us all to grow and reflect in his debut book, How to Grow: Nurture Your Garden, Nurture Yourself.  In the book he focuses on a trinity of wellbeing—mental health, physical fitness, and spiritual awareness—and weaves together stories of his life, starting with the first lesson he learned from tending his grandmother’s garden in his youth: “…that growth cannot be forced, only fostered.” Throughout, Marcus reflects on his own development while providing readers with tools to look inwardly on their own growth, and maximize their own potential for kindness, patience, and positivity.

How to Grow isn’t a gardening book, rather a self-help book that draws inspiration from the garden. Original, timely, and filled with nurturing wisdom, it takes perennial knowledge from the plant world to teach us about ourselves and opens our eyes to what we can achieve.

As a practicing primary physician, Dr. Coe has seen too many adult patients that are struggling with burgeoning chronic medical conditions and illnesses. They feel frustrated and overwhelmed as they try to juggle busy lives while striving to maintain the quality of life they deserve. Maintaining and advocating for one's health is not easy, but it can be done.

This self-help book gives detailed information about how to proactively help you care for yourself and also help your physician/provider care for you in a more substantial way. There are numerous ways people can promote and maintain their health, as well as improve when they're unwell. Dr. Coe's goal is to provide everyday individuals with a single comprehensive resource, sharing the wisdom and practical tips from her clinical practice on health, mental health, and overall well-being. Her philosophy and unique approach to caring for people is informed by the many self observations that she has accumulated from her patients over the years. The information in this book will greatly simplify the reader's approach to health so that it doesn't seem so daunting and create a cause for fear or avoidance of seeking medical advice and paying attention to one's health. This book is invaluable to people who have doctors but are not getting what they want out of their health care interactions.

The advice contained in these pages stems from listening to the life stories and experiences of many patients throughout Dr. Coe's 27-year career as an Internal Medicine physician. Actively listening to patients helped her hone her clinical skills such that she has developed a distinctive way of taking care of patients that helps them get improvement of their health when they have not been satisfied with the care that they have been receiving from previous doctors. Paying attention to what her patients communicate has propelled her to be a distinguished clinician, diagnostician, counselor and advocate for the people that she cares for. Dr. Coe gives practical ways to make healthy choices in life with respect to eating, prevention and management of chronic diseases and conditions and keeping track of your mental health status.

There is so much health information that people have access to, however it is hard for people to sift through the noise and focus on what is important and what actually makes a difference in health and wellness. Despite the amount of money that we spend on healthcare in this country, our collective health should be much better than it is. This book gives practical advice about how to be, become, and/or stay healthy in a practical and concise form.

This book tells people, in clear terms, full of lists, charts and checklists, about how to keep up with mental and physical health, such that they can actually help their doctor take better care of them and become an engaged and informed advocate for their own health. Dr. Coe's advice can help improve health, control and reverse many chronic medical illnesses and conditions, and can even decrease or eliminate the need for prescription medications.

Feeling overwhelmed? Step away from life's demands and free yourself up for what matters with this succinct and sensible guide by the Zen Buddhist author of the international bestsellers The Art of Simple Living and Don't Worry.

Amid the relentless cycle of news, social media, emails, and texts, it can be hard to know when, if ever, you can take a break from everything clamoring for your attention. The internationally bestselling Buddhist monk Shunmyo Masuno offers a radical message: You can leave it all be, and, indeed, sometimes the best thing you can learn is how to do nothing. How to Let Things Go will teach you to:

* Lesson #2: Give people space—being caring and being nosy are not the same thing.
* Lesson #15: Remember that social media is a tool and nothing more.
* Lesson #19: Let a relationship come to an end rather than force it.
* Lesson #40: Think of letting things go not as throwing them away but as setting them free.
* Lesson #75: Make decisions in the light of the morning—don't rush into them.
* Lesson #90: Slow down and take more breaks.

With these and ninety-three other practical tips, you can abandon the futile pursuit of trying to control everything and discover the key to a fulfilling social life; individual well-being; and a calmer, more focused mind.

Listening with compassion can solve our most pressing issues—across global politics and interpersonal relationships and within our own hearts and minds.

In How to Listen, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh demonstrates how deep listening is a fundamental building block of good communication. But perhaps more fundamentally, listening is central to our practice, a basic ingredient to strengthen our capacity for mindfulness, concentration, insight, and compassion. Learning how to listen with equanimity to life itself, we generate insight into the true nature of our deep connection to all things. And from this place of understanding—when we know that we aren’t separate—our capacity to listen deepens even further.

With clear and gentle guidance from Thich Nhat Hanh, we learn how truly listening—to ourselves, to each other, to Mother Earth, and to the many “bells of mindfulness” that are available to us in each moment—is the foundation of our practice, an expression of love, and a solution to our deepest and most urgent large-scale conflicts.

All Mindfulness Essentials books are illustrated with playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis.

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New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self. Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson’s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal. Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.

“In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once: some cultivated, some simple, some wickedly funny, some deeply melancholic. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith

Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.

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The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant. 

The tragedies and reckonings around racism that are rocking the country have created a specific crisis for parents, educators, and other caregivers: How do we talk to our children about racism? How do we teach children to be antiracist? How are kids at different ages experiencing race? How are racist structures impacting children? How can we inspire our children to avoid our mistakes, to be better, to make the world better? 

These are the questions Ibram X. Kendi found himself avoiding as he anticipated the birth of his first child. Like most parents or parents-to-be, he felt the reflex to not talk to his child about racism, which he feared would stain her innocence and steal away her joy. But research and experience changed his mind, and he realized that raising his child to be antiracist would actually protect his child, and preserve her innocence and joy. He realized that teaching students about the reality of racism and the myth of race provides a protective education in our diverse and unequal world. He realized that building antiracist societies safeguards all children from the harms of racism. 

Following the accessible genre of his internationally bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines a century of scientific research with a vulnerable and compelling personal narrative of his own journey as a parent and as a child in school. The chapters follow the stages of child development from pregnancy to toddler to schoolkid to teenager. It is never too early or late to start raising young people to be antiracist.

From the prizewinning international literary star: the searing and powerful story of one man's search for redemption.

Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience. Now Mengestu enriches the themes that defined his debut with a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, which confirms his reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.

One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Soon, their son, Jonas, will be born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas needs to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today, a story—real or invented—that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

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With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.

A New York Times Notable Book

A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the “star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful” (NPR).

Brilliant and uncompromising, piercing and funny, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential reading. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language and his artful rendering of experience, trumpeting why he is “simply one of the most talented writers in America” (New York magazine).

The final book in the bestselling How To series: simple, refreshing meditations of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh give us inspiration and tools for transforming our suffering and cultivating happiness

In inspiring passages and simple exercises, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us what he calls “the art of suffering.” He gives us teachings and tools for transforming suffering as well as ways to touch moments of happiness and smile even while suffering is still there.
Written with characteristic simplicity and wisdom, these insightful meditations—born from the Zen master’s lifetime of Zen practice and peacemaking—teach us how to come back to ourselves, calm our body and mind, and not let suffering overwhelm us. When we’re willing to face our suffering and look deeply into it, we begin to understand its origins. Transformation and healing become possible, and along with it a greater capacity to understand the suffering of others and resolve conflicts in our relationships. Creating peace and understanding in ourselves and our relationships in this way is essential for helping create true understanding and peace in our communities, society, and the world. Thich Nhat Hanh offers practices for transforming our own suffering, listening deeply to the suffering of others, and especially how to cultivate our own smile and happiness.
All Mindfulness Essentials books are illustrated with playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis.

Series Overview: The Mindfulness Essentials series is a back-to-basics collection from world-renowned Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh that introduces everyone to the essentials of mindfulness practice. The books, pocket-sized and perfect for placement at point of sale, all come with original sumi-ink artwork by California artist Jason DeAntonis.

A humorous guide to living on the Moon by astrophysicist Joalda Morancy, timed to coincide with the NASA Artemis Moon missions

An illustrated guide to lunar survival for kids from astrophysicist Joalda Morancy, timed to coincide with the NASA Artemis Moon missions.

Humans are heading back to the Moon. But once we get there, how on the Moon will we stay alive? In this practical guide, future astronauts will learn how to dodge meteorites, shield themselves from dangerous radiation, and grow the food they’ll need to survive life away from our home planet.

As well as practical tips, Morancy lifts a lid on some of the coolest developments in lunar science—including the possibility of building underground cities in lava tubes and the giant catapult that could be used to get stuff back to Earth.

Like Andy Weir’s The Martian everything in this space book is based on real, groundbreaking science. And no one is better placed to write it: when they’re not writing kids’ books, Joalda Morancy is building the lunar lander the Artemis missions will use to take astronauts—including the first woman and first person of color —to the surface!

Hilarious illustrations by award-winning artist Aaron Cushley, including graphic novel elements, convey the wonder and excitement of future space travel and give this book a key point of difference from other solar system books.

Don’t leave Earth without it!

Bestselling author and transformational speaker Ryan Leak shares research-based strategies for working with even the most challenging people to create more collaborative and productive teams.

Who is the most complicated person you work with?

You probably don’t have to think very hard to answer that question. You already know their name, their job title, their quirks, and their flaws. You have firsthand experience with the mental and emotional fallout they leave in their wake. You’ve seen the problems their complexity creates for everyone on their team. You wish you could fix them, solve them, ignore them, or teleport them to a parallel dimension.

But you can’t.

You have to work with them.

(You could quit, but your next job will have a complicated person waiting for you.)

That means you need effective strategies to collaborate with (nearly) anyone. Especially the picky, prickly, problematic ones.

Drawing from his global consulting experience with teams and leaders from the glitz of sports and entertainment, to the number-crunching world of finance, to the meticulous realms of insurance, pharma, and manufacturing, Ryan Leak provides proven strategies for…

* Seeing challenging individuals as human beings to understand rather than problems to solve
* Detoxing unrealistic expectations and getting comfortable with complicated
* Learning to communicate effectively in complex environments
* Embracing healthy disagreement as a tool to discover better solutions
* Setting boundaries that let people into your world without letting them run your world

“The process of learning to collaborate with difficult individuals is transformative—it’s a gateway to greater creativity, stronger teams, and increased productivity,” Leak explains. “On the other side of complicated is the wonderful, wide-open world of effective collaboration and a workplace you love.”

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More than 30 acclaimed writers—including diverse voices such as Nikki Giovanni, David Omotosho Black, Natasha Trethewey, Barry Jenkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, and Angela Flournoy—reflect on their experience and expertise in this unique book on the craft of writing that focuses on the Black creative spirit.

How We Do It is an anthology curated by Black writers for the creation and proliferation of Black thought. While a creator’s ethnicity does not solely define them, it is inherently part of who they are and how they interpret the world.

For centuries, Black creators have utilized oral and written storytelling traditions in crafting their art. But how does one begin the process of constructing a poem or story or character? How do Black writers, when faced with questions of “authenticity,” dive deep into the essence of their lives and work to find the inherent truth? How We Do It addresses these profound questions. Not a traditional “how to” writing handbook, it seeks to guide rather than dictate and to validate the complexity and range of styles—and even how one thinks about craft itself.

An outstanding list of contributors offer their insights on a range of important topics. Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown explores the lives personified in poetry, while Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey explores decolonizing enduring metaphors. National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy illuminates the pain of grief in all forms and how it can be revealed in the act of creation, and iconoclast Nikki Giovanni offers an elegiac declaration on language.

New and previously published essays and interviews provide encouragement, examples, and templates, and offer lessons on everything from poetic form and plotting a story to the lessons inherent in the act of writing, trial & error, and finding inspiration in the works of others, including those of Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, and Edward P. Jones. A handbook and a reference tool, How We Do It is a thoughtful and welcome tool that offers direction to help Black artists establish their own creative practice while celebrating and widening the scope of the Black writer’s role in art, history, and culture.

Contributors include David Omotosho Black, Jericho Brown, Breena Clark, Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, W. Ralph Eubanks, Curdella Forbes, Angela Flournoy, Ernest Gaines, Nikki Giovanni, Marita Golden, Ravi Howard, Terrance Hayes, Mitchell S. Jackson, Barry Jenkins, Charles S. Johnson, Tayari Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Elizabeth Nunez, Carl Phillips, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Rion Amilcar Scott, Evie Shockley, Natasha Trethewey, Frank X Walker, Afaa M. Weaver, Crystal Wilkinson, Jacqueline Woodson, Tiphanie Yanique.

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“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’”

Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.

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This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice -- and ideas for how each of us can contribute

Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It's a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.

Featuring contributions from:

• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Tarana Burke
• Harry Belafonte
• Adrienne Maree brown
• Alicia Garza
• Patrisse Khan-Cullors
• Reverend Dr. Valerie Bridgeman
• Kiese Laymon
• Jamilah Lemieux
• Robin DG Kelley
• Damon Young
• Michael Arceneaux
• Hanif Abdurraqib
  
• Dr. Yaba Blay
  
• Diamond Stingily
  
• Amanda Seales
• Imani Perry
  
• Denene Millner
  
• Kierna Mayo
  
• John Jennings
  
• Dr. Joy Harden Bradford
  
• Tongo Eisen-Martin

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

In How We Heal, bestselling author Alexandra Elle offers a life-changing invitation to heal yourself and reclaim your peace. In these pages, readers will discover essential techniques for self-healing, including journaling rituals to cultivate innate strength, accessible tools for processing difficult emotions, and restorative meditations to ease the mind.

Alex Elle elegantly weaves together themes like self-healing, mindfulness, inner child work, and boundary setting and presents the reader with easy-to-follow practices that have changed her life and the lives of the thousands of people she has taught. Her 4-part framework for healing will appeal to anyone who wants a clear process, while the compelling personal stories leave the reader feeling connected and ready to begin again.

Complementing the practices are powerful insights from Alex Elle's own journey of self-discovery using writing to heal, plus remarkable stories of healing from a range of luminary voices, including Nedra Tawwab, Morgan Harper Nichols, Dr. Thema Bryant, Barb Schmidt, and many more.

Brimming with encouragement and delivered with Alex Elle's signature warmth and candor, How We Heal is a must-have companion for anyone that wants to unlock their inner wisdom and confidence to heal on their own.