Bestsellers
- Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital (Music / Culture)
Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital (Music / Culture)
Michael E. Veal
$28.00Examines John Coltrane's "late period" and Miles Davis's "Lost Quintet" through the prisms of digital architecture and experimental photography
Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital fuses biography and style history in order to illuminate the music of two jazz icons, while drawing on the discourses of photography and digital architecture to fashion musical insights that may not be available through the traditional language of jazz analysis. The book follows the controversial trajectories of two jazz legends, emerging from the 1959 album Kind of Blue. Coltrane's odyssey through what became known as "free jazz" brought stylistic (r)evolution and chaos in equal measure. Davis's spearheading of "jazz-rock fusion" opened a door through which jazz's ongoing dialogue with the popular tradition could be regenerated, engaging both high and low ideas of creativity, community, and commerce. Includes 42 illustrations.
- Home: Social Essays (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)
Home: Social Essays (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)
LeRoi Jones
$20.95A seminal Jones/Baraka literary land mine that launches AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series. “Jones/Baraka usually speaks as a Negro—and always as an American. He is eloquent, he is bold. He demands rights—not conditional favors.” —New York Times Book Review In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Home—long out of print—features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of 1960s social and political essays. Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span—a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X . . . each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.
- From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women's Generational Sonic Rhetorics (Black Women's Wellness)
From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women's Generational Sonic Rhetorics (Black Women's Wellness)
Alexis McGee
$34.95Explores how Black women have continually used sound to convey stories and forge community across generations.
From Blues to Beyoncé amplifies Black women's ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge antiBlack discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyoncé reveals how Black women's sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.
- As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas)
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
$18.95Winner: Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's Best Subsequent Book 2017
Honorable Mention: Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.
Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around the refusal of the dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that its goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.
- The Stolen Daughter
The Stolen Daughter
ReShonda Tate Billingsley
$17.95Award-winning author ReShonda Tate Billingsley delivers a poignant, page-turning novel about the power—and fragility—of family, personal identity, and the choices we are called on to make . . .
Raised by a widowed mother, Jill Reed has come a long way from her difficult youth. But while she may not have had money, Jill never doubted she was rich in love. Her mother, Connie, made Jill the center of her world. Now, even though she has a young family of her own, it’s Jill’s turn to care for her ailing mother.
When early dementia begins to set in, Connie starts talking about Jill’s “other life.” Jill assumes it’s just rambling confusion. Still, Connie’s stories about Jill’s childhood, and her father’s early death, never quite added up. And when a strange man shows up to Jill’s job bearing news that turns Jill’s life upside down, there’s no denying Connie’s devastating secret.
As Jill sets out to learn more about her past, she’s stunned by what she learns and what it will mean for her future. Now, she must decide what price she’s willing to pay to claim the life that’s rightfully hers. - Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy
Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy
Tre Johnson
$30.00A powerful read redefining the meaning of genius while illuminating the ways in which Black Americans have found various ways to thrive despite insurmountable obstacles.
Black genius sits at the heart of the American story. In his probing essay collection, Black Genius, cultural critic Tre Johnson examines how Black American culture has, against all odds, been the lifeblood of American ingenuity. At times using his own personal and professional stories, Johnson surveys Black cities, communities, and schools with an ever-watchful eye of what transpires around Black mobility.
With a passion for complex storytelling and pulling from both pop culture and American history, Johnson weaves past and present making his case for the genius of innovation. As he examined his findings, Johnson couldn’t help but wonder about the brilliance of the every day. Specifically, the creativity of the 90’s graffiti-style airbrush tee, his aunties packed weekend bus trips to Atlantic city, and the razor-tongued, socially-sharp, profanity-laced monologues of comedian Dick Gregory.
Again and again, he asks us to ponder—are these not obvious examples of genius?
Chatty yet profound, Black Genius subverts expectations from the very first page with a blend of reportage, historical data, and pop culture as Johnson dives into his own family history seeking big answers to complex questions. Johnson’s signature wit and curiosity turns history into an amusing sequence of events. - Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy
Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy
Robert Farris Thompson
$19.00This landmark book shows how five African civilizations—Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River—have informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.
- East Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from the Hidden Caribbean
East Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from the Hidden Caribbean
Riaz Phillips
$40.00What’s inside: A celebration of the lesser known Caribbean culture, rooted in tales and memories of the history and heritage of the eastern reaches of the Caribbean.
The hidden Caribbean isn’t a place but a legacy of the complex history, people, and food that exists outside the limelight of Caribbean culture.
East Winds is full of Riaz's award-winning recipes, with food and travel writing interwoven throughout, giving full focus to both the violent and vibrant stories of the indentured Indian and Chinese, Indigenous tribes, and African heritage of Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Suriname and beyond. All equally create the kaleidoscope that is Caribbean food today.
Ranging from plant-based to meat and seafood, Riaz offers up not only delicious dishes but also the inseparable stories of people and places. Get to know island favorites like hot doubles, a whole chapter dedicated to roti, a whole list of Caribbean curries, and much more. More than a cookbook, with East Winds you'll go on a culinary journey to explore the roots and evolution of the dishes you're cooking.
- Steamy on Set
Steamy on Set
D S Walls
$18.99After a devastating breakup leaves her questioning everything, Farrah Darby trades her flailing life in San Francisco for a fresh start in Hollywood as a movie set stylist. Her fashion expertise should be her ticket to success, but there's one problem: Director Errol Davis seems determined to make her life hell. Every costume choice becomes a battle, every interaction a test of wills.
Farrah gives as good as she gets - if Davis wants war, she'll show him exactly what she's made of. But between their heated arguments, she can't help noticing other things too: his intense focus when he's directing, the rare smile that transforms his face, and yes, that irritatingly perfect ass. When a crisis on set forces them to work closely together, Farrah glimpses a different man beneath the harsh exterior - one who might be worth the risk of letting her guards down again.
Now she's facing a dilemma bigger than any wardrobe decision: trust her head, which warns her to keep her distance, or her heart, which whispers that their rivalry might be disguising something much more intriguing.
- Judgments of Fire and Desire
Judgments of Fire and Desire
Tay Mo'Nae
Sold outLosing her father to the 9/11 terrorist attack at the tender age of three, has Genesis Farris longing for what she feels is missing. Being that her mother never remarried or even introduced another man into their lives, it made her that much more curious about what it was like to be loved by one. She’s always wanted to know and experience what was so special or significant about a man’s love, but she was far from the point of desperation. Just from the stories she’d heard about her father, she knew that he wanted what was best for her, so she refused to settle for less than that.
While on the job as one of the most decorated firefighters in her city, she comes face to face with who she believes will be the man to school her on all the things she is ignorant about. The situation is extremely dangerous, and she’s hoping the attraction isn’t simply a trauma bond. She doesn’t plan to waste time on something that won’t have the potential to be permanent. Judge Patrick isn’t a man that easily accepts rejection, but Genesis knows her worth and refuses to accept anything less, regardless of status and prestige.
Kyrie Patrick is an educated man who believes in pulling yourself up by the bootstraps to get the things you want and deserve. He’s the youngest judge in the state and the first black judge from his hometown to ever be elected to office. Those facts have Kyrie thinking more highly of himself than he should and that ruffles some people’s feathers. He constantly looks over his shoulder, because he doesn’t trust people. He’s gained plenty of enemies along the way for being a presiding judge for the criminal court of appeals and for not always seeing beyond black and white.
While he would love to have a woman to share his life and all of his successes with, he isn’t in a hurry. He didn’t have the greatest example of how a man should love a woman growing up, so he is learning on the fly. He believes the love of his life will eventually cross his path if fate has its way. That fateful day comes when he faces a matter of life and death. The angel of mercy pays him a visit in the form of a gorgeous firefighter that leads him to the light in more ways than one.
Although sparks fly between Genesis and Kyrie, they chalk it up to their emotions being high and their traumatic vulnerability due to the situation. Commonality brings them closer, causing them to reevaluate their chemistry. However, egos get in the way and jeopardize their chances of reaching the heights they’d hoped for, not to mention constant threats on Kyrie’s life. Will they be able to tread through the dangers faced and get beyond their own vices and insecurities to establish something special, or will they choose to cut their losses and focus their efforts on their individual safety, careers, and futures?
- Calculated Risk
Calculated Risk
DL White
$12.99When heartbreak leads to love...
All her life, Imani Thatcher has played it safe, making the smart moves that landed her a prime spot at one of Atlanta's top financial firms. When heartbreak shatters her carefully planned world, she finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew about love and life.
Desmond Taylor has enough on his plate keeping Bright Pathways Youth Center running and Atlanta's at-risk teens off the streets. A polished financial analyst from the high gloss end of Atlanta should be the last thing on his mind, but from the moment she walks through his doors, he cannot deny the electricity between them.
When it comes to matters of the heart, love is always a calculated risk.
- PRE-ORDER: The Weary Blues; Not Without Laughter; The Ways of White Folks (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
PRE-ORDER: The Weary Blues; Not Without Laughter; The Ways of White Folks (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
Langston Hughes
$35.00PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON
A major hardcover compendium of poetry and fiction by the legendary Black American poet of the Harlem Renaissance
One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but he was also a brilliant storyteller, blending elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 1920s and 1930s aware of the Black culture thriving in its midst. Hughes's poetry and fiction works are messages from that America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, cruelly accurate portrayals of Black and white collisions.
This Everyman's Library compendium comprises Hughes's debut poetry collection, The Weary Blues, which catapulted him into literary stardom at just twenty-four years old; his award-winning debut novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930 to critical raves; and his 1933 collection of short stories The Ways of White Folks, currently only available in Vintage Classics trade paperback.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
- PRE-ORDER: Twins, but Different (Step into Reading)
PRE-ORDER: Twins, but Different (Step into Reading)
Porsche Thomas
$5.99Model and mother to twin boys, Porsche Thomas presents this Step 2 leveled reader about sibling differences and the importance of unconditional love. Perfect for children recognizing familiar words while sounding out new ones with help.
All twins look and act the same, right?
WRONG!
August and Berlin are twins but they couldn't be more different. From their personalities, to their heights, to the way they like to play, these twins are definitely not the same. So, they never get along, right?
WRONG AGAIN!
For all their differences, they're a lot alike, too. Most importantly, they know that no matter how much they do or don't have in common, they make a perfect pair.
Twin mom, model, and actress Porsche Thomas tells a story from the heart that's inspired by her own experience watching two twin boys grow up.
Step 2 readers use basic vocabulary and short sentences to tell simple stories. They are perfect for children who recognize familiar words and can sound out new words with help.
- PRE-ORDER: Suder: A Novel
PRE-ORDER: Suder: A Novel
Percival Everett
$18.00PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON October 21, 2025.
Suder, Percival Everett's acclaimed first novel, follows the exploits and ordeals of Craig Suder, a struggling black third baseman for the Seattle Mariners. In the midst of a humiliating career slump and difficulties with his demanding wife and troubled son, Suder packs up his saxophone, phonograph, and Charlie Parker's Ornithology and begins a personal crusade for independence, freedom, and contentment. This ambitious quest takes Suder on a series of madcap adventures involving cocaine smugglers, an elephant named Renoir, and a young runaway, but the journey also forces him to reflect on bygone times. Deftly alternating between the past and the present, Everett tenderly reveals the rural South of Suder's childhood -- the withdrawn father; the unhinged, protective mother; the detached, lustful brother; and the jazz pianist who teaches Suder to take chances. And risk it all he finally does: Suder's travels culminate in the fulfillment of his most fanciful childhood dream.
- PRE-ORDER: Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present
PRE-ORDER: Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present
Mary Frances Berry
$17.95PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON
An acclaimed historian narrates the stories of newly emancipated children who were re-enslaved by white masters through apprenticeships and their parents fights to free them
While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, white southerners established a system of apprenticeship after the Civil War that entrapped Black children and their families, leading to undue hardships for generations to come. In Slavery After Slavery, historian Mary Frances Berry traces the stories behind individual cases from southern supreme courts to demonstrate how formerly enslaved families and their descendants were systemically injured through white supremacist practices, perpetuated by the legal system.
By filling in the family trees of formerly enslaved people to their descendants, Berry documents the intergenerational harm they experienced. The resulting damage of trafficking Black children through apprenticeship laws has been a largely overlooked source of inequality, yet these cases provide specific examples of the kind of economic and physical harm Black families have endured.
Slavery After Slavery tells individual stories, but the fates of their descendants tell our collective American story—contributing powerfully to a case for reparations and restorative justice.
- Octavia E. Butler: Lilith's Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy (LOA #393): Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago
Octavia E. Butler: Lilith's Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy (LOA #393): Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago
Octavia E. Butler
$40.00For the first time in a deluxe, hardcover collector's edition, the landmark post-apocalyptic trilogy from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and “Bloodchild”
From the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and “Bloodchild,” here in its spellbinding entirety is Octavia E. Butler’s epic of human survival and transformation. Conceived against a backdrop of Reagan-era nuclear brinksmanship, Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy—a classic of Afrofuturist speculative fiction—offers profound reflections on race, biology, colonialism, resistance, consent, sexuality, community, hybridity, technology, power, and the future of humankind.
At the beginning of Dawn, Butler’s heroine Lilith Iyapo is awakened in a white cell, after centuries of suspended animation. She is a survivor, as is gradually revealed, of a nuclear apocalypse—and is now being healed, aboard an alien spaceship, by the terrifying and yet awe-inspiring Oankali. Searching the galaxy for new combinations of genes and DNA to acquire and trade, these advanced, uncanny beings are drawn to Lilith’s cancer, which will give them new powers: but should she, and the few of her kind that remain, agree to become one with their extraterrestrial saviors?
Adulthood Rites tells the story of Lilith’s son, Akin, as he comes of age on a newly repopulated Earth. A “construct”—part-human, and part-Oankali—he is raised among human “resisters,” who live apart from Oankali technology. Negotiating the complexities of interspecies politics and his own hybrid identity, he emerges as a leader, forging a new path on Mars for the human/Oankali future.
Imago follows another of Lilith’s hybrid progeny, Jodahs, through the jungles of a regenerating Earth. Raised as a male child, he discovers in his adolescence that he is becoming the first part-human ooloi, a member of the Oankali’s shapeshifting, astonishingly powerful and perceptive third sex—a discovery with intense personal and planetary consequences.
Continuing the Library of America’s definitive edition of Butler’s works, this volume offers authoritative texts of the novels, helpful notes, and a chronology of Butler's life and career.
- Minor Black Figures: A Novel
Minor Black Figures: A Novel
Brandon Taylor
$29.00From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling author: a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity
A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life.
As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.
- PRE-ORDER: Humboldt Cut
PRE-ORDER: Humboldt Cut
Allison Mick
$28.00PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON January 27, 2026.
Jordan Peele and Jeff Vandermeer meet The Overstory in comedy writer Allison Mick’s darkly humorous debut eco-horror novel, as a Black woman returns home to the redwood forests of northern California, only to unearth the monsters that lurk among the trees…
Jasmine Bay is a nurse for an Oakland mental health facility, battling her own demons, caught in a spiral of suicidal despair. Estranged from her brother James and his wife Tilly, who was once her best friend, Jas has chosen self-isolation to protect herself—even if it means denying herself a hopeful future with co-worker and potential love interest Henry Lewis.
When her godmother dies, Jas returns to Redceder for the funeral, a logging town where her grandfather William Whipple made a living deforesting the countryside, ripping and raping apart nature’s very foundations for corporate profits. As trees fell to axes and chainsaws, so did dozens of lumberjacks, falling prey to the dangers of their job—and to the ecoterrorism of Jas’s grandfather who was lynched for his crimes.
And buried in the haunted woods are even more dark secrets perpetrated by Jas’s family. Unnatural acts giving birth to entities made of human flesh and petrified bark, seeking to avenge the devastation that ravaged their land. It is an inheritance that threatens to consume the remnants of Jas’s family, and her very sanity. . .
Celebrated comedy writer Allison Mick’s Humboldt Cut exposes the traumatic costs of environmental destruction in an energetic, darkly humorous horror adventure that combines the botanical terrors of VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the psychological horror of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones with a dash of Jordan Peele.
- PRE-ORDER: Murder from A to Z (Mystery Bookshop)
PRE-ORDER: Murder from A to Z (Mystery Bookshop)
V.M. Burns
$17.95PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON January 27, 2026.
When Michigan bookshop owner and mystery writer Samantha Washington and her sister, Jenna, agreed to host a class for seniors on estate planning, they didn’t plan on discovering shady doings at Shady Acres Retirement Village . . .
Nana Jo has volunteered her lawyer granddaughter, Jenna, to teach estate planning to retirees—with Sam providing her bookshop as the venue. But during the seminar, entitled Getting Your Ducks in Order, it quickly becomes clear someone’s up to Fowl Play. When elderly Alva Tarkington, accompanied by her niece, sits down for a consultation, Sam realizes the woman’s frequent blinking is actually Morse Code—S.O.S. The sisters get her alone, and Alva tells them she believes her life is in danger and must change her will . . .
Unfortunately, Alva is found dead the next day—seemingly from natural causes. But Nana Jo and the sisters suspect otherwise. In between penning her latest historical mystery, set in 1939 as England declares war on Germany and Lady Elizabeth Marsh pursues stolen paintings and a traitor, Sam teams up with the senior sleuths of Shady Acres to search for motives—beginning with Alva’s family. They soon learn not everyone is who they say they are, and someone is more than qualified to teach a class on cold-blooded murder . . .
- PRE-ORDER: Futility
PRE-ORDER: Futility
Nuzo Onoh
$18.99PRE-ORDER: On Sale: October 21, 2025
For readers of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer and Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family, this is a monstrous, gleeful, bitingly funny tale of murder, body-swapping and bloody vengeance from the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award® for Lifetime Achievement and ‘Queen of African Horror’.
Betrayed by the men in their lives, two women seethe with rage and bitterness. When a trickster spirit offers them the gift of revenge, they cannot resist.
Chia runs one of the best restaurants in Abuja, Nigeria, and is renowned among the male clientele for her captivating beauty and delicious hot pepper soup. But her hot pepper soup has a secret ingredient, and her beauty is not what it seems.
Claire is a 50 year-old British woman living in Abuja with her young Nigerian boyfriend and his beautiful cousin, Shadé. Consumed by jealousy and resentment, Claire’s carefully organised life spirals into chaos after a night out at Chia’s infamous restaurant.
Crackling with wit, this is a blood-soaked, expletive-laden, vengeance-filled horror story. Satirical, twisty and murderous, this is bloody, deadly fun from a writer at the top of her game.
- PRE-ORDER: Forever for the Culture: Notes from the New Black Digital Arts Renaissance
PRE-ORDER: Forever for the Culture: Notes from the New Black Digital Arts Renaissance
Steven Underwood
$28.95PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON January 27, 2026.
THE CURATORS OF CULTURE: Celebrate Black digital art in this essay collection revealing how Black artists have shaped everything from TikTok dances to viral memes
Steven Underwood digs into the current Black digital arts movement that has shaped popular culture for the last decade. He connects this current space to historical influences, speaking to a “legacy of audacity and daring that presented us with the opportunity to redirect the conversations on Blackness back on its center. Back to Black people.” Written as a collection of thought-provoking essays pulling in social commentary, interviews, popular culture, and deep research, Underwood taps into a topic that is incredibly relevant but often unknown.
The nature of the internet is so ephemeral that sometimes we forget when we do something worth celebrating. For Black people particularly, that’s unforgiveable. Digital Black art has become increasingly more outspoken, introspective, and genre-defining. But it’s also vulnerable. Original phrases, tweets, dances, songs, and other content are often taken from a Black artist and attributed to a white influencer. And Black creators are paid less for their work, though their engagement is often higher than that of their white peers. There is also the added risk of backlash and hate that comes with publicly existing online. As an award-winning writer with a popular online presence, Underwood is no stranger to the experiences of Black digital artists. Using his own personal stories, he highlights the beauty, vulnerability, and innovation of the Black digital arts movement.
Shining a light on the curators of our culture, Forever for the Culture narratively follows the construction of a new Black art movement and how creators have defined a community when that community does not have a physical space.
- PRE-ORDER: Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past
PRE-ORDER: Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past
Dorothy A. Brown
$30.00PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON January 20, 2026.
A bold manifesto arguing that there is a clear precedent for paying reparations to atone for America’s original sin of slavery, offering a compelling legal strategy to achieve this goal—from the acclaimed author of The Whiteness of Wealth.
The idea of reparations is not a new or original one; it is one that is baked into American history.
When the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862 went into effect, wealthy slaveowners like Margaret Barber were compensated for the loss of their enslaved workers. Barber received $9,000—an equivalent to $250,000 today. When a group of Italian immigrants were lynched in 1892, President Harrison compensated Italy a total of $25,000 for their deaths—an equivalent to almost $766,000 today. The Indian Claims Commission, an arm of the federal government, paid Indigenous Americans $818 million for underhandedly stealing their land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—an equivalent to almost $350 billion today.
Dorothy A. Brown addresses the glaring question: if reparations can be achieved for others, why not for Black Americans? If lynching can be remedied for Italian immigrants, and slaveholders compensated for losses associated with abolition and emancipation, then the government’s failure to provide such remedies to Black communities harmed by similar violence, loss, and destruction is long overdue. The fight for reparations is truly a fight for the soul of America, to produce the country our founding fathers idealized but never achieved.
Getting to Reparations makes a logical and necessary case for reparations for Black Americans. It lays out a path as to how we might achieve this, built on the frameworks used throughout U.S. history by the government to pay restitution. It is now time to do the same for America's Black population.
- PRE-ORDER: Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem
PRE-ORDER: Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem
Maya Angelou
$19.99PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON October 21, 2025.
This dazzling Christmas poem by Maya Angelou is powerful and inspiring for people of all faiths.
In this beautiful, deeply moving poem, Maya Angelou inspires us to embrace the peace and promise of Christmas, so that hope and love can once again light up our holidays and the world. “Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers, look heavenward,” she writes, “and speak the word aloud. Peace.”
Read by the poet at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree at the White House on December 1, 2005, Maya Angelou’ s celebration of the “Glad Season” is a radiant affirmation of the goodness of life.
- PRE-ORDER: A Rainbow in the Cloud: A Coloring Book Featuring the Wit and Wisdom of Maya Angelou
PRE-ORDER: A Rainbow in the Cloud: A Coloring Book Featuring the Wit and Wisdom of Maya Angelou
Caged Bird Legacy
$18.00PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON January 6, 2026.
Maya Angelou's wit and wisdom come to life in this 96-page coloring book celebrating her phenomenal way with words and her indomitable spirit.
"All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart."
Now you can meditate on the encouraging words of Dr. Maya Angelou as you align your own color techniques to her brilliant literary art.
Need a bit of courage? Dr. Angelou would say, "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them."
Need a little rainbow on a stormy day? Spending time coloring in, "We need joy as we need air," might infuse just the right amount of light into your circumstances.
Feeling lonely? Dr. Angelou's famous quote may be just the balm for you: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
Each of these 45 gorgeous illustrations offers a canvas for inspiration, drawn onto luxe paper stock perfect for your select artist tools and packaged in a 9.75" x 9.75" trade paperback package--easy to transport anywhere you might need the wordsmith's sage advice to back you up. - Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems
Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems
Cheryl Clarke
$29.00A new retrospective of a titan of LGBTQ literature, activism, and Black feminism
Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.
Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors.
- Weight in Space
Weight in Space
Thaddeus Mosley
$80.00Using traditional techniques such as direct carving and lost-wax casting, Mosley's early works in wood and later works in bronze enter into a dance between the organic and manmade
Born in 1926 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Mosley has made sculptures from wood for over six and a half decades from his home in Pittsburgh. Using only a chisel and gauge to maintain the integrity of the original log, Mosley reworks salvaged timber into monumental abstractions. Through a process of direct carving, the artist's marks respond to and rearticulate the natural gradations of the material's surface. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncusi, from Scandinavian design to West African sculpture--Mosley's "sculptural improvisations," as he calls them, also take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. Weight in Space is the most comprehensive monograph on the artist's oeuvre to date. In addition to a detailed chronology, this volume features new scholarship by Fred Moten and Catharina Manchanda, a conversation between Mosley and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and excerpts from an extensive oral history interview conducted by Bridget R. Cooks and Amanda Tewes.
- PRE-ORDER: These Long Shadows: Women's House Museums in the American South
PRE-ORDER: These Long Shadows: Women's House Museums in the American South
Monica Nelson
$35.00PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: January 20, 2026
A gorgeous illustrated meditation on the homes of iconic Southern women, from Nina Simone to Carson McCullers
In These Long Shadows, writer Monica Nelson excavates the domestic narratives and mythologies contained within the publicly preserved homes of some of the American South's leading cultural figures.
In Virginia, readers are drawn into the garden and home of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer and encounter modernist architect Amaza Lee Meredith's International Style residence, Azurest South. Journeying south, they encounter the North Carolinian childhood homes of both influential civil rights activist Anna "Pauli" Murray, and revolutionary singer-songwriter Nina Simone. In Atlanta, readers wander into the apartment of incendiary Southern author Margaret Mitchell. In Louisiana, they gaze upon the quietly profound folk art paintings of Clementine Hunter at Melrose Plantation, and take a pilgrimage to writers' homes from the Southern Renaissance, including Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Carson McCullers.
These Long Shadows assembles a constellation of new visions, narratives and readings with which to examine the nation's ever-metamorphosing historical landscape. Nelson's book constitutes the third volume of The Illustrated America, Atelier Editions' ongoing anthropological survey of eclectic chapters drawn from 20th-century America's cultural past.
Monica Nelson is a writer and graphic designer based in New York and Savannah. She has developed strategic visual narratives for publications, cultural institutions and brands, working with over 100 photographers. She was the founding creative and photo director of Wilder Quarterly, which fostered a floral-drenched view of the natural world, and the author of Edible Flowers (Monacelli Press, 2021). - Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields
Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields
Sara Muthi
$40.00Dedicated to Gilliam's late-career sewn and collaged fabric works, this colorful catalog embraces the artist's restless creativity and visionary approach to abstraction
A pioneering artist who redefined the boundaries of painting, Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) transformed the medium with his radical approach to color, material and space. Sewing Fields focuses on a lesser-known yet crucial period in Gilliam's later career: that of his sewn and collaged works. His residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in 1993 reshaped his artistic practice. Far from his Washington, DC, studio, Gilliam embraced new materials, working with pre-stained fabrics that he shipped to Ireland, cutting and layering them into sculptural compositions. A collaboration with a local dressmaker further expanded his process, reinforcing his innovative fusion of painting and textile techniques. Sewing Fields brings these groundbreaking works back to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, nearly 50 years after Gilliam's first Dublin exhibition, positioning him within a broader transatlantic dialogue on abstraction.
- PRE-ORDER: Queer Histories
PRE-ORDER: Queer Histories
Adriano Pedrosa
$75.00PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: November 18, 2025
A chromatic celebration of LGBTQIA+ artists, queer and trans activisms and the "queering" of history, with works by Andrea Geyer, Claude Cahun, Félix González-Torres, Martin Wong, Peter Hujar, Roberto Burle Marx and many more
Since 2016, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) has centered its exhibition program on exploring different histories, with each year featuring a large-scale, international and transhistorical group exhibition, paired with an exquisitely produced catalog. Following the bestselling titles Afro-Atlantic Histories and Indigenous Histories, Queer Histories is the next chapter in this cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary survey series exploring underrepresented or marginalized narratives.
Gathering more than 200 artworks from public and private collections in Brazil and abroad, Queer Histories is organized into seven sections: "Love, family and communities," "The sacred and the profane," "Signs and spaces," "Activism and archives," "Survival," "Queer Abstraction" and "Visibility." While many of the artists featured in Queer Histories are working in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its profound impact on queer and trans communities, the exhibition goes beyond artists who identify as LGBTQIA+, approaching queerness as a lens through which to reinterpret the world, to queer history and to reclaim erased narratives. This compendium is a critical resource for understanding how art and history continue to function as sites of resistance and transformation in LGBTQIA+ lives.
Artists include: Andrea Geyer, Andy Warhol, Beverly Buchanan, Catherine Opie, Claude Cahun, David Wojnarowicz, Etel Adnan, Félix González-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Kia LaBeija, Leonilson, Martin Wong, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Peter Hujar, Roberto Burle Marx, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Salman Toor, Tseng Kwong Chi, Tuesday Smillie, Yuki Kihara, Zanele Muholi. - PRE-ORDER: Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
PRE-ORDER: Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Kerry James Marshall
$55.00PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: November 25, 2025
Accompanying the largest UK survey to date of work by the legendary Chicago-based figurative painter
This volume is the most extensive publication on Kerry James Marshall to date, celebrating half a century of his work. It reveals the complex ways in which Marshall has transformed histories of Western painting, centering Black bodies in ambitious compositions set in barber shops, public housing projects, parks and beauty salons. It charts his use of portraiture to memorialize individuals such as Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman and Olaudah Equiano. A new series, illustrated here for the first time, looks at under-acknowledged aspects of the history of Africa. With lavish illustrations of all the works in the accompanying exhibition, the book also includes chapters on Marshall's Rythm Mastr project and his various public commissions, including his stained-glass windows for the cathedral in Washington, DC. A survey by Mark Godfrey is accompanied by shorter essays by Aria Dean, Darby English and others, plus an interview between Kerry James Marshall and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, and later moved to Los Angeles. He taught painting for many years at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama. In 2017, Marshall was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, is currently working with Marshall to create two new stained-glass windows. Marshall lives and works in Chicago. - Pastor E. F. Ledbetter and The Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, 1953
Pastor E. F. Ledbetter and The Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, 1953
Gordon Parks
Sold outIn 1953, Gordon Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life magazine to photograph the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church for a series on American religious life. After the success of his recent work for Life, Parks approached the Near West Side church with a decisive eye toward composing compelling images that conveyed simultaneously the universal humanity and local specificity of the religious community. This would be the first assignment for which he was both writer as well as photographer. His photographs and essay were never published by Life, yet as this book demonstrates, Parks’ visual and textual representation of Black religious life powerfully documents the dynamism of a community shaped by the Great Migration and Chicago’s industrial landscape. Parks embarked on a significant chapter of his aesthetic and conceptual development through his engagement with the pastor, the Reverend Ernest F. Ledbetter, Sr., and the members of his church. This publication features more than 65 previously unpublished photographs and contact sheets, complemented by Parks’ unseen manuscript and ephemeral material from the private collection of the Ledbetter family. A range of scholarly essays provides further insight and contextual analysis in art history, cultural geography, Black religious studies, and creative writing. Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard University, Washington DC
- PRE-ORDER: Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination
PRE-ORDER: Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination
Oluremi C. Onabanjo
$60.00PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: December 23, 2025
A rich examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea
At a moment of profound change marked by decolonization and the civil rights period of the mid-20th century, photographers across Africa and the African diaspora used the photographic portrait in order to fuel incipient ideas of Africa. Published in conjunction with a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination charts international histories of resistance and liberation up to the present day in order to contend with the construction of Africa as a political idea, and the tools that artists used to forge it.
Featuring more than 100 photographs by renowned artists of the time, such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Jean Depara, and by contemporary artists of African descent, such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, this richly illustrated publication explores modes of Pan-African possibility in powerful images of everyday people, where the personal was undeniably political. With an introduction by curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, excerpts from landmark texts by V.Y. Mudimbe and Brent Hayes Edwards, and a conversation between Yasmina Price and Momtaza Mehri, Ideas of Africa highlights the potential of the photographic portrait as both a creative endeavor and political mechanism.
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