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  • Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit

    Deborah G. Plant (Author)

    $15.95
    While most biographies of Hurston take a standard approach to revealing the facts and details of her life, this is the first to look at the role spirituality played in her life and letters. Throughout her fiction, nonfiction, political and social activity, Hurston's spirit shines through, animating all areas of her life. To ignore it is to paint an incomplete picture of a life that carries on through the works she left behind. Plant shows here that Hurston's spirituality helped her to endure the challenges in her life, including chronic ill health, personal and professional setbacks, financial difficulties, and other obstacles that might have crushed a less resilient soul. In revealing this often overlooked area of Hurston's life, Plant offers a more complete biography of this eminent woman of letters.
  • Creep: Accusations and Confessions

    by Myriam Gurba

    $27.00

    Ships in 7-10 business days

    A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.

    A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.

    Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.

    With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.

  • My Seven Black Fathers: A Young Activist's Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole

    by Will Jawando

    $28.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days

    A call to action and a narrative that runs counter to every racist stereotype that thwarts the lives of men of color today.

    Will Jawando tells a deeply affirmative story of hope and respect for men of color at a time when Black men are routinely stigmatized. As a boy growing up outside DC, Will, who went by his Nigerian name, Yemi, was shunted from school to school, never quite fitting in. He was a Black kid with a divorced white mother, a frayed relationship with his biological father, and teachers who scolded him for being disruptive in class and on the playground. Eventually, he became close to Kalfani, a kid he looked up to on the basketball court. Years after he got the call telling him that Kalfani was dead, another sickening casualty of gun violence, Will looks back on the relationships with an extraordinary series of mentors that enabled him to thrive.

    Among them were Mr. Williams, the rare Black male grade school teacher, who found a way to bolster Will’s self-esteem when he discovered he was being bullied; Jay Fletcher, the openly gay colleague of his mother who got him off junk food and took him to his first play; Mr. Holmes, the high school coach and chorus director who saw him through a crushing disappointment; Deen Sanwoola, the businessman who helped him bridge the gap between his American upbringing and his Nigerian heritage, eventually leading to a dramatic reconciliation with his biological father; and President Barack Obama, who made Will his associate director of public engagement at the White House—and who invited him to play basketball on more than one occasion. Without the influence of these men, Will knows he would not be who he is today: a civil rights and education policy attorney, a civic leader, a husband, and a father.

    Drawing on Will’s inspiring personal story and involvement in My Brother’s Keeper, President Obama’s national initiative to address persistent opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color, My Seven Black Fathers offers a transformative way for Black men to shape the next generation.

  • Black Indian: A Memoir

    by Shonda Buchanan

    Sold out

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony--only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, drunks, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance. Buchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe -- a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed -- and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan's nomadic people endured a collective identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three, races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and indentured servants at America's early crossroads is where this powerful journey begins.  Black Indian doesn't have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American's multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one family's history as it can go sometimes, with a bit of discomfort. But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan's search for hers will resonate in anyone who has wondered "maybe there's more than what I'm being told."

  • Hurricanes

    by Rick Ross

    $17.99
    The highly anticipated memoir from hip-hop icon Rick Ross chronicles his coming of age amid Miami’s crack epidemic, his star-studded controversies and his unstoppable rise to fame.

    Rick Ross is an indomitable presence in the music industry, but few people know his full story. Now, for the first time, Ross offers a vivid, dramatic and unexpectedly candid account of his early childhood, his tumultuous adolescence and his dramatic ascendancy in the world of hip-hop.

    Born William Leonard Roberts II, Ross grew up “across the bridge,” in a Miami at odds with the glitzy nightclubs and yachts of South Beach. In the aftermath of the 1980 race riots, he came of age at the height of the city’s crack epidemic. All the while he honed his musical talent, overcoming setback after setback until a song called “Hustlin’” changed his life forever.

    From his first major label deal to the controversies, health scares, arrests and feuds he had to transcend along the way, Hurricanes is a revealing portrait of one of the biggest stars in the rap game and an intimate look at the birth of an artist.
  • The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir

    By Ta-Nehisi Coates

    $17.99
    As a child, Ta-Nehisi Coates was seen by his father, Paul, as too sensitive and lacking focus. Paul Coates was a Vietnam vet who’d been part of the Black Panthers and was dedicated to reading and publishing the history of African civilization. When it came to his sons, he was committed to raising proud Black men equipped to deal with a racist society, during a turbulent period in the collapsing city of Baltimore where they lived.

    Coates details with candor the challenges of dealing with his tough-love father, the influence of his mother, and the dynamics of his extended family, including his brother “Big Bill,” who was on a very different path than Ta-Nehisi. Coates also tells of his struggles at school and with girls, making this a timely story to which many readers will relate.
  • Chasing Me To My Grave

    by Winfred Rembert

    from $22.99

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    An artist’s odyssey from Jim Crow–era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery—a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson.

    Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs.


    During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.


    Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert’s breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia’s Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert’s Black community and the people, including his wife, Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother’s love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.


    Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and paintings that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society

  • Up Home: One Girl's Journey (Ladies for Literacy Guild Only)

    by Ruth J. Simmons

    $27.00

    An inspiring, indelible memoir from the daughter of sharecroppers in East Texas who became the first Black president of an Ivy League University—an uplifting story of girlhood and the power of family, community, and the classroom to transform one young person's life.

    I was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroads in North Houston County in East Texas.

    Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity to light the two crowded rooms, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become one of America’s preeminent educators. The former president of Smith College and Brown University, and now the outgoing president of Prairie View A&M, Texas's oldest HBCU, for decades Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.

    In Up Home, Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are young shape who we become: We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large family with an often empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his youngest daughter's dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child.

    From the farmland of East Texas to Houston's Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity guide her as she creates a place for herself in the world.

  • PRE-ORDER: No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir

    by Sarah LaBrie

    $27.99

    PRE-ORDER.  ON SALE DATE: October 22, 2024

    In this poignant memoir, as candid and indelible as The Glass Castle and Memorial Drive, a writer takes on the conflict between the love that binds us to home and the desire to escape it for good.

    On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness.

    Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can’t finish but can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal.

    Spanning the globe from Houston’s Third Ward to Paris to Tallinn and New York to Los Angeles, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of one woman's attempt to forge a new future through a better understanding of the past.

  • PRE-ORDER: Saturday Night, Sunday Morning: Staying True to Myself from the Pews to the Stage

    by PJ Morton

    $28.00

    PRE-ORDER.  ON SALE DATE: November 12, 2024

    Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, keyboardist for the mega pop band Maroon 5, and founder of Morton Records, PJ Morton details the inspiring journey that led to his unique sound and urges readers to follow their own dreams.

    The son of pastors and gospel artists, PJ Morton grew up singing gospel music in church. As he was drawn to R&B and pop, PJ  experimented in combining genres to create his own sound that record labels struggled to categorize. Despite the pressure to conform, he defied expectations and risked launching his own label, Morton Records, leading to twenty Grammy nominations and awards.

    PJ Morton is the rare artist who has straddled the tensions of life, whether in music or faith expressions, or in racial and cultural identities, while staying true to his New Orleans and Christian roots. Saturday Night, Sunday Morning captures his powerful journey of combining his two worlds, showing readers how to overcome obstacles as they seek their own dreams.

  • Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

    by Héctor Tobar

    $19.00

    A new book by the Pulitzer Prizewinning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.

    "Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.

    Investigating topics that include the US-Mexico border "wall," Frida Kahlo, urban segregation, gangs, queer Latino utopias, and the emergence of the cartel genre in TV and film, Tobar journeys across the country to expose something truer about the meaning of "Latino" in the twenty-first century.

  • PRE-ORDER: Master of Me: A Memoir

    by Keke Palmer

    $27.99

    PRE-ORDER.  ON SALE DATE: November 19, 2024

    From the award-winning, multi-hyphenate global entertainer Keke Palmer comes the inspiring true story of her journey to understanding her genuine value.

    Right when it seemed like all the pieces were coming together and Keke was living her dream life, her world got derailed. She had put in the hard work, she had put in the sweat, her passion and heart had gotten her to where she had always wanted to be, yet she was faced with the hardest challenge yet and was forced to look inward to find an even greater depth and understanding of herself.

    In her own raw and intimate words, Keke talks about everything including her struggles with boundaries, unconditional love, forgiveness, and worthiness. She walks us through how enduring the challenges that come our way leads to true performance, power, and purpose.

    In this exhilarating, deeply poignant, and often laugh-out-loud book, Lauren Keyana Palmer gets real about life, career, and spiritualty. She talks about the tools she has developed to take the reins, harness her vulnerability, and recognize her ownership and mastery over her own life to turn her personal power into major power. With her unique blend of humor, empathy, and truth, Keke details her journey back to herself as she finds a new center within motherhood, career, and relationships.

    They said, "Jack of all Trades, Master of None."
    She said "No, I am the Master.”
    “Of Me."

  • PRE-ORDER: The Half of It: Exploring the Mixed-Race Experience

    by Emma Slade Edmondson, Nicole Ocran

    $30.00

    PRE-ORDER: On sale December 24, 2024

     The world and its politics are becoming ever more polarised, leaving no room for the light and the shade. In The Half of It, Emma and Nicole will explore race and identity through the lens of the mixed race experience, creating a space for discussion and illuminating the true nuances of the mixed-race identity and what this really means.

    In The Half of It, Emma and Nicole, hosts of the critically acclaimed podcast Mixed Up, will discuss what it truly means to be mixed-race and all the different layers that fall into this. They will delve into everything from culture and identity, to interracial relationships, to adoption, to understanding the historical context of mixed-race people – and ultimately culminating in a rounder and deeper appreciation for the mixed-identity.

    They will illuminate us on their own experiences of growing up mixed, interweaving guest interviews and insights from people they talk to along the way.

    Emma and Nicole want to break down barriers and open up a deeper dialogue of the mixed-race experience. Although this was born out of a desire to speak directly to the mixed-race community, they discovered there is something in it for everyone. Whether you are mixed, you know someone mixed, if you have ever considered dating outside of your race, if you’re a parent committed to exposing your child to a more diverse view of the world, or indeed an adult committed to expanding your view of culture and identity – this is for you.

  • PRE-ORDER: My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria (Verso's Southern Questions)

    by Andrée Blouin and Jean Mackellar

    $26.95

    PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: January 7, 2025

    “We who have been colonized can never forget”

    Andrée Blouin—once called the most dangerous woman in Africa—played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and ’60s, advising the postcolonial leaders of Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and Ghana.

    In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary. Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, which she escaped after being forced by nuns into an arranged marriage at fifteen. She later became radicalized by the death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria medication by French officials because he was one-quarter African.

    In Guinea, where Blouin was active in Sékou Touré’s campaign for independence, she came into contact with leaders of the liberation movement in the Belgian Congo. Blouin witnessed the Congolese tragedy up close as an adviser to Patrice Lumumba, whose arrest and assassination she narrates in unforgettable detail.

    Blouin offers a sweeping survey of pan-African nationalism, capturing the intricacies of revolutionary diplomacy, comradeship, and betrayal. Alongside intimate portraits of the movement’s leaders, Blouin provides insights into the often-overlooked contribution of African women in the struggle for independence.

  • PRE-ORDER: Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me

    by Glory Edim

    $28.00

    PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: October 29, 2024

    An inspiring memoir of family, community, and resilience, and an ode to the power of books to help us understand ourselves, from the renowned founder of Well-Read Black Girl.
     
    “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”—Toni Morrison, Beloved
     
    For Glory Edim, that “friend of my mind” is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, eventually reaching a community of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches far back.
     
    Edim’s father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic changes and losses for her family. What became an escape, a safe space, and a second home for her and her brother was their local library. Books were where Edim found community, and as she grew older she discovered authors and ideas that she wasn’t being taught about in class. Reading wherever and whenever she could, be it in her dorm room or when traveling by subway or plane, she found the Black writers whose words would forever change her life: Nikki Giovanni, through children’s poetry cassettes; Maya Angelou, through a critical high school English teacher; Toni Morrison, while attending Morrison’s alma mater, Howard University; Audre Lorde, on a flight to Nigeria. In prose full of both joy and heartbreak, Edim recounts how these writers and so many others taught her how to value herself by helping her to find her own voice when her mother lost hers, to trust her feelings when her father remarried, and to create bonds with other Black women and uplift their stories.
     
    Gather Me is a glowing testament to how the power of representation in literature can gather the disparate parts that make us who we are and assemble them into a portrait of discovery.

  • Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life

    by bell hooks

    $23.00

    “bell hooks’s brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence.” ―Gloria Steinem
    With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writer’s journey in Wounds of Passion. She shares the difficulties and triumphs, the pleasures and the dangers, of a life devoted to writing. hooks lets readers see the ways one woman writer can find her own voice while forging relationships of love in keeping with her feminist thinking. With unflinching courage and hard-won wisdom, hooks reveals the intimate details and provocative ideas of the life path she carved out of words, lighting the way for all writers who would tread in her wake.
    This memoir is an illuminating vision of a writer’s life from one of America’s treasured authors.
    “I love this book. Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us.” ―Maya Angelou

  • Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art

    by Erica N. Cardwell

    $17.95

    A dazzling hybrid of personal memoir and criticism, considering the work of Black visual artists as a means to explore loss, legacy, and the reclamation of life through art.

    At the age of twenty-one, Erica Cardwell finds herself in New York City, reeling from the loss of her mother and numb to the world around her. She turns inward instead, reading books and composing poetry, eventually falling into the work of artists such as Blondell Cummings, Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O’Grady, and Kara Walker. Through them, she communes with her mother’s spirit and legacy, and finds new ways to interrogate her writing and identity.

    Wrong Is Not My Name weaves together autobiography, criticism, and theory, and considers how Black women create alternative, queer, and “hysterical” lives through visual culture and performance. In poetic, interdisciplinary essays—combining analytical and lyrical stream-of-consciousness—Cardwell examines archetypes such as the lascivious Jezebel, the caretaking Mammy, and the elusive Sapphire to formulate new and inventive ways to write about art.

    Pioneering and inquisitive, Wrong Is Not My Name celebrates Black womanhood, and illuminates the ways in which art and storytelling reside at the core of being human.

  • I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations with My Psychiatrist

    by Baek Sehee, Anton Hur

    $26.99

    The sequel to the internationally bestselling South Korean therapy memoir, translated by National Book Award finalist Anton Hur.

    Whenever depression or emptiness came calling, I was all too eager to open the door of self-pity and go right inside.

    Baek Sehee started recording her sessions with her psychiatrist because she hoped to create a guide for herself. She never imagined her reflections would reach so many people, especially young people. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki became a runaway bestseller in South Korea, then Indonesia, the U.K., and the U.S., drawing readers with its frank and vulnerable discussions of depression and anxiety.

    Healing is an uneven process. In this second book, Baek's sessions intensify as her inner conflicts become more complex and challenging. Through her dialogues with her psychiatrist and reflective micro-essays following each session, Baek traces the patterns of her anguish, makes progress, weathers setbacks, and shares the revelatory insights that come just when she has almost given up hope.

    I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki offers itself to the social media generation as a book to hold close, a friend who knows that grappling with everyday despair is part of a lifelong journey.

  • The Women

    Hilton Als

    $17.00

    A New York Times Notable Book

    Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.

    Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.

  • Grant Me Vision: A Journey of Family, Faith, and Forgiveness

    by Sabrina Greenlee

    $30.00

    In this extraordinary memoir—a story of hardship, loss, redemption, faith, and ultimately reclaiming your power—Sabrina Greenlee, the mother of NFL star DeAndre Hopkins, shares her experience growing up Black and poor in South Carolina, how she survived domestic violence and coped with the loss of her sight, and how she continued to remain strong even in the face of despair.

    Sabrina Greenlee has known darkness. Born in South Carolina to Black teenaged parents, Sabrina grew up in a family that lacked the means—financial and emotional—to offer her and her two brothers the safety, comfort, and love every child deserves. Growing up Black and poor in the South, she endured years of sexual and domestic violence and suffered tragedy after tragedy, including the death of her younger brother during a drunk driving accident, and surviving another car accident that claimed the life of her one true love. Coupled with the pain of her childhood, she faced crushing heartbreak, including an abusive relationship that endured for years and later, the loss of her sight in a brutal public attack.

    But the trauma that Sabrina experienced and eventually overcame is what makes her life truly remarkable. After years of tremendous setbacks, Sabrina was able to built herself back up again and achieved the kind of life she always dreamed. She became the loving and dependable mother she wished she’d had, raising four children—including star athletes—who attended college and are successful in their chosen fields. She also found the courage to break the silence that enshrouded her life, ending the generational trauma that had damaged her family for generations.

    Grant Me Vision is her riveting story—a memoir of faith and resilience in the face of life’s most difficult challenges. At its heart, it is a story of claiming your power by making peace with your past and finding the faith to have strength even when the future seems hopeless.

  • A Living Remedy: A Memoir

    by Nicole Chung

    $19.99

    A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

    Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * Harper’s Bazaar * Esquire * Booklist * USA Today * Elle * Good Housekeeping * New York Times * Electric Literature * Today

    From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost.

    In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.

    Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.

    When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.

    Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.

  • A Crown of Stories: The Life and Language of Beloved Writer Toni Morrison

    by Carole Boston Weatherford

    $19.99

    From award-winning author Carole Boston Weatherford comes a captivating picture book biography about the incredible life of esteemed author, editor, and activist Toni Morrison, featuring gorgeous illustrations by debut artist Khalif Tahir Thompson.

    How do you tell a story?

    Before Toni Morrison was a Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Prize–winning author, she was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, a little girl in Ohio who was both the only Black child in her first-grade classroom and the only student who was able to read.

    This is the true story of how that young girl learned from her upbringing, surrounded herself with stories, and made a tremendous impact on the world. Toni Morrison’s pen was her sword, and she grew to be a titan of the arts. Her legacy is one that still touches readers to this day.

    Expertly and evocatively told by award-winning author Carole Boston Weatherford, with beautiful painted illustrations by Khalif Tahir Thompson, this is a must-have picture book biography for any collection. It celebrates Toni Morrison’s legacy while inspiring readers to create art, believe in themselves, and strive for greatness.

  • Accordion Eulogies: A Memoir of Music, Migration, and Mexico

    by Noé Álvarez

    $26.00

    Searching, propulsive, and deeply spiritual, Accordion Eulogies is an odyssey to repair a severed family lineage, told through the surprising history of a musical instrument Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: That he had abandoned his family, and had possibly done something awful that put a curse on his descendants. About his grandfather, young Noé was sure of only one thing: That he had played the accordion. Now an adult, reckoning with the legacy of silence surrounding his family’s migration from Mexico, Álvarez resolves both to take up the instrument and to journey into Mexico to discover the grandfather he never knew. Álvarez travels across the US with his accordion, meeting makers and players in cities that range from San Antonio to Boston. He uncovers the story of an instrument that’s been central to classic American genres, but also played a critical role in indigenous Mexican history. Like the accordion itself, Álvarez feels trapped between his roots in Mexico and the U.S. As he tries to make sense of his place in the world—as a father, a son, a musician—he gets closer to uncovering the mystery of his origins.

  • PRE-ORDER: Life Is Not a Straight Line: The Upside of Every Downturn in Business and in Life

    by Ken Chenault

    $35.00

    PRE-ORDER: On Sale April 01, 2025

    The life and times—and values and principles—of Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express, one of the first African Americans to head a Fortune 500 company Ken Chenault’s life confounds stereotypical presumptions about and expectations for a Black American man. Born in Mineola, New York, to a dentist and a hygienist as the civil rights movement began to gather steam, much of his childhood and early adult years unfolded in a modest middle-class setting during the political and social tumult of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the struggle for racial equality, the fight for women’s rights, the rise of the counterculture. Though he was partly informed by these inescapable influences, even then, Chenault displayed an independence of thought. Although he was athletically gifted, he chose to become a student of history, rather than pursue sports, in an effort to conquer his lack of discipline. As a student at Bowdoin and Harvard Law, and early in his career at Bain & Company, he was constantly on the lookout for educational and professional opportunities that were rare for Blacks. Intending to use his talents to champion civil rights, he found himself fighting to demolish the seemingly intractable racial barriers in the worlds of finance and business. So began his storied career at American Express, where he became known for his innovations and zealous adherence to company-building values and principles: the promotion of empathy to enlarge our understanding of one another; the willingness to accept complexity and uncertainty in crafting solutions, while refusing to yield to despair; and encouragement of unfettered but responsible creativity.

  • Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon

    by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall

    $27.95
    Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston’s literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston’s two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston’s popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions.

    Perceptive and original, Ain’t I an Anthropologist is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston’s place in American cultural and intellectual life.

  • Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir

    by Walela Nehanda

    $19.99

    A searing debut YA poetry and essay collection about a Black cancer patient who faces medical racism after being diagnosed with leukemia in their early twenties, for fans of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Laurie Halse Anderson's Shout. When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of "well-meaning" but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online. But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from another realm. Walela's diagnosis becomes a catalyst for their self-realization. As they fill out forms in the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles or travel to therapy in wealthier neighborhoods, they begin to understand that cancer is where all forms of their oppression intersect: Disabled. Fat. Black. Queer. Nonbinary. In Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir, the author details a galvanizing account of their survival despite the U.S. medical system, and of the struggle to face death unafraid.

  • Coretta: The Autobiography of Mrs. Coretta Scott King

    by Coretta Scott King

    $18.99

    Celebrate the life of the extraordinary civil and human rights activist Coretta Scott King with this picture book adaptation of her critically acclaimed adult memoir.

    This is the autobiography of Coretta Scott King—the founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center), the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and a singular twentieth-century American civil and human rights activist. Learn about how a girl born in the segregated Deep South became a global leader at the forefront of the peace movement and an unforgettable champion of social change. Resilience, bravery, and joy lie at the center of this timeless story about fighting for justice against all odds.

  • A Long Way from Home

    by Claude McKay

    $19.99
  • Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr.

    by Marc Andrus

    $17.95
    The never-before-told story of the friendship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh—icons who changed each other and the world

    The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a heartbroken letter to their mutual friend Raphael Gould. He said: "I did not sleep last night. . . . They killed Martin Luther King. They killed us. I am afraid the root of violence is so deep in the heart and mind and manner of this society. They killed him. They killed my hope. I do not know what to say. . . . He made so great an impression in me. This morning I have the impression that I cannot bear the loss." 
     
    Only a few years earlier, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote an open letter to Martin Luther King Jr. as part of his effort to raise awareness and bring peace in Vietnam. There was an unexpected outcome of Nhat Hanh's letter to King: The two men met in 1966 and 1967 and became not only allies in the peace movement, but friends. This friendship between two prophetic figures from different religions and cultures, from countries at war with one another, reached a great depth in a short period of time. Dr. King nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He wrote: "Thich Nhat Hanh is a holy man, for he is humble and devout. He is a scholar of immense intellectual capacity. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity."

    The two men bonded over a vision of the Beloved Community: a vision described recently by Congressman John Lewis as "a nation and world society at peace with itself." It was a concept each knew of because of their membership within the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international peace organization, and that Martin Luther King Jr. had been popularizing through his work for some time. Thich Nhat Hanh, Andrus shows, took the lineage of the Beloved Community from King and carried it on after his death. 

    In Brothers in the Beloved Community, Marc Andrus tells the little-known story of a friendship between two giants of our time.
  • Dear Cis(gender) People: A Guide to Allyship and Empathy

    by Kenny Ethan Jones

    $24.99

    A powerful call to arms to empower cisgender people to be better allies, blending memoir, detailed research, and interviews.

    The trans experience is all too often the subject of fierce debate in the media and online. While we’re having more and more conversations about the trans experience, the stark reality is that hate crimes against the trans community have quadrupled over the past five years and that two in five trans young people have attempted suicide.  

    But behind the shock headlines and the distressing statistics, what does it really mean to be trans?

    In this powerful, extensively researched, and deeply personal book, Kenny Ethan Jones, a trans activist and writer, offers an authentic and in-depth insight into the trans experience. From gender dysphoria to surgery, from being outed to finding love and considering parenthood, Kenny Ethan Jones draws on his own life and the stories of others from the trans and nonbinary communities to create discussion around the complexities and reality of the trans experiences in today’s society.

    Dear Cis(Gender) People is a powerful call to arms, equipping people of every gender with the tools to step forward as allies in order to bring about meaningful change. Through acting and speaking out, we can create a safer, fairer world for trans people—a world in which all of us can exist as our most authentic selves and celebrate who we are without fear.

  • Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance

    by Francesca Royster

    $26.00

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides

    As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.

    Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

  • The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
    $17.00

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.

    In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. 

    Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?

    That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.

    Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

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