"A much-needed resource for women's health"--Uché Blackstock, MD, author of New York Times bestseller Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

Are you dealing with uterine pain, heavy bleeding, fibroids, or endometriosis? Take your power and your health back with this comprehensive, inclusive and accessible guide to uterine health, and should you need it, hysterectomy.

After years of dealing with pelvic pain--whether from fibroids, endometriosis, or another issue--your doctor has recommended a hysterectomy. Perhaps those are words you'd never thought you'd hear. Perhaps the suggestion is a relief; perhaps it brings up all sorts of concerns--questions about the surgical process, the recovery period, and even about your own mental health as you weigh your options. In this offering from board certified obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Kameelah Phillips, you'll find a comprehensive, evidenced-based, and empowering guide that you need to read before making a life-changing, irreversible decision about about your future health and well-being. 

The Empowered Hysterectomy is the antidote to the lack of medically sound resources and the overwhelming amount of misinformation surrounding this procedure. In it, you'll find: 
* A primer/refresher on the female anatomy--something many women are out of touch with
* Insights into the origins of the hysterectomy procedure, and the ripple effect it continues to have
* The various conditions (fibroids, endometriosis, ectopic pregnancy, cancer, and other ailments) that may lead to hysterectomy 
* Finding balance between holistic & non-surgical options alongside medical management 
* Advice for gender-affirming hysterectomy
* A complete guide to the surgical and recovery process 

You don't have to make this decision alone! With The Empowered Hysterectomy, you can come to the table prepared and informed about your body and your choices and avoid potential pitfalls in the doctor-patient conversation around treatment options.

A spectacular musical and scientific journey from the Bronx to the cosmic horizon that reveals the astonishing links between jazz, science, Einstein, and Coltrane

More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music.

Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim — The Jazz of Physics reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the "Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics.

The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.

A powerful, incisive reckoning with the impacts of school desegregation that traces four generations of the author’s family to show how the implementation of integration decimated Black school systems and did much of the Black community a disservice

On May 17, 1954 the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Heralded as a massive victory for civil rights, the decision's goal was to give Black children equitable access to educational opportunities and clear a path to a better future. Yet in the years following the ruling, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods were shuttered or saw their funding dwindle, Black educators were fired en masse, and Black children faced discrimination and violence from their white peers as they joined resource-rich schools that were ill-prepared for the influx of new students.

Award-winning interdisciplinary scholar of education and Black history Noliwe Rooks weaves together sociological data and cultural history to challenge the idea that integration was a boon for Black children. She tells the story of her grandparents, who were among the thousands of Black teachers fired following the Brown decision; her father, who was traumatized by his experiences at an almost exclusively-white school; her own experiences moving from a flourishing, racially diverse school to an underserved inner-city one; and finally her son and his Black peers, who over half-century after Brown still struggle with hostility and prejudice from white teachers and students alike. She also shows how present-day discrimination lawsuits directly stem from the mistakes made during integration.

At once assiduously researched and deeply engaging, Integrated tells the story of how education has remained both a tool for community progress and a seemingly inscrutable cultural puzzle. Rooks' deft hand turns the story of integration's past and future on it's head, and shows how we may better understand and support generations of students to come.

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

An essential exploration of the overlooked impact of disordered eating among Black women—and a prescriptive road map to returning to peace and wholeness within our bodies, from the clinical therapist who founded Black and Embodied Counseling and Consulting PLLC

Food has always been a political tool for the oppressor. And the body, especially the Black body, has always been one of its many battlegrounds.

Licensed mental health therapist, somatic healer, and eating disorder specialist Alishia McCullough understands that for far too many Black women, the myriad effects of racial trauma have disrupted their most essential relationship: the one they have with their bodies—and by extension, with their food. African Americans are disproportionately impacted by disordered eating behaviors, yet their experiences are frequently overlooked by doctors and mental health experts. As a result, entire communities—our most vulnerable communities—are forced to navigate systems that are already primed to dismiss their needs, leaving them without proper care, or often even the language they need to identify what’s wrong.

McCullough’s groundbreaking work radically validates the lived experiences and generational traumas of BIPOC communities. As part of a steadily growing movement among clinicians to “decolonize therapy,” McCullough rejects the patriarchal, white supremacist mindset that has dominated the field, and instead embraces a more integrated approach that seeks to understand disordered eating patterns by examining the psychological wounds left by centuries of racism.

Weaving together crucial history, compelling client stories, guided practice, and McCullough’s own experiences with disordered eating behaviors, Reclaiming the Black Body is a revealing, potentially life-saving book that illuminates the way home, back to the safety and comfort found within our bodies.

A science-based, data-driven, and global exploration of racial disparities in health care access by virologist, immunologist, and science journalist Layal Liverpool; In the spirit of ambitious bestselling books like Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body. The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that viruses disproportionately affect people of color. Here, Layal Liverpool goes a step further to show that this disparity exists for all types of illness and that it is caused by racism. Liverpool will show how racism is woven, invisibly, not just into the structure of medicine and science but into our very bodies. Refuting the false belief that there are biological differences between races, Liverpool goes on to show that racial stereotyping and trauma can however lead to biological changes that make people of color more vulnerable to illness. Systemic tackles: * The problem of racial bias and data gaps in medicine where the default human subject is white * The dangerous health consequences of systemic racism, from the physical and psychological effects of daily micro- and macro-aggressions to intergenerational trauma * The fatal stereotypes that keep people of color undiagnosed, untreated, and unsafe * How we can fix these problems by confronting bias and closing the data gap Using data-driven science, Layal Liverpool shows that racism itself can have biological consequences on the body.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package. 

Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage—all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.

For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

A revelatory account of a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. And it is also a powerful reflection on what is broken in America—but also what might heal and make it whole again.

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A guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.

From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.

A leading figure in the movement to decolonize design, Dori Tunstall uses hard-hitting real-life examples and case studies drawn from over fifteen years of working to transform institutions to better reflect the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities. Her book is at once enlightening, inspiring, and practical, interweaving her lived experiences with extensive research to show what decolonizing design means, how it heals, and how to practice it in our institutions today.

For leaders and practitioners in design institutions and communities, Tunstall’s work demonstrates how we can transform the way we imagine and remake the world, replacing pain and repression with equity, inclusion, and diversity—in short, she shows us how to realize the infinite possibilities that decolonized design represents.

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Award-winning viral curator and poet Natasha Marin follows up her acclaimed Black Imagination with a brilliant new collection of sharply rendered, breathtaking reflections from more than one hundred Black voices.

When do you feel most indigenous?
What does it sound like when you claim yourself?
When do you feel most powerful?

Black Powerful explores the monumental resilience, joy, and triumph of Black People everywhere.

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One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction

In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.

America’s first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last—an opportunity to choose hope over fear.

A persuasive primer on police abolition from two veteran organizers

“One of the world’s most prominent advocates, organizers and political educators of the [abolitionist] framework.” —NBCNews.com on Mariame Kaba

In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn’t stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens.

Centering survivors of state, interpersonal, and community-based violence, and highlighting uprisings, campaigns, and community-based projects, No More Police makes a compelling case for a world where the tools required to prevent, interrupt, and transform violence in all its forms are abundant. Part handbook, part road map, No More Police calls on us to turn away from systems that perpetrate violence in the name of ending it toward a world where violence is the exception, and safe, well-resourced and thriving communities are the rule.

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Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. 2019 Over the Rainbow Booklist Selection for Nonfiction. Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes. SISTER LOVE: THE LETTERS OF AUDRE LORDE AND PAT PARKER 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. SISTER LOVE is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

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In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.

Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Florida native Zora Neale Hurston's early twentieth-century ethnographic research and writing emphasizes the essentials of food in Florida through simple dishes and recipes.

It considers foods prepared for everyday meals as well as special occasions and looks at what shaped people's eating traditions in early twentieth-century Florida. Hurston did for Florida what William Faulkner did for Mississippi - provided insight into a state's history and culture through various styles of writing. Her collected food stories, folklore and remedies, and the related recipes food professor Fred Opie pairs with them, are essential reading for those who love to cook and eat.

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An illustrated highlight reel of more than 100 women in rap who have helped shape the genre and eschewed gender norms in the process
 
The Motherlode highlights more than 100 women who have shaped the power, scope, and reach of rap music, including pioneers like Roxanne Shanté, game changers like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott, and current reigning queens like Nicki Minaj,  Cardi B, and Lizzo—as well as everyone who came before, after, and in between. Some of these women were respected but not widely celebrated. Some are impossible not to know. Some of these women have stood on their own; others were forced into templates, compelled to stand beside men in big rap crews. Some have been trapped in a strange critical space between respected MC and object. They are characters, caricatures, lyricists, at times both feminine and explicit. This book profiles each of these women, their musical and career breakthroughs, and the ways in which they each helped change the culture of rap.

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A call to action for consumers everywhere, Consumed asks us to look at how and why we buy what we buy, how it's created, who it benefits, and how we can solve the problems created by a wasteful system. 

We live in a world of stuff. We dispose of most of it in as little as six months after we receive it. The byproducts of our quest to consume are creating an environmental crisis. Aja Barber wants to change this--and you can, too. 
 

In Consumed, Barber calls for change within an industry that regularly overreaches with abandon, creating real imbalances in the environment and the lives of those who do the work—often in unsafe conditions for very low pay—and the billionaires who receive the most profit. A story told in two parts, Barber exposes the endemic injustices in our consumer industries and the uncomfortable history of the textile industry, one which brokered slavery, racism, and today’s wealth inequality. Once the layers are peeled back, Barber invites you to participate in unlearning, to understand the truth behind why we consume in the way that we do, to confront the uncomfortable feeling that we are never quite enough and why we fill that void with consumption rather than compassion. Barber challenges us to challenge the system and our role in it. The less you buy into the consumer culture, the more power you have. Consumed will teach you how to be a citizen and not a consumer. 

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A riveting examination of racial violence in America that occurred in the late-1800s. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, by Ida B. Wells, is an exemplary investigative report that details a wave of brutal murders plaguing African Americans, particularly in the South.

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From microaggressions to the wage gap, The Memo empowers women of color with actionable advice on challenges and offers a clear path to success.

Most business books provide a one-size-fits-all approach to career advice that overlooks the unique barriers that women of color face. In The Memo, Minda Harts offers a much-needed career guide tailored specifically for women of color.

Drawing on knowledge gained from her past career as a fundraising consultant to top colleges across the country, Harts now brings her powerhouse entrepreneurial experience as CEO of The Memo to the page. With wit and candor, she acknowledges "ugly truths" that keep women of color from having a seat at the table in corporate America. Providing straight talk on how to navigate networking, office politics, and money, while showing how to make real change to the system, The Memo offers support and long-overdue advice on how women of color can succeed in their careers.

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From comedian Quinta Brunson comes a deeply personal and funny collection of essays about trying to make it when you're struggling, the importance of staying true to your roots, and how she's redefined humor online.

Quinta Brunson is a master at breaking the internet. Before having any traditional background in media, her humorous videos were the first to go viral on Instagram’s platform. From there, Brunson’s wryly observant POV helped cement her status in the comedy world at large, with roles on HBO, Netflix, ABC, Adult Swim, BuzzFeed, the CW, and Comedy Central. Now, Brunson is bringing her comedic chops to the page in She Memes Well, an earnest, laugh-out-loud collection about this unusual road to notoriety.

In her debut essay collection, Quinta applies her trademark humor and heart to discuss what it was like to go from a girl who loved the World Wide Web to a girl whose face launched a thousand memes. With anecdotes that range from the ridiculous—like the time she decided to go clubbing wearing an outfit she describes as "Gary Coleman meets metrosexual pirate"—to more heartfelt material about her struggles with depression, Quinta's voice is entirely authentic and eminently readable. With its intimate tone and hilarious moments, She Memes Well will make you feel as if you're sitting down with your chillest, funniest friend.

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Change the way you think about cooking! In this epic guide to better eating, the chef, recipe developer, and video producer Sohla El-Waylly reimagines what a cookbook can be, teaching home cooks of all skill levels how cooking really works.

“The book I wish someone had handed me when I began my own journey as a cook.”—from the Foreword by Samin Nosrat

A practical, information-packed, and transformative guide to becoming a better cook and conquering the kitchen, Start Here is a must-have master class in leveling up your cooking.
Across a dozen technique-themed chapters—from “Temperature Management 101” and “Break it Down & Get Saucy” to “Go to Brown Town,” “All About Butter,” and “Getting to Know Dough”—Sohla El-Waylly explains the hows and whys of cooking, introducing the fundamental skills that you need to become a more intuitive, inventive cook.

A one-stop resource, regardless of what you’re hungry for, Start Here gives equal weight to savory and sweet dishes, with more than two hundred mouthwatering recipes, including:

• Crispy-Skinned Salmon with Radishes & Nuoc Cham
• Charred Lemon Risotto
• Chilled Green Tahini Soba
• Lemon, Pecorino & Potato Pizza
• Fruity-Doodle Cookies
• Masa & Buttermilk Tres Leches

A fiercely candid, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking blend of memoir and self-help on vulnerability, identity, and reclaiming your life

What if you didn't need Bali to find yourself? For 14 years, Traci Saulsberry led communications at NBC, becoming one of the youngest Black executives at the company. She had everything a modern woman is told to want―the house, her son, the high-powered job.

But when her carefully constructed life collapsed, Saulsberry was confronted with a question she'd been avoiding for years: Who was she, really?

Here I was, caught on my heels, with no backup lover to pick up the slack. Naturally, because I am a product of an adolescence spent binging rom-coms filled with sweeping tales, I wanted to run away and leave it all behind. I romanticized that there must be a flight to the farthest island on the edge of the world where I could just start over again. My archnemesis, reality, quickly snapped me out of that daydream. I wasn't going anywhere. I felt trapped.

This Is How You Love Her is a vulnerable narrative guide to uncovering your identity in life's small moments, right where you are. With wit and insight, heart and cinematic prose, Saulsberry weaves together pages from her journal, conversational guides, poetry, and reflection prompts in this memoir-meets-guide that gives readers permission to get to know themselves at their own pace.

For anyone who's ever lost themselves in work, relationships, or the image they built to survive―this is your roadmap home.

And this is how you love her.

Perfect for fans of memoirs, self-help, and journaling, this book explores:

* Perfection: Unlearning the belief that you’re not allowed to get it wrong
* Body Autonomy: Reclaiming your body  and learning to be present in your own skin
* Boundaries: Setting limits with the people you love most, even when it means risking the relationship
* Control: Releasing the need to manage everyone's perception and trusting yourself to just be

This standout creative nonfiction debut explores the lives and histories of plants considered nonnative or invasive as metaphors for the Black experience in America.

In Tending the Vines, Ashia S. Ajani illuminates how eight unique plants tell the story of the Black diaspora in America. Each chapter is a deep dive into one plant―including eucalyptus, passionflower, wild mustard, and kudzu―exploring their significance in African tradition, their role through the Middle Passage and Chattel Slavery, and their enduring importance in modern households and communities.

Tending the Vines unpacks the complex rhetorical lives of these plants, most of which have been used as both ugly metaphors for Black incursion as well as powerful symbols for Black liberation. It also highlights the ethnobotanical uses that have sustained displaced populations for centuries. Throughout, Ajani complicates our notions of “invasive” and belonging, by contextualizing how plants move, are moved, and, of course, move us.

An expansive lexicon of words, terms, concepts, and ideas that takes the multiplicity of Black life as its point of departure.

Thinking from Black: A Lexicon is an unusual reference book. Its contributors―the Practicing Refusal Collective―are visual artists, poets, dancers, historians, writers, architects, painters, theorists, activists, anthropologists, filmmakers, educators, and musicians. Each has engaged with the idea of a lexicon of Black living and taken up the invitation to think from Black in relation to their own medium.

Some terms are enunciated in a poetic register―such as Redaction, Seeing, and Song. Some are aspirational―such as Solidarity, Garden, and Care. Some entries, such as BlackSound, Fantasy, Mathematics, and Dispossession, work in a more theoretical idiom. Words such as Gesture and Syncopation are composed of both text and drawings, and summon the body in motion. The word Time, which is defined twice, carries with it musicality, duration, and refusal. Together, these definitions offer a sense of some of the many ways that Black people tend to each other and the world.

Read in relation to each other, the terms create a rich, startling lexicon that is eclectic, elliptical, cross-genre, historical, speculative, and literary―a set of words, phrases, concepts, and ideas that are part of the many languages constituting and animating Black life. Thinking from Black is a book to be read with others, as it was created. It is a book to live and think and act with, in the world.

A classic and controversial critique of sexism in the black nationalist movement, this “landmark black feminist text” is essential reading for those engaged in discussions about feminism and race politics (Ms.)

Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood.
 
With a foreword that examines the debate the book has sparked between intellectuals and political leaders, as well as what has—and, crucially, has not—changed over the last four decades, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman continues to be deeply relevant to current feminist debates and black theory today.

Award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams explores how artists today must respond to systemic violence and injustice―in the words of Paul Robeson, by choosing sides.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is Williams’ clear-eyed exploration of the role of the artist in these times by answering the question: what radicalized you? He answers by examining how his role models―writers and artists, from Amiri Baraka to local musicians in Brazilian bars to Palestinian hip-hop heads―have responded to imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. Riffing on Paul Robeson’s famous declaration, Williams builds a provocative case for why today’s artists cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice. “We need songs that crumble empires,” he writes, “films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship.”

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question, What does poetry have to do with politics?

Over the last decade, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has had a tremendous influence on scholars and activists alike, deeply shaping debates on the place of race within capitalist societies. Is race subsumed by class, with the latter the sine qua non of capitalism? Do race and class act independently within modern societies? Or does capitalism inevitably express a deeper racial impetus in the West? In this, the first book-length discussion of Black Marxism, Nimtz lays out the limits of Robinson’s much-celebrated text, showing it represents a sophisticated, but ultimately flawed, version of Black nationalism. Nimtz defends Marxism from Robinson’s accusations of myopia on matters of race, suggesting that, in charging Marx and Engels with Eurocentrism, he either failed to understand, or misrepresented, their work―and that, in effect, many thinkers inspired by Black Marxism blatantly misrepresented Marxist texts. Especially in his writings about the U.S. Civil War, Marx had far more to say about race than is commonly understood, Nimtz shows.

An authentic Marxism, argues Nimtz, remains the most reliable real-world method for human liberation, not least among peoples of African descent. Speaking for himself as a contemporary of Robinson’s, Nimtz grounds Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique in an account of his own upbringing in New Orleans, and his development throughout the struggles of the 1960s, explaining how and why he came to radically different conclusions. Accessible and engaging,

Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique will be a significant intervention in the race-versus-class debate on the U.S. Left. No doubt, Nimtz’s trenchant critique will generate controversy, highlighting how more possibilities for transracial class alliances exist than ever before―and misguided theories like Robinson’s prevent us from seeing that potential. His detailed rejoinder to Black Marxism is much needed.