NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “With a thoughtfully curated series of essays, poetry, and conversations, the brilliant scientist and climate expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has assembled a group of dynamic people who are willing to imagine what seems impossible, and articulate those visions with enthusiastic clarity.”—Roxane Gay

Our climate future is not yet written. What if we act as if we love the future?

A SMITHSONIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.

Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.

If you haven’t yet been able to picture a transformed and replenished world—or to see yourself, your loved ones, and your community in it—this book is for you. If you haven’t yet found your role in shaping this new world or you’re not sure how we can actually get there, this book is for you.

With grace, humor, and humanity, Johnson invites readers to ask and answer this ultimate question together: What if we get it right?

On possibility and transformation with:
Paola Antonelli • Xiye Bastida • Jade Begay • Wendell Berry • Régine Clément • Steve Connell • Erica Deeman • Abigail Dillen • Brian Donahue • Jean Flemma • Kelly Sims Gallagher • Rhiana Gunn-Wright • Olalekan Jeyifous • Corley Kenna • Bryan C. Lee Jr. • Franklin Leonard • Adam McKay • Bill McKibben • Kate Marvel • Samantha Montano • Kate Orff • Leah Penniman • Marge Piercy • Colette Pichon Battle • Kendra Pierre-Louis • Judith D. Schwartz • Jigar Shah • Ayisha Siddiqa • Bren Smith • Oana Stănescu • Mustafa Suleyman • Jacqueline Woodson

From the beloved Today show host Sheinelle Jones comes an inspiring collection of heartfelt life-lessons from hard working moms who raised some of our favorite celebrities.

When Sheinelle Jones launched “Through Mom’s Eyes,” a recurring Today show segment interviewing celebrities’ mothers about raising successful kids, she had an ulterior motive—she wanted to bring all their wisdom to bear on raising her own three children. So she asked Lin-Manuel Miranda’s mom about staying present with kids while balancing a demanding career, talked with Lady Gaga’s mom about how to recognize bullying, and got tips from Steph Curry’s mom on making sure even future NBA royalty does his chores. She has since interviewed dozens of remarkable women and gathered a candid, warm, and insightful collection of valuable lessons about life, love, and parenthood.

Now in her first book, Through Mom’s Eyes, Sheinelle is ready to share even more of those life-changing secrets with the world. Combining insights from celebrity mothers with her own journey through modern parenting, Sheinelle reveals how to make it through the hard parts of motherhood and still tap into the joys of it with empathy, generosity, and solidarity. Through Mom’s Eyes is a beautiful celebration of those who are the guiding light for their loved ones—mothers.

Featuring advice from the moms of:
Lady Gaga * Kevin Durant * Matthew McConaughey * Venus and Serena Williams * Lin-Manuel Miranda * Steph Curry * Padma Lakshmi * Tyra Banks * Donnie and Mark Wahlberg * Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski * Jessica and Ashlee Simpson * Shaquille O’Neal * Brandon Maxwell * The Jonas Brothers * Thomas Rhett

Find your joie or joy with this guided journal that brings a Parisian perspective to your everyday life and allows you to tap into the things that bring you gratitude and happiness, from the author of Joie.

While the French may have a reputation for grumpiness, they let nothing get in the way of their joie. They also know joy is not a feeling but something you cultivate. In fact, Parisian author Ajiri Aki reminds us that joy can be found anywhere—you only need to seek it out. Much like a gratitude or mindfulness practice, pursuing joy can put you in a calmer, happier state of mind, by helping you focus on the little things that make you happy in the moment.

Choose one of the twenty-five challenges, make a plan to follow through, and then use the prompts to reflect on the joy that activity brought you. Whether it’s buying yourself flowers, hosting a small gathering, or taking a trip down memory lane, this journal offers small, actionable ways to bring more joy into your life. Once filled, it becomes a reminder of your own joie de vivre that you can look back on whenever you need a boost.

Young Debbie Allen is destined for fame and everyone will know her name! A poetic, uplifting biography of a Black icon for kids ages 5-8.

New York Times best-selling author Tami Charles tells Debbie Allen’s inspiring story of perseverance and growing up during the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow South.

Young Debbie Allen was blocked from the local dance school in the 1950s Jim Crow American South. In order to allow Debbie to pursue her dream, Debbie's mother moved with her to Mexico where Debbie studied at the Ballet Nacional de Mexico. When they returned to Texas, Debbie was admitted to the Houston Ballet Foundation as the company’s first Black dancer, and a legendary career began.

Inspired by award-winning and NYT best-selling author Tami Charles’s interviews with living legend and dancer/actor Debbie Allen, this is an ode to creativity and perseverance, as well as an amazing history of a pivotal time in Debbie's life.

A life-affirming resource for parents raising children with special needs, this inspiring devotional brings together real hope, uplifting truths, and practical applications to help you reconnect with God's constant love and presence.

Raising a child with special needs is a journey filled with unique challenges and joys that not everyone understands. In this comforting devotional, Camille Joy draws from her experiences of raising a son with autism, IDD, and complex medical issues to help you recognize God's presence and plan for you and your child.

Whether you're facing overwhelming obstacles or celebrating small victories, these pages offer a safe place to acknowledge the tough moments and a restful oasis for your weary heart. Combining tangible hope, reassuring truths, and practical encouragement, each devotion features

• inspiring Scripture to anchor your heart in God’s promises
• thoughtful reflections to bring hope to your soul in just minutes
• a bold affirmation to take with you into your day

Embrace the joy that sustains and discover the peace in knowing you are never alone.

A transformational guide that blends psychology, life coaching, and spiritual insight to help heal past wounds, navigate life’s toughest seasons, and manifest lasting success and inner peace.

Drawing from a decade of experience working with elite clients—from celebrities and athletes to CEOs and pastors—Dr. Bryant reveals a universal truth: success doesn’t shield anyone from trauma, emptiness, or the mental toll of unhealed wounds. In fact, the higher you climb, the more that unresolved pain threatens to undo everything you’ve built. Her unique, psychology-integrated coaching method offers a powerful alternative to traditional therapy—fast, effective, and rooted in both science and spirit.

Dr. Cheyenne Bryant shares her own remarkable journey—from a chaotic, love-filled upbringing in a multigenerational home to building a multimillion-dollar estate where her family now lives and thrives—and opens the gates to both her physical paradise and the spiritual and psychological path that got her there. Inspired by the biblical story of Moses, Live Your Promise reframes the challenging in-between moments of life as sacred territory for transformation. It's not the Promised Land, but the wilderness—where discomfort meets divine growth—that shapes who we become. With tools, strategies, and real-life insights, this book is your guide to navigating that wilderness with courage, clarity, and grace.

Whether you're just starting out or already living your dream, Live Your Promise will help you sustain success, find lasting peace, and manifest the life you were meant to live.

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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

"Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history."—The Atlantic

On May 17, 1954, 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 white peers and educators as they joined resource-rich schools that were reticent to accept the new students.

Award-winning scholar Noliwe Rooks weaves together sociological data, cultural history, and personal records to challenge the idea that integration was a boon for Black children. 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’s deft hand turns the story of integration’s past and future on its head and shows how we may better understand and support generations of students to come.

An urgent rethinking of the Western approach to mental health, which treats the symptoms rather than the exploitative systems causing our distress-by a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Medical School physician-anthropologist-offering lessons from the rest of the world.

An urgent rethinking of the Western approach to mental health, which treats the symptoms rather than the exploitative systems causing our distress-by a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Medical School physician-anthropologist-offering lessons from the rest of the world.

What if the mainstay of mental health care involved cancelling onerous debt, giving poor people free housing, and paying reparations to the descendants of slavery and colonialism? In Empire of Madness, Dr. Khameer Kidia re-evaluates the Western approach to mental health, which medicates symptoms instead of changing the structures that harm the human psyche. A physician and researcher whose own family suffers from the psychological effects of colonialism, Kidia highlights the limitations of the Western mental health model by reporting from the front lines of mental health crises at home, in the clinic, and during a decade of fieldwork.

Clear-eyed and openhearted, Kidia asks the nuanced questions unaddressed by our current mental health model- How do history, culture, and politics shape mental distress? Are hoarding and burnout medical diagnoses or social problems? Why are schizophrenia outcomes sometimes better in poor countries without antipsychotics? Can a traditional healer treat mental illness better than a Western-trained clinician? For those living in poverty, can cash replace pills?

With rigorous research, cutting analysis, and illuminating prose, Kidia invites us to reimagine mental health as a global idea where our wellbeing is mutual and everyone's voice-patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers alike-matters.

“Aquí mataron gente por sacar la bandera / Por eso es que ahora yo la llevo donde quiera." (Here they killed people for taking out the flag / that’s why I bring it anywhere I want now.)—LA MuDANZA

Global superstar Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among others—that have exposed the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Offering a portrait of the past and future of Puerto Rican resistance through one of its loudest and proudest voices, P FKN R draws on interviews with musicians, politicians, and journalists as well as ethnographic research to set Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican resistance in a historical, political, and cultural context. Authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau—creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus”—demonstrate Bad Bunny’s place in a long tradition of infusing both joy and protest into music and honor the many evolving forms of daily resistance to oppression and colonialism that are part of Puerto Rican life.

“Chazaro transforms the ranfla, the hooptie, and the G-ride into a spaceship, a time machine. He points our gaze to the sky and we long to take flight while simultaneously holding onto our roots and what keeps our feet on the ground."—Joseph Rios, Fresno Poet Laureate and author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations

In These Spaceships Weren’t Built For Us, Alan Chazaro launches a speculative, lyrical odyssey through Latinx identity, diaspora, and memory, where the immigrant experience becomes a poetic voyage, rooted in resistance, love, and the enduring pull of home.

In his newest poetry collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built For Us, Alan Chazaro reconsiders the possibilities of space travel as the son of Mexican immigrants while navigating daily life across rapidly shifting social spaces. From barren gas stations in Central California during the height of the pandemic to faraway jungle planets governed by paleteros, Chazaro imagines the present and future in ways that are simultaneously bleak and dire, hopeful and beautiful, and seemingly, impossibly unrealized.

"This is not another book telling you what to do with your body; it is an invitation to listen, to tend, and to reclaim your womb as a source of wisdom, resilience, and healing" --Pregnancy Magazine

A heart-centered, science-based guide for women navigating fertility, pregnancy, loss, and what might come between and after

Every reproductive journey has unexpected bumps along the way, small and sometimes big. Whether you’re preparing or trying to conceive, moving through pregnancy, processing loss or finding your footing afterward, or moving into menopause, caring for your reproductive health starts with connecting with your body. 

From her work as a physical therapist specializing in pelvic health as well as her own lived experience with pregnancy loss and secondary infertility, Dr. “Tia” Anietie Ukpe-Wallace understands intimately the dysfunction that arises when we’re disconnected from our wombs. And so Tia empowers  women to get personal with their anatomy, learn what’s “normal” for them, and to trust their body’s signals so they can move forward with clarity, agency, and care, and become confident self-advocates in a challenging and impersonal medical system. With a frank, compassionate overview of the female reproductive system and the ways in which fertility and pregnancies can go awry, she offers advice about how to tend to your womb and all its connected systems to support the best outcomes possible.  

Tia shares:

* Exercises to connect you with your genitals
* Self-massage techniques for the vulva and abdomen
* Steps to identify your reproductive health “baseline”
* The 5 S’s of fertility and womb health
* Advice for navigating the fog of grief
* Guidance for moving into menopause with vitality

Anietie (Tia) Ukpe-Wallace  is a Doctor of Physical Therapy specializing in pelvic health, who provides a continuum of care and support from pregnancy loss to postpartum. Her own chronic struggles surrounding her pelvic floor, including multiple miscarriages, have inspired her personal interest in the womb, a rarely discussed and often misunderstood body part. A wife and mother, Tia lives in Oakland, CA, where she offers telehealth and clinic-based physical therapy services through her practice, Self-Care Physio.

An extraordinary new work, epic in scale and lyrical in flight, by the award-winning author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. 

“How big is a home?” 

“What is space without reaching?” 

“You ever think about being remembered?”

Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill’s new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity’s seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as “arboreal miners” with “a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns” that the speaker observes and “can’t help but see blood.” 

This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart. 

Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.

The first full and definitive narrative of one of the most shocking and largely unknown events of racial injustice in US history: the execution of nineteen Black soldiers in Texas

On the sweltering, rainy night of August 23, 1917, one of the most consequential events affecting America’s long legacy of racism and injustice began in Houston, Texas. Inflamed by a rumor that a white mob was arming to attack them, and after weeks of police harassment, more than 100 African American soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, took their weapons without authorization and, led by a sergeant, marched into the largely Black San Felipe district of the city. Violent confrontations with police and civilians ensued and nineteen lives were lost.

The Army moved quickly to court-martial 118 soldiers on charges of mutiny and murder, even though a majority of the soldiers involved had never fired their weapons. Inadequately defended en masse by a single officer who was not a lawyer and had no experience in capital cases, in three trials undermined by perjured testimony and clear racial bias, and confronted by an all-white tribunal committed to a rapid judgment, 110 Black soldiers were found guilty—despite the fact that no mutiny had, in fact, taken place. In the predawn darkness of December 11, thirteen of them were hanged at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio—hastily and in secret, without any chance to appeal. News of the largest mass execution in the Army’s history outraged the country and inspired preventive legislation; and yet six more Black soldiers were executed in early 1918 and the rest were sentenced to life in prison.

The Houston Incident, as it became known, has remained largely untold, a deep stain on the Army’s record and pride. Award-winning historian and Army veteran John A. Haymond has spent six years researching the events surrounding the Incident and leading the efforts that ultimately led, in November 2023, to the largest act of retroactive clemency in the Army’s history when the verdicts were overturned and honorable discharges awarded to all the soldiers involved. His dramatic chronicle of what transpired—situated amongst the rampant racism in Texas and the country—is a crucially important and harrowing reminder of our racially violent past, offering the promise that justice, even posthumously, can prevail.

Author Marisa Renee Lee shares how to care for yourself during uncertain times—a disorienting emotional period when life is fundamentally altered without your consent, in prose Maggie Smith deems "nothing short of a miracle and just what we need right now.”

In Waiting for Dawn, bestselling author Marisa Renee Lee reveals how to prioritize and care for yourself when change you don’t want is thrust upon you. Lee guides you through the hard times that arise unexpectedly and disrupt your life for in-determinate periods. Uncertainty and fear impact how you interact with the world and understand your place in it. You manage the loneliness and isolation by convincing others that you are fine. Lee debunks the idea that you must force positivity and, instead, helps you learn how to hold compassion for yourself in hard times.

Through rich, revelatory prose, Lee assists you in navigating life’s unstable and overwhelming moments. Using research and her personal experiences, she argues that self-preservation is necessary when life is at its worst. If you are experiencing pain, chronic stress, or loneliness or are burdened with self-doubt, Waiting for Dawn brings you from a place of instability to hope.

Lee shares her two-year journey battling loss and illness—the death of her mother-in-law, ongoing sickness, and the emotional challenges she endured—that taught her that healing is about finding your own unique way through the darkness. Waiting for Dawn provides a compass to help you rediscover your worth and identify how to live well. These dark periods are necessary for things to grow and transform, but it never stays dark forever.

In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life.

Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work.Who was Elena Garro, really?

She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism”, a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and theI Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.

The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.

In Homegrown, cultural critics bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains reflect on the innate solidarity between Black and Latino culture. A work of activism through dialogue, Homegrown is a declaration of solidarity that rings true even ten years after its first publication.

In Homegrown, cultural critics bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains reflect on the innate solidarity between Black and Latino culture. Riffing on everything from home and family to multiculturalism and the mass media, hooks and Mesa-Bains invite readers to re-examine and confront the polarizing mainstream discourse about Black-Latino relationships that is too often negative in its emphasis on political splits between people of color. A work of activism through dialogue, Homegrown is a declaration of solidarity that rings true even ten years after its first publication.

This new edition includes a new afterword, in which Mesa-Bains reflects on the changes, conflicts, and criticisms of the last decade.

Former boxing legend Muhammad Ali, one of the best-known and best-loved celebrities and an international goodwill ambassador, offers inspiration and hope as he describes the spiritual philosophy that sustains him.

“During my boxing career, you did not see the real Muhammad Ali. You just saw a little boxing. You saw only a part of me. After I retired from boxing my true work began. I have embarked on a journey of love.”

So Muhammad Ali begins this spiritual memoir, his description of the values that have shaped and sustained him and that continue to guide his life. In The Soul of a Butterfly the great champion takes readers on a spiritual journey through the seasons of life, from childhood to the present, and shares the beliefs that have served him well.

Ali reflects on his faith in God and the strength it gave him during his greatest challenges. He describes how his study of true Islam has helped him accept the changes in his life and has brought him to a greater awareness of life’s true purpose. As a United Nations Messenger of Peace, he has traveled widely, and he describes his 2002 mission to Afghanistan to heighten public awareness of that country’s desperate situation, as well as his more recent meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Ali’s reflections on topics ranging from moral courage to belief in God to respect for those who differ from us will inspire and enlighten all who read them. Written with the assistance of his daughter Hana, The Soul of a Butterfly is a compassionate and heartfelt book that will provide comfort for our troubled times.

Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.

Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the “double consciousness” of W. E. B. Du Bois to the “double vision” of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.

In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.

In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In Postcolonial Melancholia, he continues the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine―and defend―multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security."

This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.

How Black women’s visual work functions in an era of new racial and gender meaning

In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, Undesirability and Her Sisters charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. Tiffany Barber argues that Black women’s social positions at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class are inherently queer, thus spurring unexpected aesthetic strategies that throw into high relief the ethical terrain of what it means to be Black and a woman now.

Undesirability and Her Sisters collates what Barber terms “undesirable” representations of Black female bodies in recent American sculpture, collage, photography, and dance-based performance art by Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister. These works not only engage the visual senses but also incorporate olfactory, haptic, and sonic experiences that challenge traditional interpretations of Blackness and womanhood in art history, Black Studies, feminist and gender studies, dance and performance studies, and queer studies. Instead of transcendental beauty, wholeness, and individual and collective becoming, the perverse Black female figures profiled here eschew sublimation and synthesis as necessary responses to racial and gender subjugation in the past, present, and future.

Through its unique, groundbreaking analysis, this book contributes to the ongoing discussions on the ethics of representation―the capacity to speak and act for oneself, to have significance and impact, and ultimately, to reject acknowledgment.

A groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today.

“Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean’s utility to Western Wealth.”
—Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.

Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

In a current era marked by carceral logics, authoritarianism, and white supremacy, there has never been a greater need for the tools and inspiration that radical feminism provides. In Insurgent Visions, Chandra Talpade Mohanty explores methods of anticapitalist resistance to radically transform everyday life. She presents insurgent feminism—a theory and praxis with which to contest and replace the practices of violence grounded in racialized gender relations. Insurgent feminism unsettles existing power structures in order to enact new relationships and forge new subjectivities, epistemologies, and communities. Drawing on organizing efforts in the US-Mexico borderlands, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir, as well as on abolitionist and Dalit feminisms, Mohanty contends that the knowledge that emerges from the experiences of marginalized groups who are struggling for economic, racial, and social justice is key for imagining feminist futures. She also turns to the neoliberal landscape of higher education in the United States and the difficulties of instituting transformative antiracist and anti-imperialist feminist knowledge building. Mapping new challenges for radical praxis, Mohanty reconfigures feminist studies while offering a model for decolonial cross-border organizing and solidarity.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Angela Garbes has given us the definitive explanation for something we all share: the sense that something is not right about our society’s treatment of parenting. Essential Labor is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and courageously personal book. Garbes reveals the way systems exploit caregiving and shows us how the essential work of mothering can fix not just family life, but society. A timely and unforgettable book.”—Heather McGhee, New York Times bestselling author of The Sum of Us

From the acclaimed author of Like a Mother comes a reflection on the state of caregiving in America, and an exploration of mothering as a means of social change.

The Covid-19 pandemic shed fresh light on a long-overlooked truth: mothering is among the only essential work humans do. In response to the increasing weight placed on mothers and caregivers—and the lack of a social safety net to support them—writer Angela Garbes found herself pondering a vital question: How, under our current circumstances that leave us lonely, exhausted, and financially strained, might we demand more from American family life? 

In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipino-American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family's complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context—the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color. 

Garbes contends that while the labor of raising children is devalued in America, the act of mothering offers the radical potential to create a more equitable society. In Essential Labor, Garbes reframes the physically and mentally draining work of meeting a child's bodily and emotional needs as opportunities to find meaning, to nurture a deeper sense of self, pleasure, and belonging. This is highly skilled labor, work that impacts society at its most foundational level.

Part galvanizing manifesto, part poignant narrative, Essential Labor is a beautifully rendered reflection on care that reminds us of the irrefutable power and beauty of mothering.

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art.

Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O’Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

A classic collection of essays calling for decolonization through self-liberation

“For us,” said Amilcar Cabral, “freedom is an act of culture”―and these were not just words. Guided by the concrete realities of his people, Cabral called for a process of “re-Africanization,” a Return to the Source. As a new imperialism has taken hold the world over, many have hearkened back to Return to the Source, but this time, our source of inspiration is Cabral himself. With a system of thought rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world’s most profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of anti–imperialist struggle. Cabral and his fellow Pan-African movement leaders catalyzed and fortified a militant wave of liberation struggles beginning in Angola, moving through Cabral’s homelands of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and culminating in Mozambique and beyond. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in under just ten years steered the liberation of three–quarters of the countryside of Guinea Bissau from Portuguese colonial domination.

In this new, expanded edition of Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral we have access to Cabral’s warm and humorous informal address to the Africa Information Service, and we revisit several of the principal speeches Cabral delivered during visits to the United States in the final years before his assassination in 1973, including his last written address to his people on New Year’s Eve. Return to the Source is essential reading for all who understand that the erasure of historical continuity between social movements has disrupted our ability to make the revolutionary transformation we all desperately require.

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists’ today. Rodney lived through the failed –though immensely hopeful -socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere.

The book critically considers Rodney's contribution to Marxist theory and history, his relationship to dependency theory and the contemporary significance of his work in the context of movements and politics today. The first full-length study of Rodney’s life, this book is an essential introduction to Rodney's work.

Published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first major study of Malcolm X’s influence in the sixty years since his assassination, exploring his enduring impact on culture, politics, and civil rights.

Malcolm X has become as much of an American icon as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But when he was murdered in 1965, he was still seen as a dangerous outsider. White America found him alienating, mainstream African Americans found him divisive, and even his admirers found him bravely radical. Although Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our own Black shining prince,” he never received the mainstream acceptance toward which he seemed to be striving in his final year. It is more in death than his life that Malcolm’s influence has blossomed and come to leave a deep imprint on the cultural landscape of America.

With impeccable research and original reporting, Mark Whitaker tells the story of Malcolm X’s far-reaching posthumous legacy. It stretches from founders of the Black Power Movement such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton to hip-hop pioneers such as Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur. Leaders of the Black Arts and Free Jazz movements from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, August Wilson, and John Coltrane credited their political awakening to Malcolm, as did some of the most influential athletes of our time, from Muhammad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and beyond. Spike’s movie biopic and the Black Lives Matter movement reintroduced Malcolm to subsequent generations. Across the political spectrum, he has been cited as a formative influence by both Barack Obama—who venerated Malcolm’s “unadorned insistence on respect”—and Clarence Thomas, who was drawn to Malcolm’s messages of self-improvement and economic self-help.

In compelling new detail, Whitaker also retraces the long road to exoneration for two men wrongfully convicted of Malcolm’s murder, making The Afterlife of Malcolm X essential reading for anyone interested in true crime, American politics, culture, and history.

Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory.

Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young

A reissue of Greg Tate's classic, out-of-print collection of essays, with a new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new foreword by Questlove.

From one of the most original, creative, and provocative culture critics comes an eye-opening collection of essays and tales about American music and culture.

Under the guise of writing about a single subject, Greg Tate’s essays in Flyboy in the Buttermilk branch out from his usual and explore social, pop cultural, political, and economic subjects. Taking on a wide diversity of topics―from the rise of hip-hop; the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat; the music of Miles Davis, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bad Brains, and many others; to the crisis of the Black intellectual and the irony of the GOP recruiting Black Americans― Tate writes in a brave and distinctive voice that is angry, joyous, anxious, and funny.

In every piece of this collection, Tate offers informed insight into where America is going and why.

In trying times, our nation demands more of us. It is time for good trouble.

Senator Cory Booker captivated Americans across the political spectrum in early 2025 with his remarkable 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, when he spoke out eloquently and forcefully against the Trump administration’s relentless challenges to civil liberties, government institutions, the rule of law, and our nation's international standing. In the process, Booker outlasted the record for longest continuous Senate floor speech set by segregationist Strom Thurmond during a filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which was delivered at another time of great uncertainty for our country when it felt like the odds were hopelessly stacked against justice and unity.

Stand expands on that message and offers a compelling vision for the future to readers who are eager to make a difference. It focuses on the virtues that are vital to our success as a nation and the lessons we can draw from past generations of Americans who fought for them. Now is not the time to surrender to cynicism or abandon our most noble ideals. Now is the time to defiantly declare, like our ancestors before us: "I, too, stand for America.”

Stand is a celebration of the Americans who chose to get up in the face of injustice, who championed the uniquely American values central to making our nation a more perfect union, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It is also a guide for today: leadership is not derived from position or title, it comes from action and example.

In the tradition of books by Albert Woodfox and Angela Davis comes the gripping memoir of a wrongful conviction and life on death row in Angola prison, showing how incarcerated people care for, protect, mentor, and teach each other.

In 1975, seventeen-year-old Gary Tyler was sent to Angola prison to die. A year earlier, he had been wrongfully charged with the killing of a white teenager and found guilty by an all-white jury, making Gary the youngest prisoner on death row in the country.

Following his conviction, Amnesty International and investigative reporters documented the brutal treatment, fabricated evidence, recanted testimony, and repeated injustices that led to his sentencing. Three times Gary was recommended for a pardon; three times Louisiana governors refused to accept the political risk. After more than four decades in prison, Tyler was released in 2016—but he was never exonerated.

This is not a story of mistaken identity or circumstantial evidence, but one of systemic injustice from an institution hard-wired into a legacy of slavery—in effect, this was a legal lynching. It is precisely this harsh reality that makes this memoir a remarkable celebration of life and justice, a story of pride, forgiveness, community, and triumph. With insight and heart, Gary shows how he learned to reject bitterness and survive with the help and mentorship from activists such Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace on the inside, and the relentless support from people on the outside. Stitching Freedom is the page-turning chance for Gary to reclaim his power and exonerate himself at last.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward.

“A powerful read that fills one with, dare I say . . . hope?”—The New York Times
 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it’s clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it’s a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.
 
All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States—scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race—and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society.
 
Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this collection is a celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.

With essays and poems by:

Emily Atkin • Xiye Bastida • Ellen Bass • Colette Pichon Battle • Jainey K. Bavishi • Janine Benyus • adrienne maree brown • Régine Clément • Abigail Dillen • Camille T. Dungy • Rhiana Gunn-Wright • Joy Harjo • Katharine Hayhoe • Mary Annaïse Heglar • Jane Hirshfield • Mary Anne Hitt • Ailish Hopper • Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe • Emily N. Johnston • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Naomi Klein • Kate Knuth • Ada Limón • Louise Maher-Johnson • Kate Marvel • Gina McCarthy • Anne Haven McDonnell • Sarah Miller • Sherri Mitchell, Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset • Susanne C. Moser • Lynna Odel • Sharon Olds • Mary Oliver • Kate Orff • Jacqui Patterson • Leah Penniman • Catherine Pierce • Marge Piercy • Kendra Pierre-Louis • Varshini • Prakash • Janisse Ray • Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez • Favianna Rodriguez • Cameron Russell • Ash Sanders • Judith D. Schwartz • Patricia Smith • Emily Stengel • Sarah Stillman • Leah Cardamore Stokes • Amanda Sturgeon • Maggie Thomas • Heather McTeer Toney • Alexandria Villaseñor • Alice Walker • Amy Westervelt • Jane Zelikova