A Ms. Magazine "Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026" Pick

Gives voice to the Black women whose lives were devastated by the carceral system and sheds powerful light on its slavery-based roots to transform how we think about mass incarceration

Historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core of a fresh argument: that the system of mass incarceration was established as protection for the institution of slavery and the profits of enslavers and that this legacy continues today.

For centuries, Black women in America have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons, yet their experiences have often been overlooked in favor of Black men’s.

Arguing that the merger between profit and punishment continues to keep Black people bound, LeFlouria traces the connection between enslavement and incarceration, revealing how they have always been intertwined—from the domestic slave trade of 1810-1865, when an estimated one million people were incarcerated in privately owned slave jails, to the post-Civil War era when Black people were enslaved through new systems of state-sponsored mass incarceration, and through to today.

Using archival sources and personal testimonies, LeFlouria tells a new origin story of mass incarceration with the stories of numerous Black women throughout history, including:

· Delia Garlic, who was incarcerated in a slave jail and later sold to a sheriff at the height of the domestic slave trade

· Eliza Purdy, who was jailed and sold to the highest bidder a year after the Civil War ended, and

· Susan Burton, who was commodified and trafficked through a 20th-century cell block, much like an enslaved person on the auction block 200 years prior.

An American sports legend offers a sweeping Black history of boxing, celebrating the trailblazing athletes who fought in the ring and against racial injustice.

Features a 16-page photo insert.

Here is Peter Jackson, a free-born Black tradesman and boxer from the island of St. Croix who KO’d the white boxer Tom Leeds in the thirtieth round to win the Australian Heavyweight championship in 1886. Most white fighters refused to get into the ring with Jackson. “Gentleman” Jim Corbett was one of the few who not only fought him, but said of him afterwards that Jackson was the most intelligent fighter he ever faced and could beat any heavyweight that Corbett ever fought or ever saw.

Here too of course are boxing legends Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, but also the dozens of outstanding Black boxers who fought from the late 1800s to the end of the 20th century, overcoming their opponents and facing discrimination in an array of forms, from being disqualified unfairly after winning fights to being mobbed and injured in the ring by white assailants while referees and judges looked on impassively, to having mobster managers who gave them only a minute portion of their winnings.

Here is Joe Gans, the first American-born Black boxer to win a world championship, in 1902, and who dominated the sport throughout the first decade of the 20th century. Here too is Sam Langford, who became heavyweight champ in 1923. But through most of the first half of the twentieth century Black boxers were separated into Black leagues and there were Black champions rather than world champions who were Black. That all began to change in the 1930s with Joe Louis. A new generation of Black boxers would come up after him, standing on Joe Louis’s shoulders, Floyd Patterson, George Foreman, Sonny Liston, Archie Moore, Larry Holmes, Ken Norton, Joe Frazier, and finally the young Cassius Clay, who would rename himself Muhammad Ali and come to dominate the sport for decades, and after him, though not a heavyweight, the great Sugar Ray Leonard.

Scott’s unique perspective brings fresh insight and passion even to well-known stories about the fight game, and every time he adds something new.

An irresistible delight, this hilarious and heartwarming essay collection gathers essential tales about growing up in the South, the pitfalls of date night, and why no one should ever tell a Black girl how to Black Girl.

Black women always find a place to meet: in the natural hair aisle, at Beyoncé concerts, even online in memes and catchphrases. This book is one of those places: a living room where readers can contemplate how a well-picked afro can defy the laws of physics and why boob sweat has to exist in the first place. Here, Black Girl is a verb. Here, Black women can Black Girl in every way we want to.

Amena Brown’s book Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl blends storytelling, humor, and pop culture commentary to traverse the magic and wisdom she's gleaned from being raised by Southern Black women, and supported by the community of Black women who hold her down today. After graduating from the International Black Girl Headquarters (the renowned HBCU Spelman College), Amena has built a career telling stories and celebrating Black womanhood. In her book, she shares stories of dancing in Janelle Monae's "Tightrope" music video and partnering with Tracee Ellis Ross to compose odes to natural hair. She imparts essential life lessons from the Real Housewives of Atlanta, and tells hair tales, including wisdom on the ideal style for her first speaking gig at Essence Fest (box braids, 100 percent).

In the end, Brown shares that Black women are a whole world. A galaxy of customs, language, code, and unspoken understandings, all explored with humor and heart in this unforgettable book.

The creator of the viral TikTok series “Who TF Did I Marry?” shares an even more unfiltered account of how she reclaimed herself, fought through toxic relationships, and regained her foundation through healing and deep self-reflection.

When Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson decided to disclose the full details of her turbulent marriage in a 50-part TikTok series, from first meeting to the finality of divorce, she hoped it would help at least one person from making similar mistakes. In a flash "Who TF Did I Marry?" went global, becoming a movement. Millions around the world were enraptured and identified with Tareasa's story, ultimately sharing their own experiences of heartbreak and deceit.

While “Who TF Did I Marry?” questioned the relationship, What (TF) Do I Do Now? probes deeper, asking “Where did I lose myself?” Through reflection, acceptance, and humor, Tareasa unravels even more details of what caused her to stay in a partnership where familiarity became too comfortable, and loneliness was a scarier proposition than owning her solitude. Tareasa’s indelible voice and keen perspective shares new, engrossing stories and practical insights as she regains her footing and her faith in herself, offering readers the chance to do the same.

Probing, personal, and incredibly relatable, What (TF) Do I Do Now? isn’t a self-help guide, but an empowering conversation with the reader, illuminating the courage it takes to trust yourself because healing is on the other side of pain.

God is speaking to you in your dreams, more often than you know. This insightful guided journal based on the lessons from the national bestseller The Power of Your Dreams helps you decipher those messages and put His wisdom into practice.

The average person spends twenty-six years of their life sleeping. That time was created not only to enjoy the physical benefits of rest but to engage in the presence of God and access His guidance for day-to-day life and spiritual growth. Written by pastor and bestselling author Stephanie Ike Okafor, this dream journal offers a practical companion to The Power of Your Dreams, while also standing on its own as a biblical guide for anyone longing to understand how God speaks at night.

Designed to help you remember and understand your dreams, this interactive resource will allow you to give your dreams back to God as an act of both prayer and worship. In addition to offering ample writing space for recording your dreams, the journal includes:

* reflections on sleep and hearing the voice of God
* insightful prompts
* biblical meanings of common symbols and numbers
* practical interpretation tips
* and soothing prayers for sleep

As you pour out your wondrous, difficult, or confusing dreams onto these pages and better learn how God might be speaking to you through them, may you gain a deeper understanding of God’s presence in all aspects of your life...including your times of sleep.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times

From Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, a sermon in the public square on the issues that plague us most

Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Senator Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources but from a poverty of moral imagination.

His sermon on the book of Isaiah draws from ideals resonant in his own faith and all the great faiths and other moral traditions, offering a bold vision of how to live and relate to one another in the land. A moral topography, he calls it, a geopolitics that centers love and justice, or as Dr. King would so often say, the beloved community. The Crooked Places Made Straight examines six crises at the center of American life: voting rights and voter suppression, gun violence, mass incarceration, the persistence of poverty, dark money in politics, and the climate emergency.

This is not a naive faith, either. As Senator Warnock writes: Isaiah is no stranger to frustration with institutional leadership. He knows well the perils of public corruption, sophisticated legalized bribery, and a political class more interested in preserving its own power than in serving the people. . . . He’s fed up with political leaders who are focused on their own gain at the expense of the people. “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves,” he says.

For Senator Warnock, democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. A vote is a kind of prayer. The Crooked Places Made Straight is his inspiring vision for a more just and equitable America where communities thrive with hope and possibility and every child has a chance.

In this inspiring memoir, a Black woman pilot leading the way for other aviatrixes shares her journey of fulfilling a lifelong dream to fly—and how she rediscovered her passion in the face of tragedy and adversity.

Before being cleared for takeoff, Captain Nia Gilliam witnesses the World Trade Center attacks from the co-pilot’s seat on the runway of Newark Airport. Struggling with the harrowing sights unfolding before her, she finds the composure to take off as smoke billows from the Twin Towers. In a moment that changed everything, for her and the world, Gilliam's dedication to the skies is forever shaken and she resolves to never fly again.

Now, Gilliam traces her path to the pilot’s seat, from the moment her mother showed her an article of Black aviation pioneer Bessie Coleman to the day she ditched school to pay her respects at the funeral of Janet Harmon Bragg, the first Black woman to earn a commercial pilot’s license, where she ultimately met her future mentor. Alongside the grit and determination to work towards her dream, Gilliam captures the challenges, both personal and societal, and triumphs of earning her spot in the pilot’s seat. But just as Gilliam’s life begins to soar, the aftermath of 9/11 thrusts her into a moment of unforeseen decisions. As she finds the fortitude to stand strong after a national tragedy, she confronts bias as the first pregnant pilot at her airline, fights to overcome postpartum depression, and navigates a career transition that would take her away from the life she’d worked so hard for.

Cleared for Takeoff is a deeply affecting story, tracing Gilliam’s roots to navigating a male-dominated industry and illuminating one woman’s unwavering faith in herself.

A radical reclamation of the Black Madonna as a liberatory figure that offers a richly spiritual and politically charged vision of Black divinity and resistance.

Social psychologist and author of God Is a Black Woman Christena Cleveland brings forth Black Madonna as a Divine icon and spiritual home. This is a call to reclaim a spirituality that has always been ours. Through story, image, reflection, and ritual, the spiritually curious and justice-minded are invited to move beyond dogma and toward embodied, mystical liberation. Written in a voice that bridges scholarship and devotion, this work is for all who are longing for a decolonized, diasporic, and feminine-rooted sacred—one that speaks directly to the soul’s hunger for belonging, meaning, and collective healing.

Drawing on Christian mysticism, Black feminist theology, ancestral memory, and global iconography, this work is both a historical excavation and a contemporary invocation of an iconic figure. Each chapter brings the reader into conversation with a different embodiment of the Black Madonna, from ancient statues hidden in caves to modern artistic visions, illuminating her power as a sacred symbol.

The autobiography of a Black woman who defied nineteenth-century conventions to become a preacher, popular speaker, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist. 

Sojourner Truth was an incredible, remarkable, epoch-defying woman who escaped from slavery and successfully sued for her son’s freedom, in addition to her career as a wildly successful orator and activist—a woman alive to the hypocrisies of her age, and unafraid to talk about them.

Her autobiography, which she dictated, is an outstanding historical document. Truth’s tale sheds a light on realities of slavery that are still rarely discussed: that she was a slave in upstate New York, not on a Southern plantation; that Dutch was her first language; that the circumstances of her slavery isolated her from a broader Black community; that her experience of religion was a racially integrated one, and became the means of her independence. Ultimately, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the story of a great American that reveals aspects of slavery and free Black life that are too often overlooked.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • How would your life look if you gained years of wisdom, guidance, and strategy while you were asleep? That’s exactly what you receive when you tap into the power of God’s voice in your dreams!

“The Power of Your Dreams isn’t just words on a page; it’s a tool every believer needs to receive personal instruction for their destiny!”—Travis Greene, pastor, recording artist, and author

The average person spends twenty-six years of life sleeping. That time was created not only to enjoy the physical benefits of rest but to engage in the presence of God and access His guidance for our days. Through fascinating real-life stories, Pastor Stephanie Ike Okafor reveals how dreams have equipped her and many others throughout history, and she shows how you, too, can receive revelation from God through your dreams.

Anchored in biblical truth, The Power of Your Dreams answers your most perplexing questions about dreams:

• Are all dreams from God?
• How do I know if my dream contained a message from God?
• How do I interpret my dreams?
• Do nightmares have any meaning?

God spoke to His people through dreams in biblical times. Today He speaks to you in the same way, inviting you to unlock hidden treasures of wisdom. Discover richer clarity and confidence in your purpose as well as enjoy a strengthened relationship with God as you learn how to recognize and respond to His voice in your dreams.

An inspiring and practical catalyst to break out of survival mindset and walk in the fullness of God’s plan for your life—from the New York Times bestselling author of When God Speaks.

With so much happening in the world, we are carrying more than we ever expected—pressure, responsibilities, unanswered questions, and the weight of discerning what matters most in uncertain times. But there is a revelation to be found right where you are.

Pastor, prophet, and bestselling author Joshua Giles weaves together spiritual and behavioral insights to help you move out of survival mode and into the life God is calling you to live. Discover how to

• identify and break free from survival mode’s gravitational pull
• let go of the past and begin dreaming again about your future
• understand the transitions between your night and day seasons—and receive the promises and blessings in both
• recognize spiritual resistance at pivotal moments and respond with wisdom, authority, and faith
• design your environment to better support your calling

This message is a catalyst to awaken you to the gifts and opportunities around you and build the future God has planned.

Your moment is here. It’s time to shift your life.

The soul-stirring intersectional biography of the most famous Islamic woman scholar working today, from the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist author of If the Oceans Were Ink and Home, Land, Security.

“A testament to what it means to labor for justice from inside a faith tradition—to love it enough to transform it . . . The Lady Imam is right on time to ignite our courage.”—Valarie Kaur, bestselling author of See No Stranger and Sage Warrior

A feminist scholar-activist, single mother of five, and queer advocate, amina wadud has led a struggle against Islam’s patriarchal establishment that’s been felt keenly all over the world. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X before her, wadud has mobilized faith’s potential as an engine of equality. Yet this American trail-blazer’s story has never been told in book form—until now.

Born Mary Teasley, the daughter of a Methodist preacher, wadud grew up in Maryland with a rare vantage on socioeconomic divides, living through poverty and her sister’s death from an illegal abortion. A gifted student, teenage wadud was sent to live with affluent white families in Weston, Massachusetts. After cross-country hitchhiking and a stint in a Buddhist ashram, she converted to Islam as a twenty-year-old Ivy League student.

wadud devoted her life to studying the Qur’an and challenged centuries of patriarchal interpretations, finding in it equality for all. In Manhattan in 2005, she became the world’s most famous—and infamous—Islamic scholar when she became the first woman in 1400 years to lead men and women together in public Friday prayers.

The Lady Imam chronicles the life of a singular figure not only in Islam, but also in feminism, Black history, and gender studies. With unprecedented access through years of interviews and archival research, Carla Power has written the definitive account of wadud's extraordinary life while shedding light on our deepest questions about faith, family, and social justice.

One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books

WITH AN APPENDIX OF NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED WORK

Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to unpublished pieces composed during his final years.

Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer in several genres (also published under the name LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. His legacy in world literature is matched by his widespread influence as an activist and cultural leader. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by the Black Arts Movement's intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.

Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production.

Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis.

Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and riots—militant thinkers, artists, educators, and others discuss aesthetic production, forms of social organization, modes of struggle against gendered and racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory. Common to all three conversations is a commitment to rethinking the relationship between forms of critique and forms of struggle undertaken by collective social practices, offering lessons for tactics, strategies, and practices.

Nara Aziza Smith (@naraaziza), the best-dressed culinary creator in digital media, brings her signature style to 80 delicious, homemade family-friendly recipes in her debut cookbook.

You may think you know Nara Smith—the glamorous outfits, the soothing ASMR voice, the beautiful family, the seemingly effortless approach to making food from scratch—but behind it all is a working mom with a relatable goal: preparing nourishing whole foods for herself and her family.

Nara grew up in Germany inspired by her grandmother’s cooking and the intention behind it—everything from freshly baked bread to her mother’s home remedies for mild ailments, like garlic soaked in honey. While working as a model, she soon met and married supermodel Lucky Blue Smith and started a family. When she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and eczema, she found that she could manage her symptoms by cutting out most processed foods. She turned her scratch-cooking expertise in a new curated direction while sharing her cooking online with compelling and elevated content. A self-taught home cook, Nara found joy in the ethos of slowing down and cooking with intention at home.

Now, millions of followers later, Nara has made home cooking look incredibly chic while preparing delicious and thoughtful meals her family loves. In her eagerly awaited and beautifully photographed first cookbook, Nara shares recipes from simple to complex, such as:

* Softest White Potato Sandwich Bread, English Muffins, and Handmade Cheese Crackers, a few of the doughs that keep Nara’s hands busy
* Cinnamon Toast Squares, a quick breakfast beloved by Nara’s toddlers and better than anything you can find in stores
* Baked Fall Vegetable Salad with Miso-Sherry Dressing, a gorgeous salad that fuels Nara for long workdays
* Soy-Glazed Flank Steak with Plum Herb Salad, a beautiful, nourishing meal made from whole ingredients
* One Pasta Dough for all shapes and sizes, with sauces, including stunning edible floral lasagna sheets.
* Pork Schnitzel, a comfort food that brings Nara back to her childhood in Germany
* Lucky’s Oat Chocolate Chip Cookies, Nara’s husband’s recipe for the best American classic
* A chapter on Bits & Bobs, including everything from homemade mozzarella to flavored butters to chocolate-hazelnut spread, showing the simplicity and magic of cooking from whole ingredients

In Homemade, Nara brings ease and elegance to the creation of homemade food—inspiring readers to elevate their own reality, in the kitchen and beyond in their daily life.

This book delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within the nation, focusing on this process in the Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined.

Selected by Kirkus for "Best of 2021: Our Favorite Nonfiction"

It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow terrorism. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood follows Ludger Boguille, his family, and friends through landmark events―from the Haitian Revolution to the birth of jazz―that shaped New Orleans and the United States.

The story begins with the author’s father rescuing a century’s worth of handwritten journals, in French, from a trash hauler’s pickup truck. From the journals’ pages emerged one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets. Although Louisiana law classified them as men of color, Negroes, and Blacks, the Economie brothers rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all.

A descendant of the Economie’s community, author Fatima Shaik has constructed a meticulously detailed nonfiction narrative that reads like an epic novel.

Commemorating its 20th anniversary with a new Introduction and updated content, Shifting explores the many identities Black women must adopt in various spaces to succeed in America.

Based on the African American Women’s Voices Project, Shifting reveals that a large number of Black women feel pressure to compromise their true selves as they navigate America's racial and gender discrimination. Black women "shift" by altering the expectations they have for themselves or their outer appearance, a set of coping mechanisms explored in detail within these pages. They modify their speech. They shift "white" as they head to work in the morning and "Black" as they come back home each night. They shift inward, internalizing the searing pain of the negative stereotypes they encounter daily. And sometimes they shift by fighting back. In commemoration of its twentieth year in print with a new Introduction and updated content throughout, Shifting is a much-needed, clear, and comprehensive portrait of the reality of Black women's experiences with bias today.

This foundational text on the emotional well-being of Black women breaks down key concepts, including:

* The Sisterella Complex: A groundbreaking look at the unique manifestation of depression common among Black women, fueled by the pressure to overachieve while denying their own needs.
* The Lily Complex: An analysis of the pressure Black women feel to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards, from altering hair texture to navigating body image.
* Black Women in the Workplace: An exploration of how women "shift" to survive, dealing with everything from microaggressions to being overlooked for promotions in professional settings.
* Mothering Black Children: A look into the specific challenges of raising children to cope with a society still struggling with prejudice, and how mothers teach the ABCs of shifting for survival.

Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing

"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."—Marlon James

“An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth.”—Robert Macfarlane

From an exciting new voice in international literature, a profoundly moving memoir that explores the Black experience in the natural world and the transformative power of plants.

Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. The cycles of his boyhood revolved around tending the plots of cabbage, tomatoes, and yams dotting the clay hillsides; playing beneath the cavernous roots of cotton trees; and climbing trunks of the fruit trees that fed him and his grandmother. But as a student of the literature of colonial England, in which the landscape of heather and moors has long been thought of as ideal, these years of subsistence and community evoked more shame than pride, and a language for the natural world that surrounded him remained elusive.

Years after leaving the island to attend university in England, and eventually achieving a position as a lecturer in Leeds, he finds himself “alienated from land, from planting, from watching things grow.” Walking among the trees in Yorkshire, he wonders how his own body will be perceived and can’t help but think of the epidemic of anti-Black violence across the Western world. He returns to Jamaica and the intimate archives of knowledge in his late grandmother’s grung, determined to reclaim his cultural inheritance, and ultimately to rediscover a “second life of seeing,” based on old ways of knowing.

“A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning” (Kwame Dawes), The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time.

From the introduction of animated film in the early 1900s to the 1950s, ethnic humor was a staple of American-made cartoons. Yet as Christopher Lehman shows in this revealing study, the depiction of African Americans in particular became so inextricably linked to the cartoon medium as to influence its evolution through those five decades. He argues that what is in many ways most distinctive about American animation reflects white animators' visual interpretations of African American cultural expression. 

The first American animators drew on popular black representations, many of which were caricatures rooted in the culture of southern slavery. During the 1920s, the advent of the sound-synchronized cartoon inspired animators to blend antebellum-era black stereotypes with the modern black cultural expressions of jazz musicians and Hollywood actors. When the film industry set out to desexualize movies through the imposition of the Hays Code in the early 1930s, it regulated the portrayal of African Americans largely by segregating black characters from others, especially white females. At the same time, animators found new ways to exploit the popularity of African American culture by creating animal characters like Bugs Bunny who exhibited characteristics associated with African Americans without being identifiably black. 

By the 1950s, protests from civil rights activists and the growing popularity of white cartoon characters led animators away from much of the black representation on which they had built the medium. Even so, animated films today continue to portray African American characters and culture, and not necessarily in a favorable light. 

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with former animators, archived scripts for cartoons, and the films themselves, Lehman illustrates the intimate and unmistakable connection between African Americans and animation.

A visual journey of Caribbean art profiling more than 60 contemporary Caribbean artists, curated by award winning multidisciplinary artist and textile surface designer, Malene Barnett .

Through powerful interviews with more than 60 artists and designers of Caribbean heritage, accompanied by gorgeous photographs, Crafted Kinship takes readers on a unique journey through the world of Black Caribbean creativity. Each maker crafts a kinship with the land, the people, the culture of their country of origin. Their art explores and reflects deeply on themes like African origins, ancestors, Black womanhood/Black manhood, identity, joy, memory, and the complicated and painful history of migration and diaspora. An art that is more often than not multidisciplinary, created by makers who eschew traditional labels by reshaping the boundaries around art and design.

Curated by Malene Barnett, an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and textile surface designer of Jamaican and Vincentian descent, Crafted Kinship is the first book in which Caribbean makers share the intimate stories of their art-making process and how their countries of origin influence and inform how and what they create. Included are makers working across all mediums. Meet Anina Major, a Bahamian visual artist whose work attempts to reclaim the significance of straw basketry through her ceramics; Basil Watson, a Jamaican figurative artist and sculptor famous for his stunning bronze figures that are exhibited outdoors all over the world; Renee Cox, a Jamaican photographer whose work celebrates Black womanhood; La Vaughn Belle, a multidisciplinary artist from St. Croix who draws from archival sources to interrogate colonial legacies; Sonya Clark, a textile artist and educator of Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Bajan heritage who works with hair and other meaningful materials to explore issues of power, race, and gender; and Nyugen E. Smith, an interdisciplinary artist of Trinidadian and Haitian ancestry whose fluid stream of consciousness is expressed through objects, performance, music, and moving image.

An inspiring and practical guide to throwing parties where guests feel seen, cared for, and connected

Welcome to a new era of entertaining. Perfection is out, joy is in, and the only thing that matters is gathering with an open heart and a curious mind. And anyone—everyone!—can do it. Packed with inspiration, tips, lists, timelines, and recipes, Your Turn to Host is a complete party playbook with an attention to detail that could only come from a master event planner.

Whether hosting a birthday bash or an intimate dinner, a raucous game night, New Year’s Eve party, or Friendsgiving potluck, Amber Mayfield Hewett shows you how to succeed, step-by-step and with confidence and ease, from planning a menu to putting together the ultimate playlist, sparking conversation to choosing a timeless party favor. She calls it the Anatomy of a Good Shindig, teaching you both the art and science of being the host with the most.

"WOROFILA Worofila Street: Building African Architecture" "The first book by Senegalese practice Worofila, bringing together their research processes and projects to suggest an approach to making in architecture in contemporary Africa This collection of critical texts and project presentations reflects on the legacy of colonialism in building practices in West Africa, and explores local pre-colonial histories to forge a contemporary bioclimatic and ecological architectural language Worofila are a celebrated emerging practice based in Dakar and headed by principals Nzinga B. Mboup and Nicolas Rondet, whose work has been widely exhibited and discussed" "This irst book by celebrated Senegalese practice Woroila addresses the challenge facing the African city of today: to build in a way that is adapted to the lives of cur- rent inhabitants without compromising those of future generations. Drawing on abundant but often ignored pre-colonial methods and models of building, Woroila create bioclimatic architecture based around local, non-polluting materials, ances- tral knowledge, and democratic systems of construction and maintenance. Their work moves beyond the legacy of colonial-era architecture, imposed from other cultures and climates and frequently ill-suited, to recover and develop a sustainable African architectural language that reflects the continent's climate, ecology, and identity. Worofila Street: Building African Architecture offers an overview of Woroila's proliic work to date, with detailed explorations of the research, ideas, and tech- niques that structure it. Texts on the histories of building in Senegal and the pre- and post-colonial conditions of architecture on the African continent are accompanied by presentations of projects spanning housing, public buildings, infrastructure, landscapes, and experiments with materials. Together these propose a new typol- ogy of building in Senegal and inspire approaches to develop local and sustainable architectures across the world." "WOROFILA are a Dakar-based architectural practice founded in 2019 and headed by Nzinga B. Mboup and Nicolas Rondet. Woroila specialises in bioclimatic architecture and construction using local materials such as raw earth and typha, with the aim of promoting an architecture that is durable and in harmony with the climate."

Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen continues his exploration of colonial history and its legacies in this new book comprised of meditative photographs of Grenada’s flora. Taken on a trip to the island in the summer of 2024, these images reckon with the connections between landscape and historical trauma, studying Grenada’s plant life as permanent markers of beauty in a land ravaged by exploitation. Rendered in vivid colour, the images reflect the complex interlocking of history, heritage, and survival contained in the simplicity of the island flora. Taking as his touchpoint the late Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s elegy to his mother, ‘The Bounty’, McQueen’s project adopts a similarly poetic sensibility, attuned to the resilience of the island’s landscape and the dualities of the word ‘bounty’, which alludes to both the generosity of nature and the sum paid to slave catchers. Grounded in a deep reverence for the sublime natural world, Bounty invites a visceral engagement with the silent endurance of nature despite the grim realities of human history.

I Will Keep You in Good Company brings together pages and fragments from over twenty of Ghanaian-Russian artist Liz Johnson Artur’s personal workbooks – handmade volumes she has kept since the early 1990s. Part diary, part experimental playground, these books are where she shaped her photographic language through layering, cutting, annotating, and assembling: a space for processing not only images, but life itself. Each page is a tactile surface, combining photographic prints on canvas, tracing paper, faxes, and photo stock with screen-prints, handwriting, and clipped texts. The result is a sensorial, intimate archive of moments lived and witnessed – of friends, family, strangers, lovers – held with care and attention. ‘I like to be right next to it, in the middle of it, to take it home’, Johnson Artur writes. ‘To keep them close is a way of giving importance and appreciation.’ These workbooks are acts of presence – visual thinking made physical – and the foundation for her celebrated Black Balloon Archive, a project that honours communities across the African diaspora. I Will Keep You in Good Company is a candid, generous record of a photographer learning not only how to look, but how to stay close.

Passports 2012–2025 presents an intimate body of work by Keisha Scarville taken from an ongoing series centered around her father’s earliest passport photograph. The artist has reinterpreted the photograph over three hundred times to date, each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery – paints, beads, photograph fragments of Black bodies, gold leaf, glitter – to form a deeply textured act of photomontage. Interwoven with the passport works are archival images taken between the 1960s and 1980s in Guyana and New York City, where her father settled in the US, his self-portraits, Scarville’s own photographs of him and of Guyana’s striking landscape, and short transcripts of their conversations. Together these works excavate untold histories and disrupt the false neutrality of the passport image in an interrogation of citizenship and personhood, absence and materiality. Drawing on all these strands, the book examines and reimagines diaspora, bureaucratic images, and the archive, asking what it means to understand a person, especially a loved one, through an image. With a new text by Tina M. Campt, Professor of Humanities at Princeton University

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.

For leaders and practitioners in design institutions and communities, Dori 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.

Information on Black scientists and inventors is becoming more readily available to the general public and this is a welcome development. However, information specifically on the scientific and technological contributions of the Ancient Egyptians is not as readily available as one might think. Great books and essays have been written on the topic but many authors have pitched their works above the level of the ordinary reader. Other papers are in difficult-to-find journals and collections. Some writers, in an attempt to bring greater prestige to twentieth century European and European American science, dismiss all ancient science as superstition and error. They emphasize what the Ancient Egyptians did not know as opposed to what they did know. In this book, Blacks and Science Volume One, I bring the information together in one place. I write positively about what the Ancient Egyptians achieved and do not waste ink on what they did not achieve. Finally I present the information in as straightforward and accessible a way as possible. Should you read this book and learn the information: * You will gain a greater mastery over Black or African History * Your knowledge will be the envy of your friends and family * Learning your historical contributions will skyrocket your confidence and esteem * Your interest in all areas of human culture will dramatically increase * You will have a vast reserve of information to pass on to your children This book is largely a synthesis of my previously published Kindle e-books Ancient Egyptian Contributions to Science and Technology combined with The Mysterious Sciences of the Great Pyramid. The feedback I received from these e-books was positive, but many people asked me if was possible to turn these lecture essays into physical books. After all, not everybody possesses a Kindle! My response was to produce this book Blacks and Science Volume One. Very shortly, other volumes in this series will be issued. The first part of this book is a general introduction to the role played by the Ancient Egyptians in the origin and evolution of Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine & Surgery, Navigation & Cartography, Architecture, Construction and other areas that are more controversial. The second part of the book focuses on one monument--the Great Pyramid of Giza. In this section, I review the discussions and speculations of what the Ancient Egyptians probably knew about pi, phi, the Dimensions of the Earth, etcetera. Robin Walker

Jess Hilarious, comedy’s whip-smart and unapologetic superstar, continues to push boundaries and offers a hilarious account of the challenges in creating a healthy coparenting relationship and the lessons she’s learned on life's journey.

Before Jess Hilarious ever had dreams of telling jokes in front of sold-out arenas across the country, being featured on Wild-’n-Out, or becoming a cohost on The Breakfast Club, Jess dreamt of marrying her high school sweetheart and raising a family together in their hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. In hopes that having her partner’s child would solidify this outcome, Jess became pregnant at nineteen but begrudgingly learned that the vision she had for her life—as a wife and mother—would have to be reimagined.

After multiple attempts at a relationship between her and her son’s father failed, Jess accepted that, while they would never get married, they were forever linked by the lifetime commitment of raising a child together. With her trademark wit and perspective, Jess shares her experiences with valuable and vulnerable insight for coparents who struggle with what it means to put their children first while protecting them from the ups and downs of adult relationships. ’Til Death Do We Parent is an inspirational journey to coparenting with ease and humor.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me by Florida native Zora Neale Hurston was originally published in The World Tomorrow in May 1928. In this autobiographical piece about her own color, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life feeling different. In this beautiful piece, Hurston largely focuses on the similarities we all share and on her own self-identity in the face of difference. Through it all, I remain myself.  This short work is part of Applewood’s American Roots series, tactile mementos of American passions by some of America’s most famous writers and thinkers.

The eloquent story of Eileen Harris Norton's collection and its pivotal role in championing the work of women artists, artists of color, and changing narratives of contemporary art.

Since she acquired her very first artwork from Los Angeles printmaker Ruth Waddy in 1976, Eileen Harris Norton's collection has bloomed into a beautiful reflection of her interest in the practices of women and artists of color, and work made in California. Alongside the eponymous exhibition Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, Destiny Is a Rose celebrates fifty years of Harris Norton's remarkable collection, taking its title from a painting in the collection by Kerry James Marshall and featuring numerous iconic works of contemporary art by Mark Bradford, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Yoshimoto Nara, Adrian Piper, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and more. Texts by art historian Kellie Jones and curator Ingrid Schaffner delve into the critical role that education and philanthropy, representation and identity, and personal relationships with artists and curators have played in shaping Harris Norton's visionary collecting practice. Offering deep insight into the act and impact of collecting, Destiny Is a Rose is a tribute to Harris Norton's ongoing role as a vital agent of change and growth within the contemporary art world.

"McMillian endows simple objects with affecting political resonances...There is anger in them, but there is hope too." ―Frieze

Published with Columbia Museum of Art.

Multimedia artist Rodney McMillian (born 1969) conjoins political texts, found domestic materials and archival footage into assemblages that confront the complex histories of class, race, landscape and region that inform American identity. In A Son of the Soil, McMillian trains his eye on the history of landscape representation in the South. Through large-scale abstract expanses painted on old bedding, sculptures constructed from post-consumer objects and archival film footage, McMillian evokes the land's tillage and spoilage, histories of ownership and the charged relationship between land and the body. A Son of the Soil presents a bevy of scholarly essays that examine McMillian's oeuvre, focusing on the artist's interplay between urban industrialism and domestic space, his visual culture and art historical sources and, more broadly, the relationship between a region and a nation.