For readers of Permission to Come Home, Minor Feelings, and Pleasure Activism, an insightful guide for “hyphenates” seeking to better understand themselves and help others understand them, too.

What does it mean to live a hyphenated life? 

So many folks are forced to toggle across the multiple layers of who they are, and across the diverse spaces they occupy. They may be children of immigrants, 1.5 gen, of color; they may be disabled, neurodivergent, or queer. Regardless of how they identify, they exist in an in-between space while also trying to fit into the dominant culture. With a foot in multiple worlds, belonging fully to none, it can be hard to figure out where they fit in.

Dr. Han Ren, licensed psychologist and a hyphenate herself, seeks to offer solutions for those with intersectional identities to fully express who they are in any and every environment. The Hyphenated Life is an intersectional, inside out excavation of how existing in marginalized bodies affects the ways folks show up in dominant culture and predominantly white spaces. 

Offering tools, stories, conversations, solutions and insights, this book will resonate with anyone who is navigating the intricacies of their multicultural identity development.

'Stop creating from the perspective of what other people want you to make.' Dive headfirst into the world of ultimate pop sensation and rapper Doechii, in a vibrant celebration of the ‘Anxiety’ icon’s most incredible moments to date. From her early life growing up in Florida to her incredible sweep of awards at the VMAs, you’ll learn all there is to know about the ‘NISSAN ULTIMA’ singer’s journey to stratospheric fame and global popularity, including her sold-out shows, festival performances and internet-breaking fashion moments. Packed with 50 gorgeous images accompanied by insights into her life, join the ‘DENIAL IS A RIVER’ megastar on a visual journey of her life so far. With powerful vocals and slick dance moves, there’s no doubt this ‘BLOOM' performer is an unstoppable force in the music industry. Making waves with her bold lyrics, '90s style and unforgettable music videos, ICONIC: Doechii proves her status as one of the most exciting new artists of her generation.

A completely revised and updated handbook of eye-opening—and frequently myth-busting—facts and figures about the real lives of Black Americans today, called “a gift of knowledge” by Susan Taylor, former editor-in-chief of Essence magazine

There’s no defeating white supremacist myths without real data. Hailed as “an important resource for anyone seeking a better understanding of . . . Black America” (Benjamin Todd Jealous, former NAACP president and CEO), this completely revised and updated edition of Black Stats offers new facts, critical analyses, and information on the current state of Black life in the United States, at the quarter-century mark, unhindered by jargon and assumptions.

Monique Couvson, author of the acclaimed Pushout, has compiled statistics from a broad spectrum of telling categories that illustrate the quality of life and the possibility of (and barriers to) advancement for a group at the heart of American society. With fascinating information on a wide range of topics including education, entertainment, sports, and the arts, the environment, health, justice, military service, money and jobs, science and technology, and more, this “invaluable resource” (International Journal of Communications) will enrich and inform many public debates while challenging commonly held yet often misguided perceptions.

Called a “great tool offering descriptive statistics on the condition of our nation’s promise of freedom, justice, equality and economic opportunity for all” by Marc H. Morial, president and CEO, National Urban League, Black Stats simultaneously highlights measures of incredible progress, conveys the disparate impacts of social policies and practices, and surprises with revelations that span many subjects. It is an essential tool for advocates, educators, and anyone seeking racial justice and to understand the complex state of our nation.

Cedric Robinson’s widely acclaimed study on Marxism and race has enjoyed a celebratory renaissance in recent years, becoming commonplace across the disciplines and beyond to activist and left circles. The Antinomies of Black Marxism contests its now‑enormous influence, bringing together leading scholars of Marxism to reassess the decisive question of race and Marxist thought and practice.

While varied in their approaches, the contributors all affirm that racism is a modern production of capitalist class exploitation. They put forth a trenchant and uncompressing critique of Black Marxism. They see Robinson’s transhistoric racialism and hostility to Marxism as politically dangerous to the extent that it propagates a race over a class consciousness that undermines working‑class unity. They place a premium on multiethnic, transnational proletarian struggle against capitalism at a time of epochal crisis in the global capitalist system.

This indispensable compendium makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates on race, class, capitalism, and social inequality and is essential to classes on Black Studies and black social thought, as it provides a thorough analysis and critique of one of the landmark contemporary critical theorists in US political and social theory.

From an international cast of leading activist communicators, a timely and instructive handbook for telling stories that change the world

The twenty-first century has seen a profound shift in the global sociopolitical and economic landscape, shaped by seismic interventions ranging from the War on Terror to the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2000 and 2024, social movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, climate justice, the Fight for $15, Palestine liberation, health care for all, and queer and trans resistance have illuminated a new narrative—one rooted in an inclusive vision of society, driven by a newly politicized and radicalized generation. This shift did not happen by chance. Movement workers have meticulously crafted communications and narrative strategies, honing their political messaging and storytelling to seize narrative power in today’s struggles.

In Liberation Stories, today’s foremost progressive and leftist communicators, organizers, artists, journalists, and academics share their collective wisdom in one powerful volume. Featuring in-depth case studies of both contemporary and historical movements, Liberation Stories distills successful theories, strategies, and tactics for anyone wanting to understand—and participate in—the diverse initiatives currently shaping our society.

As far-right and conservative movements gain traction worldwide—attacking our books, our bodies, and our democracies—Liberation Stories emerges as a vital resource for constructing the world we envision, one story at a time.

A Civil Rights Journey presents the astonishing archive of Dr Doris Derby: photographer, activist, and professor of anthropology. Active throughout the Civil Rights Movements of the mid twentieth century in the southern United States, particularly Mississippi, Derby acted as a photographer, organiser and teacher, making photographs of the intimate and human side of the everyday struggle for survival and human rights. She photographed both the organisation of political events, meetings, and funerals, alongside the literacy, co-operative and community theatre programmes, many of which she founded, and encountered much danger and tragedy along the way. Here we see the speeches and protests that gave the movement its defining moments, as well as vital figures including Muhammad Ali, Alice Walker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Jesse Jackson. We also see classrooms and church halls, doctors and secretaries: everyday scenes of joy, frustration, curiosity, and connection, in which the determination and collective actions and resolve and actions of the movement are equally expressed. This extensive volume presents Derby's images in sequences that between them document rural and urban poverty, offer lucid ethnographies of particular streets and families, track the day-to-day lives of African American children growing up in the Mississippi Delta, and bear witness to such pivotal events as the Jackson State University shooting, the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1968 Democratic Convention. Derby's photographs offer us an invaluably rich portrait of a historical moment whose effects have defined today's world and issues a vital reassertion of the work that remains to be done. Artist photographer Hannah Collins has worked with Doris Derby to recount the events photographed in extensive texts which accompany the images.

Shining Lights: Black Women in Photography in the 1980s–90s is the first critical anthology of Black women photographers active in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, providing a richly illustrated overview of a significant and overlooked chapter of British photographic history. Seen through the lens of Britain’s sociopolitical and cultural contexts, the publication tells a unique story from the dual perspectives of lived experience and historical investigation, authored and researched by one of the period’s most influential photographic artists, Joy Gregory. The pioneering and diverse work created by Black women artists in the UK over the course of these two decades marked an important juncture in both documentary and conceptual practices, including the experimental use of photomontage, self-portraiture, staged imagery, and photography in dialogue with other media. Shining Lights showcases the expertise and evolution of this work, illuminated by ephemera and archival material, new essays and roundtable conversations, foregrounding a variety of individual artistic developments as well as the communities fostered around them. Amongst the fifty-eight photographers included are Maxine Walker, Ingrid Pollard, Claudette Holmes, Roshini Kempadoo, Mohini Chandra, Carole Wright, Joy Gregory, Sutapa Biswas, Maud Sulter, Brenda Agard, Anita McKenzie, Mitra Tabrizian, Poulomi Desai, Virginia Nimarkoh, Jennie Baptiste, Nudrat Afza, Merle Van den Bosch, and Eileen Perrier. This comprehensive publication by Joy Gregory is developed in close collaboration with photography historian and writer Taous Dahmani, and is co-published with Autograph, London.

The classic, New York Times-bestselling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America.

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? How can we get past our reluctance to discuss racial issues?

Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about communicating across racial and ethnic divides and pursuing antiracism. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand dynamics of race and racial inequality in America.

The incredible journey of activist Opal Lee—known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth—is brought to life in this biographical graphic novel that not only explores Opal’s remarkable path, but the history of the holiday of Juneteenth itself.

From the 1860s to Ms. Opal’s childhood home, from her years as a teacher to the White House, First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth seeks to give readers an insight into the history behind one of the central figures in the creation of America’s newest federal holiday, Juneteenth.

Born in 1926, Opal Lee grew up in a racially divided America and dedicated her life to overcoming the obstacles presented therein. A lifelong educator, Ms. Opal has been a community activist all her life, and would take on the movement to celebrate and commemorate Juneteenth not just as a holiday, but as a symbol of comprehensive freedom for all people.

Ms. Opal’s life personifies the fight for everyday freedom that leads to lasting change. As the Grandmother of Juneteenth says, “There is so much more to do.”

Written by acclaimed journalist, producer, and author Angélique Roché (My Super Hero is Black) and drawn by a trio of talented artists—including Alvin Epps (I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005: A Graphic Novel), Bex Glendining (the upcoming Indigo Port), and rising star Millicent Monroe—The First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth promises to illuminate the life of a singular woman and the history of a momentous holiday, with additional back matter providing more insights into Juneteenth’s history and the making of this graphic novel tribute.

Leading Binnizá and Maya Ch'orti' scientist Jessica Hernandez, PhD, weaves together Indigenous knowledge, environmental science, and personal family stories in her highly anticipated follow-up to the LA Times best-seller Fresh Banana Leaves.

Not every environmental problem is a result of climate change, but every environmental and climate change problem is a result of colonialism.

Dr. Jessica Hernandez offers readers an Indigenous, Global-South lens on the climate crisis, delivering a compelling and urgent exploration of its causes—and its costs. She shares how the impacts of colonial climate catastrophe—from warming oceans to forced displacement of settler ontologies—can only be addressed at the root if we reorient toward Indigenous science and follow the lead of Indigenous peoples and communities.

Growing Papaya Trees explores:

* Energy as a sociopolitical issue
* The interconnectedness of natural disasters, sociopolitical turmoil, and forced migration
* Our oceans, our forests, and our Indigenous futures
* Moving Indigenous science from mere acknowledgement into real action
* How to nourish Indigenous roots when displaced beyond borders

Dr. Hernandez asks: what does it mean to be Indigenous when we’re separated from our lands? How do we nurture future generations knowing they, too, will have to live away from their ancestral places? She illuminates that cultures are not lost, even amid genocide, turmoil, war, and climate displacement—and shows us how to be better kin to each other against the ecological violence, colonial oppression, and distorted status quo of the Global North.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2024 • An award-winning journalist's exploration of how race, identity and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics

“A deeply reported, surprisingly personal exploration of a phenomenon that is little understood in our politics: the affiliation of Latino voters with causes and candidates that would seem, at first glance, unwelcoming to them."—Rachel Maddow

Democrats have historically assumed they can rely on the Latino vote, but recent elections have called that loyalty into question. In fact, despite his vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric and disastrous border policies, Trump won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Now, journalist Paola Ramos pulls back the curtain on these voters, traveling around the country to uncover what motivates them to vote for and support issues that seem so at odds with their self-interest.

From coast to coast, cities to rural towns, Defectors introduces readers to underdog GOP candidates, January 6th insurrectionists, Evangelical pastors and culture war crusaders, aiming to identify the influences at the heart of this rightward shift. Through their stories, Ramos shows how tribalism, traditionalism, and political trauma within the Latino community has been weaponized to radicalize and convert voters who, like many of their white counterparts, are fearful of losing their place in American society. Cross-cultural and assiduously reported, Defectors highlights how one of America's most powerful and misunderstood electorates may come to define the future of American politics.

From Terrell Carter, a standout on Tyler Perry’s new Netflix drama Beauty in Black as Varney, Problem Child is a heart-wrenching story that will take you on an emotional rollercoaster ride that makes the Twilight Zone look like Disneyland.

Problem Child is the unbelievably true story of Terrell Carter, an American musician and actor who grew up in Buffalo, New York, in a dysfunctional family, each member crazier than the next. And the Problem Child is the only one in the story who may, or may not, actually have a problem. An emotional journey of trials and revelations, with a huge secret at its core, this story may force you to laugh—just to keep from crying.

“Terrell, we’re still feeling the goosebumps.”—Quincy Jones

“My beautiful baby boy, even more beautiful on the inside, and he sings even better than that. Now Ms. Patti is giving him his wings to fly among the greats.”—Patti LaBelle

A long-overdue corrective to the history of rock ‘n’ roll and alternative music, repopulating it with the extraordinary Black artists and influential figures who steered its course, from an author, journalist, and front woman of the British post punk band Big Joanie.

The history of rock and roll and alternative music is often told in bold, sweeping, isolated moments that are removed from the context of their time. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the stories we tell center primarily on the achievements of white men like Elvis Presley, The Ramones, Nirvana, and David Bowie. White men who were the stars, white men who supposedly changed the game, white men who seemingly were at the forefront of every musical innovation in the 20th and 21st centuries. These rock and roll retellings perpetuate the belief that white men were the most important people to wield a guitar, strut on stage, or pound out a pummeling drumbeat. What is missing in these stories is everything in between—the people, the places, and the scenes that connect the dots—and you can’t tell the history of any music scene, let alone alternative music, without the Black community.

From the genre's earliest moments, Black musicians—like gospel entertainer Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the 1930s-40s and rock and roll legend Chuck Berry in the 1950s—have consistently pushed musical boundaries that forever impacted the music that followed. Throughout the decades, numerous Black entertainers continued to add their take on rock and alternative genres, expanding and building on what was already there to create what we know as alternative music today: look no further than the electric fire of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar licks in the '60s, the kaleidoscopic melee of hardcore and reggae that was Bad Brains in the late '70s, and the funkadelic swagger of Living Colour in the '80s.

Despite their groundbreaking contributions, why have Black musicians been so neglected from the historical canon? Is alternative music still seen as a white genre, and how are Black musicians and fans making space for themselves in the music scenes they love? We Were Here tells the story of Black artists performing in alternative genres from punk to rock and roll, indie to new wave, alongside their Black fans. Through brand new interviews and meticulous research, Phillips documents the history of Black people’s influence on these genres, highlighting the key players, assessing the legacy of their work, and drawing attention to those who have been obscured from history.

Where rock magazines and music books previously omitted or misunderstood the stories of Black artists and fans, this book centers their voices and attempts to right the wrongs of the past. Along the way, Phillips infuses her own coming-of-age story as a Black female musician in the punk scene, alongside a cultural analysis of rock and alternative music history.

The inspiring memoir of a brilliant young man who, sentenced to life in prison, refused to surrender his future—a story so powerful that it transformed even the judge who handed down the sentence.
 
If our world were more just, Chris Young would have been crossing a stage at college graduation at the age of 22. Instead, he was marched into a maximum-security federal prison, facing life under mandatory drug sentencing laws. Like far too many young Black men from his neighborhood in Clarksville, Tennessee, this was where his story was supposed to end.
 
But one day in the prison library, a book caught his eye: an encyclopedia. As he began to turn the pages, Chris felt himself transported. Knowledge became a portal. He began to confront the nihilism around him, the trauma of his past, and the cruelty of a system determined to confine him. From the library, his cell, and even solitary confinement, Chris built an education from scratch, studying philosophy, art, anthropology, history, physics, and politics. He learned to analyze the stock market and taught himself how to code without a computer. He trained his mind—and refused to let prison dictate the limits of his imagination. At his sentencing hearing, Chris gave such a moving speech that the judge resigned from his lifetime appointment to the bench and fought to free him.
 
Started in solitary confinement and finished beyond bars, The Wound Is Where the Light Enters is a powerful meditation on choice, consequence, and human potential, told through the story of a man who was never given a chance—and who fought until, at last, he was.

For fans of The Body Keeps Score and How to Do the Work, trauma therapist Simone Saunders bridges the gap where talk therapy falls short—showing you how to move beyond self-awareness and reconnect with the sensations, signals and emotions your body has been shaped by, breaking cycles of emotional disconnection once and for all.

Many of us assume that once we understand why we feel the way we do, things will finally change. Traditional talk therapy often equips us with the language and self-awareness we’ve been missing — yet so many of us find ourselves stuck. We can recognize the trigger, name the pattern, and explain the story, yet still feel unable to create tangible change in our day-to-day lives. So, where’s the disconnect? What’s missing?

Registered social worker and trauma therapist Simone Saunders believes the answer lies in crossing the threshold from the mind into the body—moving from self-awareness into a felt, embodied understanding. In Where Do You Feel That in Your Body, Simone guides you through a gentle and practical approach to noticing what emotions feel like in your body, understanding the protective patterns shaped by identity and past experiences, and recognizing how your nervous system responds to stress and disconnection. You’ll learn how to read your body’s signals with curiosity, and how to build the capacity to stay present with your emotions instead of disconnecting from them.

In recent years, the language of the body—posture, facial expressions, movements, and sensations—has become more widely recognized for the integral role it plays in shaping and maintaining our survival patterns. Where Do You Feel That in Your Body shows you how to build a steady, supportive relationship with your nervous system that grows and shifts over time. You’ll understand how your body and mind communicate, how identity and culture shape your emotional responses, and how to gently shift the patterns that once helped you survive.

An exploration of the link between politics of migration, prospects of integration, and ethnic identity among Iranian immigrants and their descendants in the United States, spanning from the 1970s to the present day.

Thousands of Iranians fled their homeland when the 1978–1979 revolution ended the fifty-year reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. Some fled to Europe and Canada, while others settled in the United States, where anti-Iranian sentiment flared as the hostage crisis unfolded. For those who chose America, Texas became the fourth-largest settlement area. Iranians in Texas culls data, interviews, and participant observations in Iranian communities in Houston, Dallas, and Austin to reveal the difficult, private world of cultural pride, religious experience, marginality, culture clashes, and other aspects of the lives of these immigrants.

Examining the political nature of immigration between Iran and the United States and social, cultural, and economic life for Iranian immigrants and their American-born children, Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher incorporates his own experience as a Texas scholar born in Iran. In this revised edition, two new chapters and a new introduction and conclusion provide updates on what has happened in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, including the Iran nuclear deal and resulting controversy, the Muslim ban, and the global protests over the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini for not wearing a hijab. Bringing to life a unique immigrant population in the context of global politics, Iranians in Texas overturns stereotypes and echoes diverse voices.

An examination of the interconnectedness of brown-racialized people across multiple identities, told through case studies of television, literature, and writing.

As a Filipinx immigrant to the United States, Sony Coráñez Bolton has frequently been mistaken as Mexican. Dos X theorizes such misrecognition. What does it mean to exist in this liminal state, which Coráñez Bolton dubs the “racial uncanny”? What generative possibilities emerge from the presumed interchangeability of Latinx and Filipinx bodies—and from the in-betweenness of brownness as such?

Dos X tracks misrecognition through cultural products like the TV series Undone, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, and the nonfiction work of Jose Antonio Vargas. Misrecognition, Coráñez Bolton argues, produces moments of uncanniness in which subjects experience dysphoric attachments to identities that aren’t supposed to be theirs. In the context of racial capitalism, racial dysphoria is a disability because it undermines certainty about what one’s body is and therefore what role one is meant to play as a laborer. But racial dysphoria can also be revealing. Coráñez Bolton identifies vast potential in this supposed disability, which compels its “sufferers” to confront their shared position within the social, political, and economic organization of capital’s empire, opening new avenues for liberatory solidarity.

Curanderas—traditional healers in Mexican culture—bridge the gaps between multiple planes of existence—spiritual and material, modern and pre-modern—dispensing medicinal herbs, prayers, and instruction. Elizabeth de la Portilla writes of the world and practices of San Antonio curanderas. As a scholar, an ethnographer, and a curandera in training, her parallel perspectives uniquely aid readers in understanding this subordinated culture. Retelling the stories various healers have shared, interpreting their answers to her probing questions, and describing the herbs and recipes they use in their arts, the author vividly illuminates the borderland context of San Antonio. Scholars and readers of anthropology, sociology, Chicana and Chicano studies, and women's studies will savor the many layers of meaning and application in They All Want Magic.

Analyzing how artists reimagine migrant disappearance and visibility at the US–Mexico border.

In the mid-1990s, the US government implemented Prevention through Deterrence, a major buildup of troops, walls, and surveillance around El Paso and San Diego. Cut off from these crucial urban crossings, migrants flowed into the dangerous surrounding deserts, where some ten thousand have since died. This is all according to plan: Pentagon documents describe the strategy of funneling migrants toward “mortal danger.”

In this bracing critique, China Medel explores the aesthetics enabling and resisting the crisis of migrant death. The nation-state’s performance of sovereignty along the border, predicated on mass casualties, is tolerated and even celebrated, thanks to the images in our heads of racialized and therefore criminal bodies, made invisible as they disintegrate in the baking sand. Spectral Aesthetics shows how state officials and mainstream media, relying on postracial ideologies and white-supremacist agendas, collectively foster this picture of a brown body so abject that it is disposable. In close readings of artworks contesting this murderous visual regime, Medel discovers an alternative kind of sight, one emphasizing the ghostly traces of the dead. These are images not of the individual “alien” but of life itself, indisposable.

Deep in the Soul of Texas: An Anthology of Black Literature from the Lone Star State presents vivid firsthand accounts of resistance, perseverance, and triumph of the Black experience as the first-ever anthology of African American Texan writers. From Giddings poet Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902–1981) to Beaumont native and intellectual Amilcar Shabazz, this anthology highlights the most prominent literary figures of each decade and features Texas’ leading African American writers of today.

Edited by Cary Clack, the first Black metro columnist at the San Antonio Express-News, this anthology represents an important attempt at uncovering and celebrating the roots of Black writing and writers from and about Texas. This collection of poetry, fiction, essays, drama, speeches, and memoir join to celebrate story, imagination, and language of the last 150 years of Texas history. Within each chapter, the anthology grows one step closer in addressing a longstanding question that looms over the Lone Star State: what does it mean to be Black in Texas?

Each of the five parts in this anthology features a different facet of Black history from escape and heritage to folklore and injustice. Illuminating the varied Black experience in Texas, this anthology fills a major gap in Texas literature. Deep in the Soul of Texas brings light to all Texans as it helps change conversations―not just about what it means to be Black in Texas but expanding conceptions of what being “a Texan” truly means.

In the words of series editor Steven L. Davis, We Are Nature Defending Itself: An Anthology of Women on Bodies, Borders, and Place is “a revelation, a multicultural blend of well-known and emerging writers who come together to give nature a voice in our literature and our lives.” Not least of the many benefits to readers are its contributions from prominent Latina writers, presented here as advocates for the environment. Though this theme has long existed in Chicana literature, it has never been positioned as front and center as it is in this anthology.

Volume editor Cordelia E. Barrera also includes notable Anglo, African American, and Indigenous contributors, crafting a true cultural blend of distinctive writing that will appeal to older generations while inspiring new ones. By incorporating these border voices, this collection effectively challenges long-dominant mythologies of the American West and offers a prominent place for literatures of social justice and the environment.

The mix of poems, stories, and essays are divided into three sections: Bodies, Landscape, and Practices. Part I begins with the idea of experiencing and feeling a history of the body’s contact with landscapes and places as repositories of knowledge. Part II extends beyond particulars of private or public life to consider issues of place as sites and locations of radical action. Part III features ruminations and traditions of remembering, highlighting reciprocal relationships to the natural world that extend outward to the ways “women’s work” in and around the home shapes communal processes that reinforce continuity across time and space.

We Are Nature Defending Itself adds important new work to the growing canon of nature and borderlands writing by women of color. In turn, these new voices deepen and broaden our understanding of humanity and its relationship to the natural environment.

A richly illustrated reflection on a century of Black queer art and culture featuring seven essays from leading scholars.

The word ecstasy derives from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to put out of place.” It passed into English through the Old French extasie, which roughly translates as “rapturous.” Ecstasy, today, can be understood as a form of transcendence, often through an indiscriminate combination of extremes. Art’s truest depictions of ecstasy exist in the muddled territory between exaltation and despair. Transcendence highlights visual representations of Black queer ecstasy in a variety of media from the last one hundred years that challenge its absence from the historical record. Centering Blackness and queerness creates the conditions to investigate the potential of queer perspectives around the paradoxes of pleasure and pain, excess and lack, and autonomy and dependence.

This catalogue features seven essays by preeminent scholars of Black LGBTQ+ art and culture, each based on one of the volume’s subthemes: Portraiture; Beyond Figuration; Dance and Movement; Spirituality; Sex and Sensuality; Black Queer Futures; and Altered States. Together these themes represent the foundations of queer experiences and offer readers a space to engage with artwork and ephemera that highlight an ecstatically abundant past and advocate for a more inclusive and equitable future.

The inaugural issue of the movement-focused and future-forward Abolition Journal quarterly after it was relaunched by the Philadelphia-based Abolition School.

This pilot issue of the revived Abolition Journal is produced by the Philadelphia-based W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction. It brings together two dozen urgent and timely interventions in political debates around abolition and aims to show how this abstract idea manifests itself in our daily lives.

These interventions, authored by a diverse cast of contributors, including academics and attorneys, so-called felons and physicians, artists and educators, and parents, playwrights and poets, explore the everyday experiences that come with trying to live out an abolitionist politics. In the words of the editors, these experiences include “the daily victories and errands, reflections and runarounds, gestures and drama, habits and heartbreaks, setbacks and surrenders, excuses and evasions, breakdowns and breakthroughs.”

The issue curates a variety of content, including political essays, short stories, poetry, interviews, and speeches, each resonating and reflecting in their own unique way on the central theme “Everyday Sh!t.” They offer thoughts and reflections on structure, practice, care, and direction to deepen existing movement knowledge and invite new audiences to see themselves mirrored within this work.
Without exception, these are stories of sincere experience mixed with radical poetic visions culled from the issue contributors’ plurality of pasts, presents, and prefigurative futures. Grounded in Philadelphia, yet looking out onto the whole wide world, Abolition Journal aims to reflect the lived complexity that can be messy and self-defeating, but equally authentic and inspiring.

A profound and poetic memoir, tracing the wounds that racism and colonialism have left on Black people across borders. 

With astute insight and immersive prose, Bonhomme outlines a personal and political history of life in the United States, Haiti, and Germany, discovering what it means to be Black at home and abroad. She unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism and explores how communities are resisting the weight of centuries of history.

Whether examining debt, medical racism, art, or reparations, Tending to Our Wounds cuts a breathtaking course between the past and the present, the individual and the collective―identifying the tendrils of history in the everyday and outlining a path to real freedom.

“Mahalia Jackson was the greatest gospel singer of her time and an overlooked leader in the Civil Rights Movement. Her voice seemed born of heaven.” ?Henry Louis Gates Jr.

If Americans today still recognize the name Mahalia Jackson, they might recall that she was perhaps the greatest gospel singer who ever lived. But for many people, there is no awareness at all, not even for an entertainer whose “Move On Up a Little Higher” sold eight million copies, who headlined two Newport Jazz Festivals and performed before four United States presidents.

While this rich musical legacy is admired by those in the know, virtually no one recognizes Jackson’s astonishing role in American civil rights history. In this startling new depiction of the renowned gospel singer, New York Times best-selling author Timothy B. Tyson and Mary D. Williams, an acclaimed gospel singer herself, bring Jackson back to soaring life by positioning her as the major civil rights figure she, in fact, was.

Mahlia Jackson, Moving On Up a Little Higher then traces Jackson’s career from abject poverty in New Orleans to global superstardom, revealing how even after meteoric success, Jackson maintained an unwavering devotion to Black freedom. In the 1930s in Chicago, even before the Civil Rights Movement took its modern shape, she used her rapturous voice to support independent Black political power. Her work only intensified in the 1940s and beyond when she campaigned first for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later for Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson; headlined in Montgomery for the 1955–56 bus boycott; sang for the Birmingham campaign and on the Selma March; and performed at the iconic 1963 March on Washington, where she urged Martin Luther King Jr. to “Tell ’em about the dream.” In retrospect what becomes historically significant is that Mahalia Jackson was present at so many civil rights events, even singing a divine rendition of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” at Dr. King’s funeral in 1968. Weakened and worn, she succumbed to heart failure four years later at the age of sixty.

Weaving together Mahalia Jackson’s inspiring life journey with her soulful music into a transcendent text, this biography ultimately casts Mahalia Jackson as we’ve never seen her before, as a guiding light for the Civil Rights Movement, whose message still speaks to our struggles today.

5 illustrations

A groundbreaking history of elite black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century, seen through the lens of the author's ancestors

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City.

Black Gotham challenges many of the accepted "truths" about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase "nineteenth-century black Americans" means enslaved people, that "New York state before the Civil War" refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow.

Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, Black Gotham is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

“An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.” —Isabel Wilkerson

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. South to America is an essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.

Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.

From the preeminent scholar on Black masculinity in America, Save a Seat for Me is Mark Anthony Neal's attempt to bring his scholarship on fatherhood to a broader audience.

Save a Seat for Me embraces the nuances of how contemporary frameworks of masculinity informed by unprecedented advances in women and LGBTQ communities have necessitated a reimagining of the societal expectations a father plays in the public and private sectors of their homes.

The soul of this book centers on Neal's confrontation of the various political, cultural, historical narratives and messages that inform the role of Black fatherhood, and fatherhood at large, which has put him at odds with the way he fathers his own children.

Raised by a working class father, during a time when American society conceived of the role of father as protector, provider, and disciplinarian, Neal struggles with these expectations as his education (a doctorate's degree), profession (tenured professor at one of the best colleges in the country), and financial position (making more money than his father ever did) are drastically different than that of his father. Linking his father to his own fathering of his two daughters, Neal grounds his intellectual arguments about Black fatherhood in experience and emotion makes for a vulnerable read, as well as a transformative one.

In our culture, the public performance of fatherhood keeps us from wondering what the practice of being a father looks like in private. Neal is opening a long overdue door to the interiority that Black men particularly--and men living in a patriarchal society generally--have only learned existed in the last twenty years.

The autobiography of the godfather of urban streetwear, American fashion designer and hip-hop cultural icon, Karl Kani whose clothes were worn by everyone from Michael Jackson to Tupac, Aaliyah to Biggie, and Nas to Jay-Z.

Karl Kani tells the story of how Karl Kani created the first quintessential fashion brand of the hip-hop generation. Like the genre that became a soundtrack to the clothes Kani designed, Karl’s brand went from local mom and pop stores in Brooklyn to national recognition and international renown.

Following Kani’s ascension as a Costa Rican immigrant striving to make a name for himself, Karl Kani also tracks parallels between how the fashion, like the music of Black and Brown kids living in the inner cities, went from marginalized subculture to the mainstream. And while there is always a price for gaining mainstream recognition and the material success that invariably follows, there’s an even heftier expense for those who refuse to compromise one’s own brand and principles to gain that entry.

Once hip-hop became a billion-dollar industry and one of America’s most lauded and coveted cultural exports, many of the fashion brands that would’ve never approached rap artists before began granting access to the upper echelons of luxury fashion. As a result, many of hip-hop’s flagship brands cashed in big payouts—Rocawear, Sean John, FUBU, Mecca, Enyce, Phat Farm, G-Unit. Karl Kani was one of the few, if not only, designers who saw that his name, the culture it represented, and the business he built was worth keeping.

Karl Kani is both a cautionary tale and an inspirational one about the price to keep one’s name in an industry looking to cash out, and how Kani continues to find an international audience for his clothes as he’s being pushed out of the American market in favor of European brands that illustrate the shift in the fashion world. Karl Kani refused to sell out, paid a price for ownership, and weathered to storm to be one of the few legacy hip-hop clothing brands to have contemporary cultural relevance.

Embrace and learn to love your natural hair with this eye-opening guide from “hair whisperer” to the stars, Felicia Leatherwood.

As a child there was nothing Felicia Leatherwood wanted more than long, flowy hair. But Felicia’s short afro grew up and out, not down. Her father who styled Felicia’s hair in her mother’s place, often didn’t know his own strength, and would rip Felicia’s delicate strands as he combed through her hair. At a young age, Felicia internalizes her hair as something to be managed, tamed, instead of a source of pride.

As hair trends come and go, Felicia’s beloved Jherri curl is replaced by every braided style in the book. She even tries her hand at weaves and relaxers. Felicia finds she loves doing hair so much she leaves her high-paying corporate job to enroll in beauty school and lands a hot new job at a salon where celebrities breeze through to freshen up their look. It isn’t long until Felicia is styling her first celebrity client. Felicia’s love of hair takes her around the world, to movie sets and several red carpets.

In Root Therapy, Felicia shares her journey of hair positivity, which opens the door to a beautiful spiritual journey of self-love. As a celebrity stylist and natural hair educator, Felicia has made it her life’s mission to share the message of hair acceptance. Complete with exercises that show you the merits of owning one’s complete self, Felicia encourages you to embrace your natural hair.

An incantation of strength and solace for persisting in twenty-first-century America

“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” In his sweeping third collection, Charleston brings a poet’s ear for echo and rhythm to bear on American history and life after 2016. For Charleston, these rhymes cut two ways: the long tradition of American racism and fascism, and the steady pulse of Black persistence. The collection’s titular invocation frames each poem, at times an oratory to rally a crowd, in other moments a private prayer whispered as the speaker gathers himself to face another day. Charleston insists that should we cede memory of our national biography―whether to repression or indifference―we will witness the country’s dissolution into something unrecognizable to many, yet all too familiar to its most marginalized people. But with each reiteration and riff, he also invokes a tenuous hope―that if we summon an American history of Black resistance, we might still make a more perfect union.

In 90+ soul-satisfying recipes, Emmy Award–winning Taste the Culture host, beloved Top Chef star, chef, and restaurateur Justin Sutherland offers his take on easy Southern-inspired home cooking…with a Northern Twist.
 
Justin owns multiple restaurants in the Twin Cities, though his reputation is national. You may know him from television, where he won an Iron Chef episode, competed on Season 16 of Top Chef, and is one of the chefs featured on Fast Foodies and is producer and host of Taste the Culture, both airing on TruTV/TBS.
 
In his highly anticipated first cookbook, Justin shares the inspiration and foundation behind his approach to his signature Southern cooking, which includes his upbringing in the Northern Midwest and the South, as well as his African-American and Asian heritage.
 
Northern Soul features his signature recipes for lunch, brunch, dinner, snacks, late-night meals, and cocktail recipes. Justin shares how you can make easy, traditional Southern recipes with a Northern flair, in your own kitchen. From recipes like Chicken and Waffles and Creole Jambalaya to Bourbon Pecan Pie with Maple Whip and Hot Mac and Cheese, plus spice blends, sauces, rubs and pickles, you’ll learn just how deliciously southern soul and northern heart blend.
 
Praise for Northern Soul:
 
“I am covered in chills reading Justin Sutherland’s book. It’s mindful, soulful, important, and truly American—because it is a global story. We are one. We are all connected if we choose to be. With Justin’s cookbook, we all come one step closer, and one meal closer, to one another.”
  ―Rachael Ray, host of “30 Minute Meals” and “The Rachael Ray Show”

“In Northern Soul, Justin Sutherland elevates southern comfort dishes in a unique way that speaks to the power of how food fuels us as individuals, connects to us spiritually, and forges the bonds of community.”
   ―Marcus Samuelsson, chef and author of The Red Rooster Cookbook
 
“This book is a deep dive into soul food from a clear and fresh perspective, one that feels familiar and approachable, creative and craveable. Justin Sutherland beautifully demonstrates how food connects us all, but also is an integral part of how we can seamlessly celebrate our individuality together. I cannot wait to cook my way through this book!”
  ―Brooke Williamson, chef and winner of Food Network’s “Tournament of Champions”