Non-fiction

  • Not Everyone is Going to Like You: Thoughts From a Former People Pleaser

    by Rinny Perkins

    $17.99

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    A debut illustrated manifesto by Rinny Perkins (@RinnyRiot) about what she's learned as a queer Black woman through the art of self-validation.

    In this graphic collection of mini essays, comedian Rinny Perkins illustrates her experiences as the owner of a popular online shop while she figures out antidepressant prescriptions and the seemingly never-ending dating-app cycle.
     
    Rinny shares what she's learned across topics like mental health, work, sex and dating, and family and friends. Featuring funny, real reflections from experiences in her hometown of (Third Ward!) Houston, Texas to Los Angeles — the author traces her journey to understanding that whether through a friendship break-up or saving up for a Telfar bag, the only person who can truly validate us is ourselves.
     
    With 1970s-inspired graphics like a "When To Quit Your Job" checklist and Microaggressions Bingo, Not Everyone's Going to Like You is a long DM of affirmations from Rinny to herself on how to get through life. Her advice? Stop ignoring your intuition, ignore perfection, and leave them on read.

  • The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

    edited by Roxane Gay

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    A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s "intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

    Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

    Among the essays included here are:

    • "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"
    • "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
    • "I Am Your Sister"
    • Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of Light

    The poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:

    • "Martha"
    • "A Litany for Survival"
    • "Sister Outsider"
    • "Making Love to Concrete"
  • How to Be a (Young) Antiracist

    by Ibram X. Kendi & Nic Stone

    from $14.99

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    The #1 New York Times bestseller that sparked international dialogue is now a book for young adults! Based on the adult bestseller by Ibram X. Kendi, and co-authored by bestselling author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist will serve as a guide for teens seeking a way forward in acknowledging, identifying, and dismantling racism and injustice.

    The New York Times bestseller How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi is shaping the way a generation thinks about race and racism. How to be a (Young) Antiracist is a dynamic reframing of the concepts shared in the adult book, with young adulthood front and center. Aimed at readers 12 and up, and co-authored by award-winning children's book author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist empowers teen readers to help create a more just society. Antiracism is a journey--and now young adults will have a map to carve their own path. Kendi and Stone have revised this work to provide anecdotes and data that speaks directly to the experiences and concerns of younger readers, encouraging them to think critically and build a more equitable world in doing so.

  • killing rage: Ending Racism

    by bell hooks

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    One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, bell hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must go hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race.

    Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. They address a spectrum of topics having to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; and internalized racism in movies and the media. And in the title essay, hooks writes about the "killing rage"--the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism--finding in that rage a healing source of love and strength and a catalyst for positive change.

    bell hooks is Distinguished Professor of English at City College of New York. She is the author of the memoir Bone Black as well as eleven other books. She lives in New York City.

  • On Morrison

    Namwali Serpell

    $32.00

    An illuminating, electrifying exploration of the work of Toni Morrison by an award-winning novelist and Harvard professor

    Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black, female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.

    This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance, archival discoveries, and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time, but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.

  • That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor

    Damon Young

    from $18.00

    From the Thurber Prize-winning author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker comes a pioneering collection of Black humor from some of the most acclaimed writers and performers at work today

    A critic explores the paradox of finding community in “the dozens” while grieving. A violent town ritual causes an all-too-familiar moral panic. An email thread between friends on why we need an updated Green Book but for public toilets. All across the nation, “Karens” become illegal overnight. These are just a few of the hilarious worlds contained in Damon Young’s groundbreaking anthology featuring the best, funniest, and Blackest essays, short stories, letters, and rants.

    With words that roast, ignite, and burn while connecting to and coalescing around a singular thesis, That's How They Get You emphasizes how and why Black American humor is uniquely transfixing. This is a mixture of not just observational anxieties and stream-of-consciousness lucidities but also acute political clarity about America. Edited and with an introduction by Damon Young, the critically acclaimed author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, the collection features new material from an all-star roster of contributors, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Mahogany L. Browne, Wyatt Cenac, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, Roy Wood Jr., and Nicola Yoon.

  • Good Sex: Stories, Science, and Strategies for Sexual Liberation

    Candice Nicole Hargons, PhD.

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    We all deserve sex that's great for everyone involved. Let sexual liberation be your guide to a truly satisfying sex life.

    How we define good sex and the conditions that facilitate it will require a liberatory approach, because intersecting oppressions impose impossible sexual standards on most of us. Instead of intimate justice, we experience blocks to accessing the ingredients for erotic equity.

    Good Sex presents the ingredients to revolutionize your sexual menu in a way that works well for you, including intimacy, fun, pleasure, nastiness, and connection. Each chapter offers more than just theory and science. Good Sex outlines action steps to understand, define, and practice sexual liberation in your personalized way, replacing the unseasoned sexual menu most of us were socialized into.

  • An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children
    $27.00

    A unique collaboration from two of America’s leading artists that explores the fascinating and hidden history of the plant world.

    In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them.

    Kara Walker, one of America’s greatest visual artists, illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors.

    There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children―so inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal.

  • Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism

    by Jenn M. Jackson

    $20.00

    Fearless essays that reclaim the work and words of Black women activists, abolitionists, and movement makers who have long fought for liberation and justice—from a beloved Teen Vogue columnist and an essential new voice in Black feminism.

    Jenn M. Jackson has been known to bring deep historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost in the meantime? A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women’s intellectual and political work at the center of today’s liberation movements.

    Across thirteen original essays that explore the legacy and work of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements, despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.

    For a new generation of movement organizers and potential co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for all of us. A reclamation of an essential history, and a hopeful gesture towards a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like.

  • I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive

    by Zora Neale Hurston

    $19.95

    A collection of essays, fiction, journalism, folklore, and autobiography, preserving the legacy of one of the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest writers.

    The foundational, classic anthology that revived interest in the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God—"one of the greatest writers of our time"—and made her work widely available for a new generation of readers (Toni Morrison).

    During her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston was praised for her writing but condemned for her independence and audacity. Her work fell into obscurity until the 1970s, when Alice Walker rediscovered Hurston's unmarked grave and anthologized her writing in this groundbreaking collection for the Feminist Press. 

    I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive established Hurston as an intellectual leader for future generations of black writers. A testament to the power and breadth of Hurston's oeuvre, this edition—newly reissued for the Feminist Press's fiftieth anniversary—features a new preface by Walker.

    "Through Hurston, the soul of the black South gained one of its most articulate interpreters." —The New York Times

  • Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators

    by The Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective

    $25.00

    A political vision for a future ripe with alternatives to imprisonment and punishment.

    Born from sustained organizing, and rooted in Black and women of color feminisms, disability justice, and other movements, abolition calls for an end to our reliance on imprisonment, policing and surveillance, and to imagine a safer future for our communities.

    Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators offers entry points to build critical and intentional bridges between educational practice and the growing movement for abolition. Designed for educators, parents, and young people, this toolkit shines a light on innovative abolitionist projects, particularly in pre-K–12 learning contexts.

    Sections are dedicated to entry points into Prison Industrial Complex abolition and education; the application of the lessons and principles of abolition; and stories about growing abolition outside of school settings. Topics addressed throughout include student organizing, immigrant justice in the face of ICE, approaches to sex education, arts-based curriculum, and building abolitionist skills and thinking in lesson plans.

    The result of patient and urgent work, and more than five years in the making, Lessons in Liberation invites educators into the work of abolition.

    Contributors include Black Organizing Project, Chicago Women’s Health Center, Mariame Kaba and Project NIA, Bettina L. Love, the MILPA Collective, and artists from the Justseeds Collective, among others.

  • Torn Apart

    by Dorothy Roberts

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    An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change 

    Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment.

    The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, Torn Apart argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities. 

  • Bad Fat Black Girl

    by Sesali Bowen

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    Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to hustle, stay on her toes, and champion other Black women and femmes as she navigated Blackness, queerness, fatness, friendship, poverty, sex work, and self-love. Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism, profiling game-changing artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monae. But despite all the beauty, complexity, and general badassery she saw, Bowen found none of that nuance represented in mainstream feminism. Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism and hip-hop intersect.

  • Design Against Racism: Creating Work That Transforms Communities
    $24.95

    A historical and philosophical exploration of the impact of design on underserved communities, examining the field’s shortcomings as well as its potential to create positive change. Through essays that delve into history and practice, and case studies that demonstrate practical strategies, Design Against Racism explores how designers of all disciplines can address, through their work, the legacies of racism and oppression.

    Design profoundly influences culture. The heart of this book is its powerful blend of essays on design history, illustrated case studies, and discussions of practical methods to approach design work, adapted from the restorative justice movement. It explores how design as a professional practice and academic discipline directly affects historically excluded communities, offering frameworks and examples that foster collective improvement.

    Topics from author Omari Souza, founder of the annual State of Black Design conference, and contributing design professionals include:
    * Unveiling the White Gaze: The Narrative of Whiteness and Colonial Nostalgia
    * Language as a Tool for Marginalization—and Resistance
    * Hip-Hop Architecture: Transforming Spaces through Culture and Innovation
    * Afrofuturism as a Design Strategy
    * Whose Knowledge Is It? Reclaiming Histories, Narratives, and the Plurality of Knowledge
    * Nonhierarchical Engagement with Communities—Anti-Racist Design Community Pop-Up

    This is a critique of design and a practical handbook that will teach designers and educators how a restorative justice approach can transform their design practice to counteract and fight racism.

    TIMELY AND ESSENTIAL TOPICS: Thought-provoking essays from leaders in design diversity offer an anti-racist approach to design practice based in an understanding of history, a focus on community building, and a commitment to inclusion.

    AUTHOR & CONTRIBUTORS: Omari Souza is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at the University of North Texas and co-host of the highly acclaimed minisode podcast The Design of Business | The Business of Design. Contributors include preeminent design professionals George Fourlas, Shamika Klassen, Kaleena Sales, Zariah Cameron, Lesley-Ann Noel, Cassini Nazir, Yolanda A. Rankin, Soniyah Robinson, and Danielle Lake.

    Perfect for:
    * Student and professional design practitioners of all disciplines, including graphic designers, product designers, architects, and more
    * Course adoption for design programs
    * Anyone eager to explore the themes of anti-racism and decolonizing design

  • The Black Yearbook [Portraits and Stories]

    by Adraint Khadafhi Bereal

    $29.99

    A gripping exploration of the joys, hardships, and truths of Black students through intimate, honest dialogues and stunning photography, author of Heavy “A radical, reverential, and restorative document of community.”—Rebecca Bengal, author of Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists When photographer Adraint Bereal graduated from the University of Texas, he self-published an impressive volume of portraits, personal statements, and interviews that explored UT's campus culture and offered an intimate look at the lives of Black students matriculating within a majority white space. Bereal's work was inspired by his first photo exhibition at the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin, entitled 1.7, that unearthed the experiences of the 925 Black men that made up just 1.7% of UT's total 52,000 student body. Now Bereal expands the scope of his original project and visits colleges nationwide, from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to predominantly white institutions to trade schools and more. Rather than dwelling on the monolith of trauma often associated with Black narratives, Bereal is dedicated to using honest dialogue to share stories of true joy and triumph amidst the hardships, prejudices, and internal struggles. Using an exciting and eclectic design approach to accompany the portraits and stories, each individual profile effectively conveys the interviewee's unique voice, tone, and background. The Black Yearbook reframes society's stereotypical perception of higher education by representing and celebrating the wide range of Black experiences on campuses.

  • My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

    by Resmaa Menakem

    $17.95

    In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.

    The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police.

    My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

    • Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy—how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system.
    • Offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary.
  • From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

    by Tembi Locke

    $18.00

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    It was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro’s traditional Sicilian family did not approve of his marrying a black American woman. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forged on. They built a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships, and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopted at birth. Eventually, they reconciled with Saro’s family just as he faced a formidable cancer that would consume all their dreams.

    From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro’s family, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother-in-law’s table. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward. All along the way she reflects on her and Saro’s romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages.

    In Sicily, it is said that every story begins with a marriage or a death—in Tembi Locke’s case, it is both. “Locke’s raw and heartfelt memoir will uplift readers suffering from the loss of their own loved ones” (Publishers Weekly), but her story is also about love, finding a home, and chasing flavor as an act of remembrance. From Scratch is for anyone who has dared to reach for big love, fought for what mattered most, and those who needed a powerful reminder that life is...delicious.

  • Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

    by Alice Walker

    $21.99

    For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple. She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world.


    In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.

  • Muslim Cool

    by Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

    $36.00
    Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop

    This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities.

    Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.
  • A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None 

    by Kathryn Yusoff

    $10.00

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    This book was selected by the artists participating in Project Row Houses' Round 52: Gulf Coast Anthropocene, which is on view from July 31 to December 5.  To learn more about Project Row Houses and this exhibit, please visit https://projectrowhouses.org/.

    No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery.

    Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.

  • Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

    Jason Reynolds

    $12.99

    The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

    Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative written by beloved award-winner Jason Reynolds, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas--and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.

  • The Rainbow Ain't Never Been Enuf: On the Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity

    Kaila Adia Story

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    A queer Black feminist debunks the myth of rainbow solidarity, repositioning Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ people at the forefront of queer pasts, presents, and futures

    Your favorite Black queer studies professor Kaila Adia Story says the rainbow ain’t never been enough in this introduction to the current state of queer intersectionality, or lack thereof. Story argues that to be queer is to be political, and the carefully glittered façade of solidarity in the pride movement veils dangerous neoliberal ideals of apolitical queer embodiment. The rainbow as a symbol of communal solidarity is a hollow offering when cis white LGBTQ people are allowed to opt out of divesting from white supremacy, misogyny, and transphobia.

    The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf fills a necessary gap in our understanding of how racism, transphobia, and antiblackness operate in liberal spaces. Black feminist and queer theorist Kaila Adia Story blends analysis, pop culture, and her lived experiences to explore the silencing practices of mainstream queer culture. She touches on cornerstone issues of the movement like

    * the whitewashing of queer history and commodification of pride celebrations
    * the appropriation of the Black and Latinx ball scene and culture
    * the racialized and gendered violence inflicted upon Black trans women
    * the exclusion of the lives and work of activists like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Stormé DeLarverie, and CeCe McDonald from queer history
    * the lack of remembrance and respect for the lives of the Black and Lantinx queer and trans people who have always been on the frontlines of queer liberation

    Expanding beyond the classroom, Story utilizes her expertise as a scholar of queer theory to offer readers a comprehensive understanding of how racism operates in these spaces and what we can do to create a more equitable future.

  • Playing in the Dark

    by Toni Morrison

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    An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner

    Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. 

    Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
  • Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin
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    An exuberant, opinionated, stereotype-busting portrait of contemporary Africa in all its splendid diversity, by one of its leading new writers.

    So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa’s rich diversity, communities, and histories.

    Starting with an immersive description of the lively and complex urban life of Lagos, Faloyin unearths surprising truths about many African countries’ colonial heritage and tells the story of the continent’s struggles with democracy through seven dictatorships. With biting wit, he takes on the phenomenon of the white savior complex and brings to light the damage caused by charity campaigns of the past decades, revisiting such cultural touchstones as the KONY 2012 film. Entering into the rivalries that energize the continent, Faloyin engages in the heated debate over which West African country makes the best jollof rice and describes the strange, incongruent beauty of the African Cup of Nations. With an eye toward the future promise of the continent, he explores the youth-led cultural and political movements that are defining and reimagining Africa on their own terms.

    The stories Faloyin shares are by turns joyful and enraging; proud and optimistic for the future even while they unequivocally confront the obstacles systematically set in place by former colonial powers. Brimming with humor and wit, filled with political insights, and, above all, infused with a deep love for the region, Africa Is Not a Country celebrates the energy and particularity of the continent’s different cultures and communities, treating Africa with the respect it deserves.

  • Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

    by Elie Mystal

    $18.99

    Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.

    Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.

    You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.

  • remembered rapture

    by bell hooks

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    In Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, award-winning author and renowned academic “bell hooks reveals the heart of her writing life and the process through which she has come to be known as a ‘visionary feminist’” (Essence).

    Born and raised in the rural South, bell hooks learned early the power of the written word and the importance of speaking her mind. Her passion for words is the heartbeat of this collection of essays.

    Remembered Rapture celebrates literacy, the joys of reading and writing, and the lasting power of the book. With grace and insight, these essays reveal bell hooks’s wide-ranging intellectual scope, untangling the complex personae of women writers, especially those whose work goes against the grain.

    “For anyone who writes, or seeks to understand the writing process, or wants to know more about the erudite and passionate mind of bell hooks, this is the book to read.”―The Philadelphia Inquirer

  • It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Adapted for Young Readers)

    by Trevor Noah

    $9.99

    Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist—and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a racist government.

  • Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life
    $30.00

    INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Emma is an inspiring force, a modern day business mogul and visionary…[This book] should be your guide if you are starting a business, thinking about starting a business, already in a business, want to make a better business for yourself and want to be a better person in that business, I highly recommend Start With Yourself…It’s a good reminder that a well-lived life starts with you.” —Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Podcast

    “Emma Grede is a modern executive for the influencer age…Start With Yourself makes the case for putting yourself first in work, life, and child-rearing. It’s Lean In for the post-girlboss era.” —The Wall Street Journal

    As seen on Good Morning America, TODAY, Morning Joe, ABC News Live, and Meet the Press.

    Start With Yourself is a game-changing, no-BS guide for anyone seeking meaningful success on their own terms. It’s an essential framework that will give you the tools and mindset to unlock your full potential in life and business—straight from a woman who defied all the odds to become a serial entrepreneur, a cofounder of culture-defining global businesses, a nonprofit champion, and the host of the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast. All while raising a family of four children.

    Based on the factors of her early life—she’s the child of a working-class single mother and grew up in a rough neighborhood in East London and dropped out of high school—you’d never guess that Emma Grede would go on to become one of America’s richest self-made women.

    This makes Grede unique, but she’s convinced you can do it, too: Start With Yourself is a blueprint to her mindset and how she thinks about business and life, structured in easy takeaways, so you can immediately apply her philosophy to what you’re trying to build and create.

    Among her most blazing insights, Grede identifies what she calls “Old Thoughts”: stale thinking, outdated ideas; set-in-stone rules ingrained into the culture about work-life balance, the crassness of money, and the unseemliness of ambition—that aren’t actually rules at all. They’re biases, Grede insists, system errors, and we must strike them from our minds so that we can gain a greater sense of control, even mastery, over our day-to-day and long-range goals.

    Ultimately, this is a book for everyone tired of feeling like a bystander or passenger in their own life. Grede offers tangible and applicable-right-now solutions to create a mindset, an overall system of thought to manage emotions, clarify ideas, and illuminate the right next step—while always staying positive.

    It’s about gathering yourself after failure. It’s about being accountable but also forgiving yourself. It’s about not expecting shortcuts while never being bashful about grabbing them when they appear. It’s about pushing hard for wins and never apologizing for your dreams.

    Above all, Grede offers a new vision for work and life that encourages readers everywhere to take responsibility for their own thinking in order to achieve personal and professional success at the highest levels.

  • Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America

    Elie Mystal

    $26.99

    The New York Times bestselling author brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to offer a brilliant takedown of ten shocking pieces of legislation that continue to perpetuate hate, racial bias, injustice, and inequality today—an urgent yet hopeful read for our current political climate

    “Mystal is a grassroots legal superhero, and his superpower is the ability to explain to the masses in clear language the all-too-human forces at play behind the making of our laws.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop

    In Bad Law, the New York Times bestselling author of Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution reimagines what our legal system, and society at large, could look like if we could move past legislation plagued by racism, misogyny, and corruption. Through accessible yet detailed prose and trenchant wit, Mystal argues that these egregiously awful laws—his “Bill of Wrongs”—continue to cause systematic and individual harm and should be repealed completely.

    By exposing the flawed foundations of the rules we live by, and through biting humor and insight, Bad Law offers a crisp, pertinent take on:

    * abortion and the Hyde Amendment, and the role federal funding, or lack thereof, has played in depriving women of necessary health and reproductive care
    * immigration and illegal reentry, and the illusions that have been sold to us regarding immigration policy, reform, and whiteness at large
    * voter registration laws, and how the right to vote has become a moral issue, and ironically, antidemocratic
    * gun control and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, and the extreme yet obvious dangers of granting immunity to gun manufacturers

    But, as the man Samantha Bee calls “irrepressible and righteously indignant” and Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion calls “the funniest lawyer in America,” points out, these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a fierce, funny, and wholly original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow.

  • Rage in Harlem: June Jordan and Architecture (Incidents)

    Nikil Saval and Sarah M. Whiting

    Sold out

    Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval tells the story of an unlikely partnership between June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller, and their attempt to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots.

    In the tense days leading up to the 2020 American elections, then-candidate for Pennsylvania State Senate Nikil Saval addressed a virtual audience at the Harvard GSD to tell a story about Black feminist writer June Jordan and a little-known project that resulted from the aftermath of the 1964 Harlem riot. The events of police brutality and community grieving made a lasting impression on Jordan, who, while known for her work as a poet, playwright, and activist, responded with a proposal for a multiple-tower housing design. Through an unlikely partnership with R. Buckminster Fuller, Jordan’s “Skyrise for Harlem” project offered a Futuristic vision for Harlem that argued for environmental redesign: “it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the pace, pattern, and quality of living experience.”
     
    Jordan was not an architect in the conventional sense, Saval says. “But in the understanding of someone who sought to propose and build interventions in public space, she was.”

  • The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes and Food Memories by The National Council of Negro Women
    $18.99
    Inspired by the Black Family Reunion Celebrations, held in seven cities every summer, this book reflects the local, national, and international heritage of the African American community. With first-person reminiscences and recipes from celebrities like Wilma Rudolph, Natalie Cole, Esther Rolle, and Patti LaBelle, this cookbook offers a delightful diversity of over 250 dishes. Line drawings throughout.
  • Unspeakable

    by Carole Boston Weatherford

    $17.99

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Longlisted for the National Book Award

    A Kirkus Prize Finalist

    A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book

    "A must-have"―Booklist (starred review)

    Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history. The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa's Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.

    News of what happened was largely suppressed, and no official investigation occurred for seventy-five years. This picture book sensitively introduces young readers to this tragedy and concludes with a call for a better future.

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