The Destruction of Black Civilization took Chancellor Williams sixteen years of research and field study to compile. The book, which was to serve as a reinterpretation of the history of the African race, was intended to be "a general rebellion against the subtle message from even the most 'liberal' white authors (and their Negro disciples): 'You belong to a race of nobodies. You have no worthwhile history to point to with pride.'" The book was written at a time when many black students, educators, and scholars were starting to piece together the connection between the way their history was taught and the way they were perceived by others and by themselves. They began to question assumptions made about their history and took it upon themselves to create a new body of historical research. The book is premised on the question: "If the Blacks were among the very first builders of civilization and their land the birthplace of civilization, what has happened to them that has left them since then, at the bottom of world society, precisely what happened? The Caucasian answer is simple and well-known: The Blacks have always been at the bottom." Williams instead contends that many elements--nature, imperialism, and stolen legacies-- have aided in the destruction of the black civilization.

The Destruction of Black Civilization is revelatory and revolutionary because it offers a new approach to the research, teaching, and study of African history by shifting the main focus from the history of Arabs and Europeans in Africa to the Africans themselves, offering instead "a history of blacks that is a history of blacks. Because only from history can we learn what our strengths were and, especially, in what particular aspect we are weak and vulnerable. Our history can then become at once the foundation and guiding light for united efforts in serious[ly] planning what we should be about now." It was part of the evolution of the black revolution that took place in the 1970s, as the focus shifted from politics to matters of the mind.

A thoughtful guide to ancestral veneration, with a focus on the importance of reclaiming African Spiritual practices as an act of liberation.

Your ancestors remember you. Do you remember them? They have been waiting for this very moment in time.

In this book, Ifa and Orisa priestess Ehime Ora shares the importance of connection to the ancestors, and to one’s spiritual roots. There’s a certain type of radical healing that takes place when we recommend to our ancestral veneration and follow through with their wisdom.

Providing healing through the written word, Ehime walks you though the reclamation of African Spiritual practices, discussing the spiritual renaissance occurring in the African community, and includes interviews with elders of the rich traditions. She also provides tangible spiritual tools so that you can incorporate ancestral veneration in your life: how to properly set up and work with an ancestral altar, the importance of spiritual hygiene, and bringing forth the concept of the ori, or the higher self.

Why is less than 1% of rural land in the U.S. owned by Black people? An acclaimed writer and activist explores the impact of land theft and violent displacement on racial wealth gaps, arguing that justice stems from the literal roots of the earth.

“With heartfelt prose and unyielding honesty, Baker explores the depths of her roots and invites readers to reflect on our own.”—Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the National Book Award for Nonfiction semi-finalist When Crack Was King

To understand the contemporary racial wealth gap, we must first unpack the historic attacks on Indigenous and Black land ownership. From the moment that colonizers set foot on Virginian soil, a centuries-long war was waged, resulting in an existential dilemma: Who owns what on stolen land? Who owns what with stolen labor? To answer these questions, we must confront one of this nation’s first sins: stealing, hoarding, and commodifying the land.

Research suggests that between 1910 and 1997, Black Americans lost about 90% of their farmland. Land theft widened the racial wealth gap, privatized natural resources, and created a permanent barrier to access that should be a birthright for Black and Indigenous communities. Rooted traces the experiences of Brea Baker’s family history of devastating land loss in Kentucky and North Carolina, identifying such violence as the root of persistent inequality in this country. Ultimately, her grandparents’ commitment to Black land ownership resulted in the Bakers Acres—a haven for the family where they are sustained by the land, surrounded by love, and wholly free.

A testament to the Black farmers who dreamed of feeding, housing, and tending to their communities, Rooted bears witness to their commitment to freedom and reciprocal care for the land. By returning equity to a dispossessed people, we can heal both the land and our nation’s soul.

"Art as Social Action . . . is an essential guide to deepening social art practices and teaching them to students." —Laura Raicovich, president and executive director, Queens Museum

Art as Social Action is both a general introduction to and an illustrated, practical textbook for the field of social practice, an art medium that has been gaining popularity in the public sphere. With content arranged thematically around such topics as direct action, alternative organizing, urban imaginaries, anti-bias work, and collective learning, among others, Art as Social Action is a comprehensive manual for teachers about how to teach art as social practice.

Along with a series of introductions by leading social practice artists in the field, valuable lesson plans offer examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both college and high school levels with contributions written by prominent social practice artists, teachers, and thinkers, including:

• Mary Jane Jacob
• Maureen Connor
• Brian Rosa
• Pablo Helguera
• Jen de los Reyes
• Jeanne van Heeswick
• Jaishri Abichandani
• Loraine Leeson
• Ala Plastica
• Daniel Tucker
• Fiona Whelan
• Bo Zheng
• Dipti Desai
• Noah Fischer

Lesson plans also reflect the ongoing pedagogical and art action work of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum.

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Many black women have endured physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, domestic violence, pregnancy-related trauma, loss, and abandonment. Rather than admitting their pain—seen as a sign of weakness—black women mask their troubles behind the façade of being “strong” and ever capable of handling everything for themselves and those around them. Nobody Knows the Trouble I Have Seen helps women understand the high price they pay for wearing a mask of strength and provides a framework for healing.

Black women deprive themselves of experiencing a full range of emotions and tend to hang on to anger and hurt which simmer. This leads to feelings of shame, loneliness, and other negative emotions that test their mental health. In addition, black women are less likely to acknowledge their mental health needs or to seek mental health treatment, increasing their risks for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and suicidal thoughts which can lead to debilitating physical problems, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.

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In 1997, the image of the “Welfare Queen” dominated white America’s perceptions of Black women. Legislation was being proposed to deny benefits to children born to welfare mothers and to require insertion of birth-control implants as a condition of receiving aid. Meanwhile, a booming fertility industry was catering primarily to infertile white couples.

Dorothy Roberts’s landmark book, Killing the Black Body, made a powerful entrance into the national conversation of the era, exposing America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies, from slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s. These abuses point not only to the degradation of Black motherhood, but to the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs from the feminist agenda. Killing the Black Body turns twenty next year and is as relevant today as it was upon publication. In our current moment of Black Lives Matter, Between the World and Me, and authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Roxane Gay speaking out about feminism and race, Killing the Black Body offers a vision of reproductive freedom that respects each and every American.

An Invitation to Community and Models for Connection

After almost every presentation activist and writer Mia Birdsong gives to executives, think tanks, and policy makers, one of those leaders quietly confesses how much they long for the profound community she describes. They have family, friends, and colleagues, yet they still feel like they're standing alone. They're "winning" at the American Dream, but they're lonely, disconnected, and unsatisfied.

It seems counterintuitive that living the "good life"--the well-paying job, the nuclear family, the upward mobility--can make us feel isolated and unhappy. But in a divided America, where only a quarter of us know our neighbors and everyone is either a winner or a loser, we've forgotten the key element that helped us make progress in the first place: community. In this provocative, groundbreaking work, Mia Birdsong shows that what separates us isn't only the ever-present injustices built around race, class, gender, values, and beliefs, but also our denial of our interdependence and need for belonging. In response to the fear and discomfort we feel, we've built walls, and instead of leaning on each other, we find ourselves leaning on concrete.

Through research, interviews, and stories of lived experience, How We Show Up returns us to our inherent connectedness where we find strength, safety, and support in vulnerability and generosity, in asking for help, and in being accountable. Showing up--literally and figuratively--points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we all want.

A history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond.

Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a “raceless democracy,” these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead “decades of capture”: times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the “rule of law” compelled black Houstonians to view injustice as a sign of progress, and how antiblack terror undermined Houston’s narrative of itself as a “heavenly” place.

Today, Houston is one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, and at the same time it remains one of the most starkly segregated. Ponton’s study demonstrates how and why segregation has become a permanent feature in our cities and offers powerful tools for imagining the world otherwise.

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New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self. Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson’s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal. Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.

Baldwin’s life and legacy as remembered by a pantheon of artists and writers: from Jamaica Kincaid and Barry Jenkins to Richard Avedon and Alice Neel

When author James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work: novels, poems, film scripts and, perhaps most indelibly, essays. A friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was a critical voice in the civil rights movement. After reaching acclaim in his early career as a writer, he struggled to retain the author’s “I,” while taking on the “we” of the people.
Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als and growing out of his landmark exhibition at David Zwirner in 2019, God Made My Face brings together an impressive assembly of contributors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, to create a memorial mosaic: one that not only mirrors Baldwin’s various tones but also closely examines his singular contributions to cinema, theater, the essay and Black American critical studies. These essays are illustrated by artwork from modern and contemporary artists who were either personal contemporaries of Baldwin or directly inspired by his work. In each piece assembled here, the authors speak from a personal, informed perspective, illuminating Baldwin’s deeply anguished and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately—because we are human—we share the potential to love, connect and live together in all our glory.
Artists include: Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Don Bachardy, Alvin Baltrop, Anthony Barboza, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, George McCalman, Alice Neel, Elle Pérez, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, James Welling, Larry Wolhandler.
Authors include:Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, Darryl Pinckney.

“Who would black women get to be if we did not have to create from a place of resistance?”

Hip Hop Womanist writer and theologian EbonyJanice’s book of essays center a fourth wave of Womanism, dreaming, the pursuit of softness, ancestral reverence, and radical wholeness as tools of liberation. 

All The Black Girls Are Activists is a love letter to Black girls and Black women, asking and attempting to offer some answers to “Who would black women get to be if we did not have to create from a place of resistance?” by naming Black women’s wellness, wholeness, and survival as the radical revolution we have been waiting for.

About the Author: EbonyJanice is a dynamic lecturer, transformational speaker, passionate multi-faith preacher, and creative focused on Decolonizing Authority, Hip Hop Scholarship, Womanism as a Political and Spiritual/Religious tool for Liberation, Blackness as Religion, Dialogue as central to professional development and personal growth, and Women and Gender Studies focused on black girlhood.

EbonyJanice holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Political Science and a Master of Arts in Social Change with a concentration in Spiritual Leadership, Womanist Theology, and Racial Justice. She is the founder of Black Girl Mixtape, a multi-platform safe think-space centering the intellectual and creative authority of black women in the form of a lecture series, an online learning institute, and a creative collaborative.

EbonyJanice is also the founder of Dream Yourself Free, a Spiritual Mentoring project focused on black women's healing, dreaming, ease, play, and wholeness as their activism and resistance work.

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An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights  

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it.

In “We Kin” he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in “Share Your Bucket” he explores skateboarding’s reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in “Grief Suite”; and in “Through My Tears I Saw,” he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.

In an era when divisive voices take up so much air space, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Full of energy, curiosity, and compassion, Inciting Joy is essential reading from one of our most brilliant writers.

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.

E. Patrick Johnson's Honeypot opens with the fictional trickster character Miss B. barging into the home of Dr. EPJ, informing him that he has been chosen to collect and share the stories of her people. With little explanation, she whisks the reluctant Dr. EPJ away to the women-only world of Hymen, where she serves as his tour guide as he bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. The women he meets come from all walks of life and recount their experiences on topics ranging from coming out and falling in love to mother/daughter relationships, religion, and political activism. As Dr. EPJ hears these stories, he must grapple with his privilege as a man and as an academic, and in the process he gains insights into patriarchy, class, sex, gender, and the challenges these women face. Combining oral history with magical realism and poetry, Honeypot is an engaging and moving book that reveals the complexity of identity while offering a creative method for scholarship to represent the lives of other people in a rich and dynamic way.

A fascinating, first-person account of a historic era in the struggle for black empowerment in America.

Long an iconic figure for radicals, Huey Newton is now being discovered by those interested in the history of America's social movements. Was he a gifted leader of his people or a dangerous outlaw? Were the Black Panthers heroes or terrorists?

Whether Newton and the Panthers are remembered in a positive or a negative light, no one questions Newton's status as one of America's most important revolutionaries. To Die for the People is a recently issued classic collection of his writings and speeches, tracing the development of Newton's personal and political thinking, as well as the radical changes that took place in the formative years of the Black Panther Party.

With a rare and persuasive honesty, To Die for the People records the Party's internal struggles, rivalries and contradictions, and the result is a fascinating look back at a young revolutionary group determined to find ways to deal with the injustice it saw in American society. And, as a new foreword by Elaine Brown makes eminently clear, Newton's prescience and foresight make these documents strikingly pertinent today.

Huey Newton was the founder, leader and chief theoretician of the Black Panther Party, and one of America’s most dynamic and important revolutionary philosophers.

"Huey P. Newton's To Die for the People represents one of the most important analyses of the politics of race, black radicalism, and democracy written during the civil rights-Black Power era. It remains a crucial and indispensible text in our contemporary efforts to understand the continuous legacy of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s."
—Peniel Joseph, author of Waiting Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

"Huey P. Newton's name, and more importantly, his history of resistance and struggle, is little more than a mystery for many younger people. The name of a third-rate rapper is more familiar to the average Black youth, and that's hardly surprising, for the public school system is invested in ignorance, and Huey P. Newton was a rebel — and more, a Black Revolutionary . . . who gave his best to the Black Freedom movement; who inspired millions of others to stand."
—Mumia Abu Jamal, political prisoner and author of Jailhouse Lawyers

"Newton's ability to see theoretically, beyond most individuals of his time, is part of his genius. The opportunity to recognize that genius and see its applicability to our own times is what is most significant about this new edition."
—Robert Stanley Oden, former Panther, Professor of Government, California State University, Sacramento

A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers.

Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life.

Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students.

Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s "Winter in America."

Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

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Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in AmericaÑbut even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

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In this inspiring follow-up to his iconic memoir, Gucci Mane gifts us with his playbook for living your best life. Packed with stunning photographs, The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness distills the legend’s timeless wisdom into a one-of-a-kind motivational guidebook. Gucci Mane emerged transformed after a turbulent life of violence, crime, and addiction to become a dazzling embodiment of the power of positivity, focus, and hard work. Using examples from his life of unparalleled success, Gucci Mane looks inward and upward to offer his blueprint for greatness. A must-read for anyone with big ambitions and bigger dreams.

A landmark study that shows how Black residents experience and respond to the rapid transformation of historically Black places.

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White.

In We Belong Here, sociologist Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at gentrification from the inside, documenting the reactions of Albina residents as the racial demographics of their neighborhood shift. As White culture becomes centered in Northeast, Black residents recount their experiences with what Evans refers to as “White watching,” the questioning look on the faces of White people they encounter, which conveys an exclusionary message: “What are you doing here?” This, Evans shows, is a prime example of what she calls “White spacemaking”: the establishment of White space—spaces in which Whiteness is assumed to be the norm and non-Whites are treated with suspicion—in formerly non-White neighborhoods. Evans also documents Black residents’ efforts to create and maintain places for Black belonging in White-dominated Portland. While gentrification typically describes socioeconomic changes that may have racial implications, White spacemaking allows us to understand racism as a primary mechanism of neighborhood change. We Belong Here illuminates why gentrification and White spacemaking should be examined as intersecting, but not interchangeable, processes of neighborhood change.

From the New York Times–bestselling author of All Boys Aren’t Blue comes an empowering set of essays about Black and Queer icons from the Harlem Renaissance.

In Flamboyants, George M. Johnson celebrates writers, performers, and activists from 1920s Black America whose sexualities have been obscured throughout history. Through 14 essays, Johnson reveals how American culture has been shaped by icons who are both Black and Queer – and whose stories deserve to be celebrated in their entirety.

Interspersed with personal narrative, powerful poetry, and illustrations by award-winning illustrator Charly Palmer, Flamboyants looks to the past for understanding as to how Black and Queer culture has defined the present and will continue to impact the future. With candid prose and an unflinching lens towards truth and hope, George M. Johnson brings young adult readers an inspiring collection of biographies that will encourage teens today to be unabashed in their layered identities.

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.

PAPERBACK ON SALE DATE: January 13, 2026

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.

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

The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay.

As Heard on NPR's This American Life

“Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate

The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.

In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything other subject, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world--his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.

The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

Deep, trans-species lessons for a world in crisis.

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.