NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2018 BY Esquire • PopSugar • The Huffington Post •  Buzzfeed • Publishers Weekly

A unique new guide to creativity from Questlove—inspirations, stories, and lessons on how to live your best creative life

Questlove—musician, bandleader, designer, producer, culinary entrepreneur, professor, and all-around cultural omnivore—shares his wisdom on the topics of inspiration and originality in a one-of-a-kind guide to living your best creative life. 

In Creative Quest, Questlove synthesizes all the creative philosophies, lessons, and stories he’s heard from the many creators and collaborators in his life, and reflects on his own experience, to advise readers and fans on how to consider creativity and where to find it. He addresses many topics—what it means to be creative, how to find a mentor and serve as an apprentice, the wisdom of maintaining a creative network, coping with critics and the foibles of success, and the specific pitfalls of contemporary culture—all in the service of guiding admirers who have followed his career and newcomers not yet acquainted with his story. 

Whether discussing his own life or channeling the lessons he’s learned from forefathers such as George Clinton, collaborators like D’Angelo, or like-minded artists including Ava DuVernay, David Byrne, Björk, and others, Questlove speaks with the candor and enthusiasm that fans have come to expect. Creative Quest is many things—above all, a wise and wide-ranging conversation around the eternal mystery of creativity.

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in this world is matched only by the diversity of stories explaining our cultural origins: stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. With writing from Jamaica Kincaid on the fallacies of national myths, Yusef Komunyakaa connecting the toxic legacy of his hometown, Bogalusa, LA, to a blind faith in capitalism, and bell hooks relating the quashing of multiculturalism to the destruction of nature that is considered "unpredictable" amongst more than 35 other examinations of the relationship between culture and nature — this collection points toward the trouble of ignoring our cultural heritage, but also reveals how opening our eyes and our minds might provide a more livable future. 

The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape.

Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places—ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit—exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America’s past and future cannot be understood.

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A window into a child's experience of the Great Migration from the award-winning creators of Before She Was Harriet and Finding Langston.

Climbing aboard the New York bound Silver Meteor train, Ruth Ellen embarks upon a journey toward a new life up North-- one she can't begin to imagine. Stop by stop, the perceptive young narrator tells her journey in poems, leaving behind the cotton fields and distant Blue Ridge mountains.

Each leg of the trip brings new revelations as scenes out the window of folks working in fields give way to the Delaware River, the curtain that separates the colored car is removed, and glimpses of the freedom and opportunity the family hopes to find come into view. As they travel, Ruth Ellen reads from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, reflecting on how her journey mirrors her own-- until finally the train arrives at its last stop, New York's Penn Station, and the family heads out into a night filled with bright lights, glimmering stars, and new possiblity.

James Ransome's mixed-media illustrations are full of bold color and texture, bringing Ruth Ellen's journey to life, from sprawling cotton fields to cramped train cars, the wary glances of other passengers and the dark forest through which Frederick Douglass traveled towards freedom. Overground Railroad is, as Lesa notes, a story "of people who were running from and running to at the same time," and it's a story that will stay with readers long after the final pages.

The New Negro (1925) is an anthology by Alain Locke. Expanded from a March issue of Survey Graphic magazine, The New Negro compiles writing from such figures as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Locke himself. Recognized as a foundational text of the Harlem Renaissance, the collection is organized around Locke’s writing on the function of art in reorganizing the conception of African American life and culture. Through self-understanding, creation, and independence, Locke’s New Negro came to represent a break from an inhumane past, a means toward meaningful change for a people held down for far too long.

“[F]or generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” Identifying the representation of black Americans in the national imaginary as oppressive in nature, Locke suggests a way forward through his theory of the New Negro, who “wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not.” Throughout The New Negro, leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance offer their unique visions of who and what they are; voicing their concerns, portraying injustice, and illuminating the black experience, they provide a holistic vision of self-expression in all of its colors and forms.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Alain Locke’s The New Negro is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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A riveting examination of racial violence in America that occurred in the late-1800s. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, by Ida B. Wells, is an exemplary investigative report that details a wave of brutal murders plaguing African Americans, particularly in the South.

The bestselling, definitive study of African Americans throughout American history, now with a new introduction by noted scholar V. P. Franklin.

In The Negro in the Making of America, eminent historian Benjamin Quarles provides one of the most comprehensive and readable accounts ever gathered in one volume of the role that African Americans have played in shaping the destiny of America. Starting with the arrival of the slave ships in the early 1600s and moving through the Colonial period, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and into the last half of the twentieth century, Quarles chronicles the sweep of events that have brought blacks and their struggle for social and economic equality to the forefront of American life.

Through compelling portraits of central political, historical, and artistic figures such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Quarles illuminates the African American contributions that have enriched the cultural heritage of America. This classic history also covers black participation in politics, the rise of a black business class, and the forms of discrimination experienced by blacks in housing, employment, and the media.

Quarles's groundbreaking work not only surveys the role of black Americans as they engaged in the dual, simultaneous processes of assimilating into and transforming the culture of their country, but also, in a portrait of the white response to blacks, holds a mirror up to the deeper moral complexion of our nation's history. The restoration of this history holds a redemptive quality—one that can be used, in the author's words, as a "vehicle for present enlightenment, guidance, and enrichment."

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Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony--only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, drunks, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance. Buchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe -- a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed -- and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan's nomadic people endured a collective identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three, races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and indentured servants at America's early crossroads is where this powerful journey begins.  Black Indian doesn't have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American's multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one family's history as it can go sometimes, with a bit of discomfort. But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan's search for hers will resonate in anyone who has wondered "maybe there's more than what I'm being told."

A companion for anyone experiencing the effects of trauma, featuring true stories of survivors from a broad, inclusive range of backgrounds

With Pleasure: Managing Trauma Triggers for More Vibrant Sex and Relationships is a companion for anyone experiencing the effects of trauma. Through true survivor stories, expert insight, writing prompts, and grounding exercises, it explores pleasure, relationships, and community as worthy and essential antidotes in trying times.
 
Written by trauma-informed sex therapist Jamila Dawson, LMFT, and sexuality journalist and podcaster August McLaughlin, With Pleasure provides a much-needed alternative to harmful “self-help” ideologies that instruct people to “change their thoughts” or “choose to be happy.”

Instead, Dawson and McLaughlin encourage readers to respect their feelings, understand the complexities of a society and systems that fuel trauma, foster self-compassion, and embrace pleasure.

Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year

“[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”
―Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.

Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban America.

Everyone needs to love and be loved—even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.

In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s hard for men to not comply—but hooks wants to help change that.

With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves—and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.

Grammy-nominated hip hop icon and New York Times bestselling author Rick Ross' captivating and inspiring guide to building an untouchable empire from mud to marble, no matter what obstacles stand in the way

*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*

A captivating and inspiring guide to building an untouchable empire from mud to marble, no matter what obstacles stand in the way

Rick Ross is a hip-hop icon and a towering figure in the business world, but his path to success was not always easy. Despite adversity and setbacks, Ross held tight to his vision and never settled for anything less than greatness. Now, for the first time, he shares his secrets to success, offering his own life as a road map to readers looking to build their own empire. Along the way he reveals: 
 

• How to turn your ambition into action 
• Tips for managing and investing your money 
• Inside stories from his business and music ventures 
• Why failure is central to success 
• Secrets to handling stressful situations 
• How to build the perfect team 

First published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle. In 2020, it found a new readership in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and the centering of narratives interrogating race by Black writers. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in spurring historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Translated by Richard Philcox, and featuring now-classic critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha, as well as a new essay, this sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon’s most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

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Michael Eric Dyson dives deep into the true meaning of Barack Obama’s historic presidency and its effects on the changing landscape of race and blackness in America. How has race shaped Obama’s identity, career, and presidency? What can we learn from his major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes?

Dyson was granted an exclusive interview with the president for this book, and Obama’s own voice shines through. Along with interviews with Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and others, this intimate access provides a unique depth to this engrossing analysis of the nation’s first black president, and how race shapes and will shape our understanding of his achievements and failures alike.

"Working The Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing" is an engaging study of the traditional healing arts that have sustained African Americans across the Atlantic ocean for four centuries down through today. Complete with photographs and illustrations, a medicines, remedies, and hoodoo section, interviews and stories.

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Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls “a temperamental autobiography,” comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir.

Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology). The book’s structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore. In this nervous system:
  •  The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950s jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent’s voice.
  •  The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be.
  •  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of Cécile McLorin Salvant.
  •  Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos.
  •  W. E. B. DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story The Lifted Veil to write his famous “behind the veil” passages in The Souls of Black Folk.
  •  The words of multiple others (writers, singers, film characters, friends, family) act as prompts and as dialogue.
 
The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. Constructing a nervous system is Jefferson’s relentlessly galvanizing mise-en-scène for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae.

New York Times Bestseller

From the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God comes a landmark publication of the American experience, now in paperback!

“A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”— New York Times

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to visit eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis, a survivor of the Clotilda, the last slaver known to have made the transatlantic journey. Illegally brought to the United States, Lewis was enslaved fifty years after the transoceanic slave trade was outlawed. At the time, Cudjo Lewis was the only known person alive who could recount this integral part of the nation’s history. As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, Hurston was eager to hear about these experiences firsthand. But the reticent elder didn’t always speak when she came to visit. Sometimes he would tend his garden, repair his fence, or be lost in reveries of his homeland.

Hurston persisted, though, and during an intense period of about three months, she and Cudjo Lewis communed over her gifts of peaches and watermelon, and gradually Lewis, a poetic storyteller, began to share heartrending memories of his childhood in Africa; the attack by, Amazons, the female warriors who slaughtered his townspeople; the horrors of being captured and held in the barracoons of Ouidah for selection by American traders; the harrowing ordeal of the Middle Passage aboard the Clotilda, as “cargo,” along with more than one hundred other souls; the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War; and finally his role in the founding of Africatown.

Barracoon reflects Hurston’s skills as both a social scientist and a writer, and brings to life Cudjo Lewis’s singular voice, in his vernacular, in a poignant, powerful tribute to the disremembered and the unaccounted for others of the Middle Passage. This profound work is an invaluable contribution to our history and culture.

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The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art is widely recognized as one of the most significant collections of modern and contemporary work by artists of the African diaspora and from the continent of Africa itself. Four Generations: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art draws upon the collection's unparalleled holdings to explore the critical contributions made by Black artists to the evolution of visual art in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This revised and expanded edition updates Four Generations with several new texts and nearly 100 images of works that have been added to the collection since the initial publication of this influential and widely praised book. Lavishly illustrated and featuring important contributions by leading art historians, critics, and curators, Four Generations gives an essential overview of some of the most notable Black artists and movements of the past century, and their approaches to abstraction in its various forms. Filled with countless insights and visual treasures, Four Generations is a journey through the momentous legacy of postwar art of the African diaspora.

Artists include: Firelei Báez, Romare Bearden, Kevin Beasley, Zander Blom, Mark Bradford, Leonardo Drew, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Isaac Julien, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Oscar Murillo, Christina Quarles, Robin Rhode, Lorna Simpson, Shinique Smith, Alma Thomas, Kara Walker, Jack Whitten, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and many others.

Rarely is a monograph on a private collection as revelatory as this—what an extraordinary, rich body of work is packed into these pages. The achievements of the artists, as well as their conceptual and formal daring, leave no doubt that a new page on American art is about to be opened." –Okwui Enwezor

Featuring more than 125 recipes, My America is a celebration of the food of the African Diaspora, as handed down through Onwuachi’s own family history, spanning Nigeria to the Caribbean, the South to the Bronx, and beyond. From Nigerian Jollof, Puerto Rican Red Bean Sofrito, and Trinidadian Channa (Chickpea) Curry to Jambalaya, Baby Back Ribs, and Red Velvet Cake, these are global home recipes that represent the best of the patchwork that is American cuisine.
 
Interwoven throughout the book are stories of Onwuachi’s travels, illuminating the connections between food and place, and food and culture. The result is a deeply personal tribute to the food of “a land that belongs to you and yours and to me and mine.”

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From the best-selling author and global feminist icon—an illustrated, guided journal containing her most powerful and inspiring quotes, as well as an introductory essay written exclusively for this publication, to help readers discover their own feminist journeys.

Her award-winning novels, including Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah; her stirring calls to arms We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele; her collaboration with Beyoncé; sharing the stage with Michelle Obama—each of these accomplishments has contributed to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s becoming one of the most iconic feminist figures of our time.

Now, in this beautiful journal, her most inspirational words encourage you to find your own voice, to define what feminism means to you, and to tell your own story. Featuring a series of writing prompts, quotes, and important events in the history of feminism, We Should All Be Feminists: A Guided Journal promises to give readers the tools to understand feminism, as well as to empower them to become better, more confident writers and communicators.

Become the healthiest and happiest version of yourself using wellness tools designed specifically for BIPOC and LGBTQ folks.

A historical account of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr. — New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, “the greatest democratic theorist of his generation” — takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.

Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Through his personal history and political acumen, we see America’s apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people.

The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and precarity, and the social order that would replace it.

Majora Carter shows how to end the brain drain that cripples low-income communities, mapping out a development strategy focused on encouraging talented people to stay and help lift up the community.

 
"My musical, In the Heights, explores issues of community, gentrification, identity and home, and the question: Are happy endings only ones that involve getting out of your neighborhood to achieve your dreams? In her refreshing new book, Majora Carter writes about these issues with great insight and clarity, asking us to re-examine our notions of what community development is and how we invest in the futures of our hometowns. This is an exciting conversation worth joining.” 
—Lin-Manuel Miranda

How can we solve the problem of persistent poverty in in low-status communities? Just like companies have talent-retention strategies, Majora Carter argues that these communities need them too. They cannot succeed if their most gifted residents measure their success by how far away they get. Carter—a MacArthur fellow, Peabody award-winner, and serial entrepreneur—could have left too, but she chose to stay in the South Bronx and develop a new way to revitalize and preserve her home. She advocates measure like:
 
   • Building mixed-income instead of low-income housing to create a diverse and robust economic ecosystem
   • Developing vibrant “third spaces”—restaurants, bookstores, places like Carter’s Boogie Down Grind Cafe—to keep people and dollars in the community
   • Showing homeowners how to maximize the value of their property so they can resist selling out and build generational wealth. 
 
This is a profoundly personal book. Carter is candid about her success and setbacks, and her struggles as a woman of color confronting the mostly “male and pale” real estate and nonprofit and philanthropic establishments. It is a powerful rethinking of poverty, economic development, and the meaning of success.

“An elegant and expansive history” (New York Times) of African American women’s pursuit of political power—and how it transformed America   

 
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more—who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.   
  
Now revised to discuss the election of Vice President Kamala Harris and the vital contributions of Black women in the 2020 elections, Vanguard isessential reading for anyone who cares about the past and future of American democracy. 

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights.

With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.