In Afroindigenization, Catherine A. John addresses the underbelly of spiritual resilience shaping a range of African diasporic institutions, traditions, and practices. John argues that repressed forms of indigenous African knowledge systems manifest in a myriad of culturally embodied ways in African diaspora spaces and places. From mermaid lore in rural Jamaica to hip-hop trance-induced dance in Los Angeles to the stories of two debaters-turned-social-media-influencers, John shows how the descendants of enslaved Africans express the signs and substance of their afroindigenous power through collective creativity. Drawing from scholars such as Vèvè Clark, Hortense Spillers, Dianne M. Stewart, and Sylvia Wynter, Afroindigenization exposes the cultural and spiritual ancestries that lie at the heart of modern Black identities and practices.

On April 21, 1966, tens of thousands of Jamaicans exuberantly greeted Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie I in Kingston, Jamaica. The emperor came to express gratitude for the peoples’ support during the Italo-Ethiopian War and bolster the ongoing struggle for liberation in Rhodesia. This state visit repositioned Rastafari in Jamaican society and ignited widespread cultural, social, and political transformations across the Caribbean. Enter the Lion assembles a vital archive of this landmark event, gathering British colonial records, newspaper reportage from the Caribbean and Ethiopia, the official records of the Ethiopian Ministry of Information, and oral history. The authors paint an illuminating picture of the diverse political interests at play, exploring how the visit reshaped the Rastafari movement, Jamaican society, the wider Caribbean, and their Pan-African connections.

In Wild Tongue, writer, scholar, and musician Jonathan Leal invites readers to the Texas borderlands to witness contemporary sonic cultures and expressive forms of Latine struggle and world-making. Blending autoethnography, music criticism, and border theory into an epistolary mixtape, Leal depicts the borderlands as a generative place made by its inhabitants, a geography where creativity and cultural performance engage powerfully with politico-aesthetic issues, create communal identity, and challenge xenophobic and nationalist dominance. Across the mixtape’s contrasting “tracks,” Leal situates living artistries within longer, local arcs of borderlands creativity, amplifying Gloria Anzaldúa’s durable, pathbreaking observation, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.” Combining lyric nonfiction, artist interviews, archival research, transdisciplinary analysis, and popular music criticism and production, Wild Tongue presents an exhilarating, embracing account of freedoms pursued between worlds.

According to Islamic tradition, God has at least ninety-nine names. In Ninety-Nine, Amira Mittermaier presents ninety-nine short chapters based on her fieldwork and interviews with over one hundred Egyptians about who God is to them. In Egypt’s turbulent twenty-first century—the Egyptian uprising, a military coup, a pandemic, a climate crisis, wars across the region—God is talked about endlessly yet remains elusive. Ninety-Nine follows Allah into different spaces and conversations without ever claiming to get the full picture. We meet a Cairo beggar, an enigmatic dervish, a queer agnostic, and a Salafi housewife. We meet a depressed God, a cute God, a God who has stopped caring, a loving God, and a God who is a bully. We learn about divine interventions, big and small, and about daily struggles, even fights, with God. An intimate mosaic of Allah, Ninety-Nine celebrates the multiplicity inherent to the Islamic tradition and offers insight into how present-day Muslims grapple with big theological questions amidst their busy lives.

In Ghost Woman, Crystal Simone Smith explores the long and deep connections between nature, personhood, ancestry, and trauma through haiku and haibun. Separated into five sections, the poems emphasize the way social bonds and landscapes are reflected in and through the environment. Smith brings her experiences with race, motherhood, and poetry into conversation with the five elements, Wind (Fu), Earth (Chi), Water (Sui), Fire (Ka), and Void (Ku) to take readers through an introspective haiku journey, an exploration of the nature of the self as well as the nature of the broader world. Balancing shattering grief with ordinary moments of love and trauma with survival, Ghost Woman weaves a narrative verse of single motherhood, bearing witness, and carrying your history with you. The poems in Ghost Woman invite the reader to be with nature and themselves more intentionally.

Meditative and theoretical, Black Undertow reorients the thinking of blackness away from the Atlantic to the African shorelines of the Indian Ocean, places where queerness and black life frequently brush up against one another. Hugo ka Canham listens for what he names the buzz of the undertow, the traces of African ancestors who linger in water, sand, coastal forts, corals, ritual practices, and unruly imaginations along the shore. In tracking these elusive figures, he develops an approach that honors a queer right to opacity. Canham reconstitutes the siloed disciplinarity that imagines African studies, Black studies, Queer African studies, and Queer studies as necessarily different. When read as coconstitutive instead, Canham demonstrates that they better allow for explicating local life, history, poetics, and theory. In so doing, he forges methods of studying black life that think beyond the limits of traditional, textual archives.

In Flight Lines, Elleza Kelley argues that African American art and writing make visible the unmappable dimensions of black space, not simply by depicting black worlds but by registering how black spatial praxis takes form under conditions of racial enclosure. Reading across literature and visual art, from W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston to Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden, and Gwendolyn Brooks, Kelley tracks spatial knowledge across media and contends that where mediums meet, black aesthetic form emerges as a crucial site for conceptualizing black space in the United States. Moving from Southern landscapes shaped by racialized property to the postmigration geographies of Harlem and Chicago, Flight Lines follows fences, railroads, blocks, apartments, and rooftops as sites where enclosure is contested, improvised on, and transformed. Proposing that black space and black form are mutually constitutive, Kelley shows how black aesthetics illuminate the racial operations of enclosure while preserving alternative ways of inhabiting, sensing, and remaking racialized worlds.

A landmark survey of African American literature about Black experiences of the maritime environment.

The ocean is foundational to the story of Africans in America, beginning with the searing Middle Passage. Initially evoking terror, pain, and death, the ocean also became associated with escape, empowerment, freedom, and home, as over time, African Americans in seaport towns found work, built communities, and gained knowledge from travelers. David R. Anderson shows in this groundbreaking collection of memoir, fiction, poetry, and more that African American maritime literature summons many of the traditional themes―survival in the face of overwhelming natural force, sublimity, demonstration of skill and merit, and self-discovery―but often with an eye on legacies of imperialism, slavery, discrimination, and cultural erasure.

Divided thematically across ten sections that address peril, labor, recreation, and more, the book gathers work by influential writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present, including: Lucille Clifton, Edwidge Danticat, Frederick Douglass, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. E. B. DuBois, Camille T. Dungy, Marcus Garvey, Robert Hayden, Zora Neale Hurston, Major Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, John S. Jacobs, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley, Colson Whitehead, and Kevin Young.

Out of the Great Dismal Swamp, a huge morass of swampland straddling the Virginia and North Carolina eastern seaboard, there emerged a distinct culture of enslaved insurgency and fugitive subversion. Maroons who fled enslavement and resettled in wilderness spaces utilized the deep interior swamps to establish permanent, multigenerational autonomous communities. Historian Kathryn Benjamin Golden reveals for the first time the role of Black women in these maroon communities and locates them in the forests, swamps, and records where they have previously evaded detection and attention.

This Insurgent Ground centers the Black women who aided, supported, led, and nurtured maroon movements in the Great Dismal Swamp as they collaborated with enslaved people in rebellion. Throughout the region, Black women resisted the injustices of reproductive violence, sexual assault, and desecrated motherhoods. Acting as agents of counterintelligence, participants in defensive violence and militant strategy, and mothers and providers of alternative autonomous communities, these women dared to redirect and repossess their energies and their bodies in absolute defiance of the very economic workings of slavery and in refusal of borders, bondage, confinement, and capture.

A young Dominican girl is excited for her first Carnaval with her parents.

Flor, Papi, and Mami zip through the streets! They're off to Carnaval! When they arrive, the plaza is bursting with sights and sounds—people shouting and laughing, fried food sizzles, and the aroma of funnel cake wafts through the air.

Flor's feet can hardly keep still as the music of tambores and trumpets thump out a rhythmic beat. Papi lifts Flor on his shoulders so she doesn't miss a thing. Below her, the Carnaval is a brilliant swirl of pinks, purples, oranges, and blues. There's so much to see!

From los lechones de Santiago, who spin in circles, dancing their African and Latin dances. They sway and shake like palmas in the wind. Flor throws her arms in the air and swings them left to right. When Los Taínos appear, their grass skirts swish in the wind, their painted bodies telling stories of the ancestors. Everything about them seems from some other time and place, but Flor knows they are apart of her.

Next comes Roba la gallina in his rainbow dress, singing and throwing candy to the crowd, telling Flor to keep her ancestors alive and strong by telling their stories. El Diablo Cojuelo is not far behind. He taunts and teases, but Flor stands tall and brave. She knows it's all just fun and games.

But then El Diablo invites her to join show! Finally! Flor, dances, whisked away by myth and magic, surrounded by Black and Brown beauty everywhere.

We're Off to Carnaval! is a joyous homage to a tradition that celebrates freedom, heritage and connection.

USA Today bestselling author Nadine Gonzalez pens a romance between two speculative fiction authors who discover their writing retreat is haunted by a pair of star-crossed lovers. Their messages from the beyond will change everything…
A chance encounter between Jules and Leo sparks an attraction so incandescent that a decade of distance has not put it out. Reunited in Key West for a lecture series, the fantasy writer and the horror author check into The Aurora Inn, the home of restless spirits themselves haunted by tragic loss. In learning about the history of the space, the fire that changed everything, and the mystery behind the haunting, Leo and Jules come together on a journey of discovery as they write their own love story.
What happens when a horror and a fantasy writer check into a haunted B&B?
If fate has its way, the star-crossed lovers will find each other in this world or the next.

The highly anticipated sequel to the instant #1 New York Times bestseller Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The Manifestor Prophecy—a boldly original and suspenseful fantasy adventure by one of the most popular and imaginative voices of this generation, Angie Thomas. Now in paperback!

After years of living in hiding in the Unremarkable world, all of Nic’s dreams have finally come true: She’s got certified hero status, a big family and a real home in the Remarkable city of Uhuru, and a chance to develop her Gift at a school for young Manifestors like her.

So life is perfect, right?

Not quite. Her-favorite-author-turned-vengeful-outcast wants to destroy her. Then there’s the terrifying prophecy that still threatens Nic’s future, and the dangerous new power she seems to have—one she cannot control. And that’s all before she encounters a cult of mysterious Manifestors who threaten to reveal her secrets unless Nic delivers to them a legendary artifact, the Book of Anansi. There’s just one small complication: no one knows if it still exists or where it could be hidden.

Nic now has only her twin brother, Alex, and her best friend, JP, to rely on as she makes a desperate attempt to uncover one of the Remarkable world’s oldest mysteries—and hold on to the home and family she has been searching for her entire life.

A heartfelt and empowering poem from a Black father to his son, celebrating love, resilience, and a child’s limitless potential―in a beautifully illustrated gift-ready hardcover edition.

In this affirming picture book, Bernard Mensah speaks directly to the experience of raising a child with care and intention. He acknowledges that every child will stumble, face challenges, and grow through difficult moments―but he emphasizes something even more important: they are never alone. They are supported, valued, and capable of rising again.

With warm, expressive illustrations by Talia Skyles that capture everyday moments of connection between parent and child, You Are a Lighthouse balances tenderness with strength. It is designed to be read again and again, and makes a meaningful gift for baby showers, birthdays, graduation, or a keepsake for milestones big and small.

A celebration of love, resilience, and possibility, this book is one that families will treasure for years.

FULL-HEARTED MESSAGE: A beautiful love letter to children and a reassuring celebration of a parent’s unfaltering love and support.

WARM, ACCESSIBLE VERSE: With clear language that will resonate with both adults and young listeners, this loving verse, written from a Black father’s point of view, is relatable for all families.

EMPOWERING GIFT: A wonderful gift for children and grandchildren of all ages, as well as for families welcoming a new addition, this book is just right for many occasions, from baby showers to graduations, and for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
 

Perfect for:

* Gift-giving for new baby, graduation, or any milestone moment
* New parents, grandparents, and caregivers
* Black families seeking authentic representation
* Educators and librarians building inclusive collections
* Bedtime reading for ages 4–8

A sweeping survey of Black quiltmaking in America with stunning archival photographs of quilters and quilting bees, as well as full-page reproductions of both significant historical quilts and bold contemporary creations.

This compelling volume gives Black quilting traditions long-overdue attention, highlighting the artistry, innovation, and community solidarity of quilters from the 1700s through today. The deeply researched text of scholar and artist Dr. Sharbreon Plummer explores quilts as an archive of collective and personal memory, delves into methods of Black quiltmaking―both distinctive and endlessly diverse―and demonstrates the power of quilts and quilting as medicine against grief and oppression.

* This book evokes the craftsmanship and tactile beauty of quilts with stunning archival and full-color photos.
* Discover the stories of scores of individual creators throughout history, including self-taught seamstresses, community organizers, and archivists of everyday life.
* Delve deeper into the stories behind world-renowned artists, past and present, like Bisa Butler, Faith Ringgold, and the Quilters of Gee’s Bend.
* Each profile illuminates the reasons behind the quilts: to honor heritage, express political beliefs, process grief, find peace, or simply create beauty.

Stories in the Seams celebrates the act of sewing in solitude or in community, as resistance or as rest. Whether you’re a veteran quilter, a textile arts appreciator, or a beginner exploring the art form, this is an informative, inspiring, and indispensable resource.

JOIN THE QUILTING MOMENT: Whether you've been wowed by major museum exhibitions of textile arts, just joined a local quilting circle, or are simply a fan of patchwork styles and nostalgic Americana aesthetics, now is the perfect time to enrich your knowledge of quilt history.

UNTOLD HISTORY: This book shares the often-ignored stories of self-taught artists, independent women creators, intergenerational collaborations, and more. From artists who created under enslavement in the early 1800s to sewing cooperatives formed in the 1960s, Dr. Plummer traces the story of quilts through a lens of personal and communal healing.

A VIBRANT AND THRIVING CREATIVE TRADITION: Black quiltmaking isn't limited to one style or frozen in the past. This book highlights the kaleidoscopic variety and continual innovation that define this art form.

Perfect for: 

* Quilters, sewists, and other crafters, makers, and collectors
* Art history buffs and readers of artist biographies
* Anyone interested in Black culture, history, and art
* Professional artists and designers, art students, and researchers
* Creatives interested in the intersection of art and activism

Cozy up and drift into the magical world of dreams with this soothing bedtime picture book, by the exceptional illustrator Fátima Ordinola, author of Our Love.

Drift off into dreamland in this beautifully illustrated bedtime story. From cuddling pandas to snuggling polar bears, lazy tigers to soft, woolly sheep, Our Dreams gently captures the cozy, restful moments shared between parent and child through the lens of the animal kingdom and explores the magic and joy of dreaming.

With soft watercolor artwork and a beautiful double-page foldout at the end, this is the perfect read for bedtime, offering comfort and reassurance as your little one drifts off to sleep, surrounded by love and the promise of sweet dreams.

FROM THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR OF OUR LOVE: This stunning book capturing tender moments through the lens of adorable cuddling animals is another heartwarming ode to parent-child connections.

A PERFECT BEDTIME STORY: Our Dreams will inspire sweet dreams to all little ones, offering comfort and reassurance.

PERFECT GIFT: For Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’ Day―or any day of the year you want to celebrate the comfort and warmth of families.

Perfect for:

* Parents, grandparents, and caregivers
* Gift-givers seeking new baby and birthday presents
* Preschool and kindergarten-level readers
* Gift-givers looking for a sweet bedtime read aloud