Eating is a Primal Act

Feel the tenderness of the meat beneath your fingertips as you prep, the tendons and fat giving way as you chew, the delicious juices seeping through to quench your craving. Suck the marrow straight from the bone.

In Kay’s kitchen, preparing and eating food is a form of ritual, self-love, and devotion. With an emphasis on taste and texture, these recipes call to your inner animal and feed your most primal desires. With your own hands you will slow roast a beef heart until it’s tender and turn beets and oranges into a soup reminiscent of fresh blood. These dishes will excite your taste buds and force you to be present. Each bite is a unique experience you need to bow down to.

Your kitchen is a place where danger, eeriness, imagination, and the sublime can coexist. Find comfort in the darkness and devour the world around you.

A moving and powerful debut novel celebrating and embracing the richness of life, even in the face of death.

Not long after giving birth to her eighth child, Renie—a thirty-nine-year-old wife and mother—is diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer with only three months to live. In confronting her own mortality, Renie creates a journal to leave for her children.

While writing and reflecting, Renie realizes that she has spent her life in duty of others—her parents, her family, her husband, and children. With this sudden and momentous revelation, her fear and subsequent preparation for death becomes replaced with an intense desire to live her last days on her terms.

With writing that’s both wise and wistful, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone is a triumphant celebration of the human spirit from a powerful and imaginative rising literary voice.

Equal parts heartrending and hopeful, Uprising is an “extraordinary” (Salman Rushdie), “powerful and uncompromising” (Kamila Shamsie) portrait of women’s lives told from the collective voice of their children.

On a desolate, sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh, a group of children witness their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude.

Bought and sold by Amma, the ruthless madam who was once herself sold into slavery, the women have accepted their fates as sex workers. Yet their children weave fantastic tales, imagining that someday they will escape the island and enjoy a life of freedom.

When Kusum Khan, a young, educated woman from the city, is brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and soon the complacency of her fellow prisoners turns into ferocity and defiance. Together, they begin a rebellion that will upend their island and the very order of things.

A blazing drama of resistance and female power by an author who “deftly weaves the personal and the political” (The New Yorker), Uprising gives voice to the silenced through the story of a revolution no one saw coming.

Who Among You Is Ready to Know More?

Chimera Skin is a new apocalypitic sci-fi short novel from Johnny Compton, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The Spite House, Devils Kill Devils, and Dead First.

Swanson, a mutated man struggling to maintain his sanity, is civilization's last hope. Our world has been decimated after a messianic alien unleashes hell on Earth during its failed attempt to “uplift” humanity. But Swanson may have figured out how to fight back, even if his plan forces him to leave the only planet he's ever known.

Chimera Skin is a short science-fiction horror novel in the vein of The Fly, The Thing, and I am Legend.

From the author of the multi-award-winning, National Book Award–longlisted, “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders) story collection Heads of the Colored People, comes a sly, spry, literary debut novel about the murder of an infamous moonshiner and the cacophony of true stories a small town can tell about itself.

Rich Milford is dead. At last.

We find ourselves in 1920’s Oklahoma, just far enough out of Tulsa, just long enough after the Race Massacre of 1921. For as long as anyone can remember, the Milfords have led plentiful lives on the backs of the townspeople of Newville. Now, on the ominous brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford was an infamous moonshiner and womanizer who, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with only his women to mourn him, but a question remains: Who killed him, and why?

Top suspects are his four “wives,” Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes.

In an electric follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection, Nafissa Thompson-Spires once again serves up a brilliant distillation of front-of-mind happenings—think, cults of personality, capitalism run amok in politics, and rampant societal distrust—structured like a stupefying line dance. In her uniquely powerful, humorous manner, Thompson-Spires takes on the interdependent clash of the traditional and the newfangled in this gobsmackingly excellent novel.

A life affirming story of rehabilitation and hope after prison. The third novel from multi-award-winning Danielle Jawando, perfect for fans of Angie Thomas and Elizabeth Acevedo.
 
‘Jawando’s writing is incredibly raw and real; I felt completely immersed’ Alice Oseman, author of the Heartstopper series
 
When fifteen-year-old Tyrell Forrester gets caught up in a high-profile armed robbery, he's sentenced to eighteen months in a young offenders’ prison. Now he’s getting out, and he’s determined to turn his life around. Despite his release, systemic discrimination makes it difficult for Ty to truly be free. Inspired by a visiting poet while inside, Ty discovers a whole new world through spoken word and is finally finding his voice. But will society ever see him as anything other than a criminal?

Praise for And the Stars Were Burning Brightly:

'An outstanding and compassionate debut' Patrice Lawrence, author of Orangeboy

'One of the brightest up and coming stars of the YA world' Alex Wheatle, author of Crongton Knights

‘An utter page turner from a storming new talent. Passionate, committed and shines a ray of light into the darkest places - the YA novel of 2020!’ Melvin Burgess, author of Junk

Praise for When Our Worlds Collided:
 
'A raw, unflinching and powerful story that will stay with me for a long time’ Manjeet Mann, author of The Crossing
 
‘A beautiful ode to found family, and a compassionate look at the power of connection borne from the ashes of tragedy and apathy’ Christina Hammonds Reed, author of The Black Kids
 
‘Hard-hitting yet still hopeful, this is an emotional powerhouse of a book’ Alexandra Sheppard, author of Oh My Gods

Warning - this novel contains themes that some readers may find upsetting, including suicide and self harm.

A posthumous book from hip-hop legend DMX that brings readers into the heart of his faith—a raw, redemptive collection of prayers and never-before-seen spiritual writings revealing the struggle and hope behind one of music’s most uncompromising voices. Authorized by the Estate of Earl “DMX” Simmons and carefully curated by co-administrators Desiree Lindstrom and Sasha Simmons, and featuring a foreword by Rakim.

DMX was celebrated for his brutally honest lyrics and raw, emotional delivery. Beneath that intensity was a man of deep and unshakable faith, relentlessly searching for grace while openly wrestling with temptation, suffering, and redemption. His prayers, whether whispered in solitude or spoken before thousands, revealed a soul determined to reconcile pain with purpose and anger with surrender. Through that vulnerability, he transformed hip-hop into testimony.

In quiet moments, DMX recorded his spiritual reflections wherever he could—on napkins, receipts, and hotel notepads—capturing his faith in its most immediate and unfiltered form. The Gospel According to DMX gathers this legacy into a posthumous collection of his prayers, sermons, spiritual writings, and selected lyrics. Presented in a beautifully designed edition crafted to echo the enduring form of a Bible, and including a moving foreword from Rakim, the book features never-before-seen handwritten pages that offer an intimate window into the private devotions of a man whose faith was as fierce as his artistry.

Despite its title, The Gospel According to DMX is not a religious or doctrinal text. Readers should note that some portions of this book contain profanity, explicit language, and mature themes. Earl Simmons's archival materials are presented in their original form and should be considered in the context of the complete body of work.

This handsome hardback edition presents Sun Tzu's classic text, The Art of War, gloriously illustrated with traditional, full-color artwork and striking laser-cut page edges.

The Art of War is one of the most successful treatises on warfare and military strategy of all time. Written by ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC, it has since been consulted by countless military leaders, politicians and business moguls, from General Gouglas MacArthur and John F. Kennedy to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Divided into thirteen chapters covering all aspects of warfare, Sun Tzu's lessons are as relevant today as they ever were. Flexible strategies, quick thinking on the battlefield, the use of intelligence, and understanding the enemy's intentions are all crucial ingredients for success. Whether you wish to get ahead in business, sport, or politics, The Art of War will help you to steal a march on your competitors.

Featuring stunning full-color illustrations throughout and Lionel Giles's classic translation, this attractive hardback edition is a wonderful companion for anyone interested in ancient wisdom.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Arcturus Edge-Cut Classics series brings together luxurious gift editions of classic works of literature, presented with striking laser-cut, page-edge effects for a spectacular visual finish.

This stunning hardback collection showcases myths and legends that have been told and treasured by the African peoples for generations.

Featuring stories from across the continent and rooted in the diverse cultures from which they originate, the tales within include valuable life lessons that are sure to have a lasting impact. With wise animals, cunning tricksters, and unexpected adventures that will thrill readers young and old, there is much to discover.

This ornate hardback edition features gold embossing on the font and back cover, full-colour endpaper designs, ivory pages and stencilled page-edges, making a wonderful collectible edition for any mythology lover.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Collectable Myth and Legends series contains luxurious gold embossed gift editions of classic myth and legends from around the world, featuring full-colour endpaper designs, ivory pages and striking stencilled page edges.

A stunning collection of African-Australian short stories from the multi-award-winning author Eugen Bacon.

Black Dingo is a cross-genre miscellany that embraces multi-award-winning author Eugen Bacon’s hybridity as an African Australian who is ‘betwixt’, ‘a sum of parts’ – she is a mother, a daughter, a sister, a woman, a writer, an author, an editor, a scholar and a friend. She is many, and it reflects in this collection that transverses transformative stories of longing and belonging, unlimited futures, a collision of worlds, mythology, and more.

Featuring a black heroine, in each story is a cameo or secondary character of a dingo. Black Dingo is sponsored through Eugen’s Otherwise Fellowship awarded by the Otherwise Motherboard; this speculative fiction cases black people in bold and evocative text, at times deeply flawed but potentially redeemable protagonists in rich hues of blackness and light. The literary strange unravels in these genre-bending Afro-irreal tales of longing and belonging, unlimited futures, a collision of worlds and everything in between: rich hues of shadow and light.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.

A stunning collection of Black American horror short stories curated by the prolific author-editor-scholar team of Maurice Broaddus and Dr. Chesya Burke.

Edited by award-winning writer, community organizer and educator Maurice Broaddus and scholar, professor and award-winning author Dr. Chesya Burke, with an introduction by Dr. Burke, Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now is a landmark anthology offering the evolution of Black American literary horror while boldly imagining its future. The stories within recognize the legacy of Black horror, its literary milestones, cultural roots, and innovative voices, while pushing the genre into new, daring territory. Authors featured in the anthology include: Tananarive Due, P. Djeli Clark, Linda D. Addison, Brandon Massey, Justina Ireland, Jewelle Gomez, Sheree Renee Thomas, Wrath James White and Victor Lavalle. It also includes a small selection of stories chosen from open submissions. This book revels in the power of horror to unsettle, illuminate, or transform, while drawing from Black American cultural histories, mythologies, and lived experiences; it will surprise you with fresh nightmares, folklore, and futures, honoring the past while writing fearlessly toward tomorrow.

The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.

In this dazzling book, perfect for gift giving, bestselling creators Regis and Kahran Bethencourt shake up Christmas with their iconic flare.

It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!
Let’s vibe with good cheer.
Let’s break out the classics
we share once a year.
 
We recite Christmas poems
and sing carols with soul.
We all get together
to let the good times roll!

Gather around and celebrate the warmth of the season with enchanting photographs by the husband-and-wife duo behind CreativeSoul Photography. Festive favorites—from “Jingle Bells”and “Silent Night“to A Christmas Carol and The Nutcracker—are reimagined and paired with glittering photos that capture the beauty of Black and brown children. Like the perfect sugar cookie or most beautifully wrapped gift, every spread brims with holiday cheer.

More picture books from Regis and Kahran Bethencourt:
The Me I Choose to Be
Greatness

The gripping, untold stories of three unsung Black physicians and their critical contributions to the field of medicine and American culture, from the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Medical Apartheid

Between 1847 and 1952, three New York City doctors transformed medicine, catalyzed racial equity, elevated American culture, then were all but lost to history―until now.

James McCune Smith, MD., Rudolph Fisher, MD., and Louis T. Wright, MD each helped shape our nation and advance medicine while sharing overlapping passions―an uncompromising, even militant opposition to racial fetters; medical research that refused racial denigration; and literary acumen. While not strictly contemporaries, they were bound across time through obstacles that parallel those we confront today. Medical exclusion and disparagement, rampant healthcare inequities paired with housing segregation, racial abuse and police violence, lynching, the suppression of Black history ―and even racial bars to higher medical education―that mirrored today’s challenges to affirmative action. 

In this comprehensive slice of previously unrevealed history, renowned writer and scholar Harriet Washington sheds light on Black physicians who pioneered important medical achievements that benefit the health of all Americans. Renaissance Men draws parallels between contemporary and historical medical exclusion and healthcare inequities and reveals a powerful argument for supporting current medical aspirants of color. Surfacing this long-buried history shows us what genius we stand to lose if medicine doesn’t rectify its current course of racial exclusion.

A powerful memoir about the path to freedom and justice from one of the most important activists in American history, freshly repackaged for the Union Square & Co. Signature Editions line.

Born into slavery in New York, Isabella Baumfree became Sojourner Truth, one of the 19th century’s most powerful and outspoken advocates for abolition and women’s rights. In her remarkable 1850 narrative—dictated to a friend because she could not read or write—she recounts her incredible journey to freedom.

This foundational work of American literature offers an intimate and unflinching account of the brutalities of slavery in the North, the spiritual awakening that fueled Truth’s activism, and her tireless fight for justice. Both raw and deeply moving, her autobiography is a testament to speaking truth to power.

A hemispheric history of how free and fugitive antebellum African Americans sought freedom in Latin America 

"A groundbreaking account of African American freedom struggles." ―Alice Baumgartner, author of South to Freedom

Fifty years before the United States went to war over the issue, Chile abolished slavery. Colombia followed in 1821, and Mexico soon after. Black Americans took note. As plantation slavery terrorized their communities, Latin America emerged as the place they could be free.

Many have written about the Underground Railroad and northward migration to Canada, but for thousands of African Americans, freedom lay to the south. Abolitionists from Boston to San Antonio celebrated anti-slavery efforts in Latin America.  Freed and fugitive slaves began to see the region as a viable place to migrate, a land where they could find stability, safety, and opportunity. Some went on their own initiative. Others were motivated by organized political movements, like a Lincoln-backed colony in Panama and hotly debated proposals for mass emigration to Central America. 

Drawing on travelogues, runaway slave ads, and hundreds of other archival sources across the Americas, Yesenia Barragan rewrites conventional histories of slavery in the antebellum era to prove that emancipation was a hemispheric effort. Eloquent and cutting-edge, In Latin America You Could Be Free is a powerful account of how African Americans pursued freedom in the darkest of circumstances.

*As featured as an editor's pick on Radio Four's OPEN BOOK*

*One of the Guardian's books to look out for in 2024*

"An immersive feminist novel that meshes the personal and political to moving effect" Preti Taneja, Financial Times

"A brilliant novel of the Palestinian diaspora. Funny and gritty, and bursting with life and humour" Ahdaf Soueif, Guardian

Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy's clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father.

Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Maleka prepares to leave home to attend university abroad, her mother revisits the past of their Palestinian family, tenderly describing their life in exile in Kuwait and her own experiences of love and loss as she grows up.

Huzama Habayeb weaves a richly observed and affectionate portrait of a Palestinian family displaced from their homeland, exploring with humour and poise the love and betrayal that pursues Jihad and her family from Kuwait to Jordan to Dubai. This is a novel whose words will resound long after you finish the final page.

Translated from the Arabic by Kay Heikkinen

Roshanak Kheshti opens her book with a line from one of Zora Neale Hurston’s earliest stories: “we see with the skin.” From this brief but potent line, Kheshti examines how Hurston’s understanding of Black skin as both seen and seeing offers radical insight into racialized perception and Black consciousness. Kheshti follows Hurston’s travels across the back woods of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana as a filmmaker and sensory ethnographer of the African diasporic spiritual practice of hoodoo. Through her travels, Hurston encountered a sensibility that could animate the object status of being colored with the power of a return gaze. Kheshti considers both how Hurston poetically exploited the synesthetic logic at the heart of race thinking—being colored—and how her embodied performance ethnography catalogued an outside to that logic. We See with the Skin is an original mapping of Hurston’s synesthetic theory and its broader implications for understanding minoritarian perception and thought.

Toward Border Abolition is an interdisciplinary exploration of border abolition that brings together scholars of international migration, border studies, and law who historicize the current border regime, critique the violence of border policing, and consider alternatives. The contributors explore the ways that migrants practice objective border abolitionism by circumventing the sociopolitical order imposed by nation-states. They illustrate how various methods of migrating, from seeking asylum to “unauthorized” border crossing, all enact a fundamentally human freedom of movement that precedes state border control as it exists today. Ultimately, Toward Border Abolition questions the assumed legitimacy of borders, nation-states, and immigration law while simultaneously showing how migrants’ transgression of borders opens new vistas for remaking the world.

The worship of Yoruba deities known as oriṣa is commonly understood as an indigenous African religion, but Ayodeji Ogunnaike argues that these traditions initially differed from the modern Western concept of religion. In Forms of Worship, Ogunnaike analyzes how the configuration of oriṣa worship has changed across the Yoruba diaspora and homeland. As the meaning of the Yoruba word ẹsin, usually translated as “religion,” is closer to “form of worship,” he examines how reorienting understandings of oriṣa traditions as multiple forms of worship changes how religious identity, practice, and dynamics can be understood in contemporary and historical perspectives. By developing indigenous models for religious phenomena, Ogunnaike accounts for Yoruba cultural dynamics, including the high degree of religious harmony, syncretism, and interaction prevalent both in Nigeria and Brazil. Furthermore, he tracks the subtle and largely unperceived shift in oriṣa worship toward a more modern, closed, and rigid conception of religion and its resulting complications. Forms of Worship demonstrates how the advent of Western religious rigidity regarding practice and identity has led to rising religious tensions and fragmentation.

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.

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