A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner!

From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood.

"Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read―both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." ―TIME Magazine

A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, the Star Tribune, AVClub, and more.

A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed,Publishers Weekly, and more.

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present―timeless black melancholies and triumphs.

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The award-winning author of Magical Negro traces the difficulty and beauty of existing as a Black woman through American history, from the foundational trauma of the slave trade all the way up to Serena Williams and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to a battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyperawareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In a collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist, Parker examines America’s cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages. She touches on such topics as the ubiquity of beauty standards that exclude Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby’s fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious. With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman’s psyche—and of the writer’s search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

This fresh, voice-driven feminist anthology reimagines Helen Gurley Brown’s seminal work Sex and the Single Girl in time for its 60th anniversary, featuring twenty-four essays from acclaimed and bestselling authors, including Kristen Arnett, Morgan Parker, Evette Dionne, and Melissa Febos.

In May 1962, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. The future Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief’s book promoted the message that a woman’s needs, ambition, and success during her single years could actually take precedence over the search for a husband.  

While much of Brown’s advice is outdated and even offensive by today’s standards, her central message remains relevant. In this exceptional anthology, Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson bring together insights from many of today’s leading feminist thinkers and writers to pay homage to Brown’s original work and reinterpret it for a new generation. These contributors provide a much-needed reckoning while addressing today’s central issues, from contraception and abortion (topics the publisher banned from the original) to queer and trans womanhood, racial double standards, dating with disabilities, sexual consent, singlehood by choice, single parenting, and more. 

Written for today’s women, this revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit just as it celebrates and validates women’s sexual lives and individual eras of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied.

In the tradition of Claudia Tate’s classic book, reenvisioned for the twenty-first century, Khadijah Queen showcases fifteen leading Black women writers who are influencing our cultural and literary future.

Like the luminaries Tate interviewed forty years ago, the writers in this collection demonstrate how their identities are integral to their creative processes in craft, thought, and imagination. Queen highlights the impacts and influence of social media, artificial intelligence, disability, the business of writing, and other subjects crucial to the imaginative and intellectual production of Black women writers at work today.

These poets, scientists, comic book artists, nonfiction writers, novelists, researchers, and playwrights provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art, offering an account of why and for whom they write.

Featuring conversations with: Elizabeth Alexander, Mahogany L. Browne, Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, Eve L. Ewing, Vievee Francis, Kaitlyn Greenidge, alexis pauline gumbs, Jzl Jmz, Morgan Parker, Imani Perry, Deesha Philyaw, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Treasure Shields Redmond, and Jesmyn Ward.

The New York Times bestselling team behind Parker Looks Up returns with this Level 1 Ready-to-Read about the fun of dressing up and dreaming big!

Parker is playing dress up with her younger siblings, Ava and Cash. With each costume, Parker imagines what her life would be like if she were a doctor, a princess, or even a princess doctor. Because Parker knows that she doesn't need to limit herself to being one thing. The sky’s the limit!

Following the tradition of Nikky Finney, Krista Franklin, and Morgan Parker, Good Dress documents the extravagant beauty of Black relationships, language, and community.

In her debut poetry collection, Brittany Rogers explores the audacity of Black Detroit, Black womanhood, class, luxury and materialism, and matrilineage. A nontraditional coming-of-age, Good Dress witnesses a speaker coming into her own autonomy and selfhood as a young adult, reflecting on formative experiences.

With care and incandescent energy, the poems engage with memory, time, interiority, and community. The collection also nudges tenderly toward curiosity: What does it mean to belong to a person, to a city? Can intimacy and romance be found outside the heteronormative confines of partnership? And in what ways can the pursuit of pleasure be an anchor that returns us to ourselves?