*Paperback Release Date - 3/2/2027*

Nikki Giovanni’s extraordinary final collection—a landmark of American literature—speaks to the fury of our current political moment while reflecting on the tragedies and triumphs of her early life.

For decades, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has been at the forefront of American culture. The New Book is a towering work of protest against the divisions of our time, leavened with moments of joy and reflection about her indelible legacy, her family history, and the small pleasures of her richly lived life.

In The New Book, Nikki Giovanni slashes at the ridiculousness of our cultural and political climate: “We have no secrets/since the world shrunk/and the icebergs melted/and all the year books/are digitized./… and we press Like/or No Like/as if it mattered.”

She remembers 2020 and its cataclysmic reckoning with police brutality and white supremacy: “I do understand that republicans/Are cowards and so are those nazis/Cheering/And those kkk we now call police killing/Not to mention father and sons chasing unarmed Black men/and running their cars into crowds/Pretending they are brave or something/They are not only cowards/And nazis but evil fools/And who go to bed white/Wake up American/And hate themselves for having/To share this earth/They will not overcome/And we will not love them.”

But also in the same poem: “But what does 2020 mean to me/A chance to learn to open oysters/Talk to my friends/Catch up on my reading/Tell myself I am going to dust the house/Lie about it/...Enjoy my own company not to mention football/And remember there will be tomorrow/Because there will be/And evil will go and good will come/I am Black/We have seen much worse.”

With this collection, which includes brief letters and short prose from her life as well as poetry, Giovanni reaffirms her place as a giant of literature, a canny truth-teller, an indispensable radical orator, and one of America’s preeminent cultural critics. It is a book to be savored, and shared.

"If there was a need for poetry that galvanized and inspired, there was also a demand for poetry that comforted and unified — and Ms. Giovanni provided on both counts." — The Washington Post

Selected Poems is the classic volume by the distinguished and celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This compelling collection showcases Brooks's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world. This edition also includes a special PS section with insights, interviews, and more—including a short piece by Nikki Giovanni entitled "Remembering Gwen."

By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems.

This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage—including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.

For the first time in print! A definitive compilation of Nikki Giovanni’s best and most beloved poems from her extraordinary 60-year career.

Nikki Giovanni’s poems are some of the most quoted, most memorable, and most talked about gems in American literature, with a huge pop culture following that continues even after her death in 2024. But there has never been a single “best of” volume of her work—until now.

The Essential Poems compiles Nikki’s most beloved and thought-provoking work, drawn from her extraordinary 60+ year career. Included here are classics like “Nikki-Rosa,” “Ego Trippin’,” “Housecleaning,” “Cotton Candy for a Rainy Day,” “Bicycles,” and “The Sterling Silver Mirror.” Edited by Dr. Virginia Fowler, Nikki’s widow, it also includes an Introduction and an Afterword by literary superstars Kwame Alexander and Renée Watson.

It is a book to be savored, and shared.

Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney’s fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of “docu-poetry.”
 
The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the “insurgent sensualist,” hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: “I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . .”
 
The tenderness of a father’s handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl’s fountainhead takes over every page. “One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.

The next book in the New Haven series, interconnected standalones featuring second chances, fiery passion, and Black heroines who get their happily ever afters.

Rae

Loving someone with demons is hard but leaving them is harder.

That's a lesson I learned roughly a decade ago when I left the love of my life behind. Choosing the child we made but weren't ready for over any hope for what could be. Trading in potential for reality, my dreams for motherhood and the warmth of his embrace for a cold, lonely world.

Despite how tragic it all sounds, everything turned out okay. I made peace with my decisions, soothed the ache in my heart with harsh truths that have remained firmly in tact until...well, until now.

Now, I'm back in New Haven and nothing is the way it should be. The man I left behind is not the one I keep running into around town. He's steady, dependable, stable, ready to be a father to our daughter and desperate to do more than co-parent with me.

Hunter

couldn't stop wanting Rachel Prince if I tried. Not that I ever have. Tried, that is. Why would I when she's the only good thing I've ever craved, the only addiction I've had that didn't try to destroy me?

When she left me, I wasn't mad. I didn't want her to go, but I think by the end we both knew she couldn't stay. There was too much darkness around us, and it was all emanating from me.

My addiction. My pain. My grief overshadowing hers.

I wasn't the man she needed or the partner she deserved. She did the right thing, getting out, taking our kid with her. But knowing that doesn't make it hurt any less.

It does, however, make me determined.

To keep my decade long sobriety streak going.

To make up for every day I missed of my daughter's life.

To win back the love of my life and never let her go again.

The next book in the New Haven series, interconnected standalones featuring second chances, fiery passion, and Black heroines who get their happily ever afters.

Rae

Loving someone with demons is hard but leaving them is harder.

That's a lesson I learned roughly a decade ago when I left the love of my life behind. Choosing the child we made but weren't ready for over any hope for what could be. Trading in potential for reality, my dreams for motherhood and the warmth of his embrace for a cold, lonely world.

Despite how tragic it all sounds, everything turned out okay. I made peace with my decisions, soothed the ache in my heart with harsh truths that have remained firmly in tact until...well, until now.

Now, I'm back in New Haven and nothing is the way it should be. The man I left behind is not the one I keep running into around town. He's steady, dependable, stable, ready to be a father to our daughter and desperate to do more than co-parent with me.

Hunter

couldn't stop wanting Rachel Prince if I tried. Not that I ever have. Tried, that is. Why would I when she's the only good thing I've ever craved, the only addiction I've had that didn't try to destroy me?

When she left me, I wasn't mad. I didn't want her to go, but I think by the end we both knew she couldn't stay. There was too much darkness around us, and it was all emanating from me.

My addiction. My pain. My grief overshadowing hers.

I wasn't the man she needed or the partner she deserved. She did the right thing, getting out, taking our kid with her. But knowing that doesn't make it hurt any less.

It does, however, make me determined.

To keep my decade long sobriety streak going.

To make up for every day I missed of my daughter's life.

To win back the love of my life and never let her go again.

From the final decades of US slavery to the present, a powerful and illuminating history of a profound inequity: the special burden of infant care and loss experienced by Black women.

In the United States, Black infants are far less likely than white infants to survive their first year of life. Underlying this predicament is a history of profound loss and persistent striving, which has durably shaped Black life in America. Following generations of mothers, caregivers, laborers, and activists from the final decades of slavery to the present, Perilous Passages chronicles the intimate practices and collective strategies Black communities created and relied upon to sustain early life threatened by disease, inadequate medical care, and racialized harm.

Perilous Passages examines nineteenth-century domestic care practices that carried families through the violence of slavery and war, and traces Black eugenic ideas, the efforts of various grassroots movements, and myths and realities surrounding the 1980s panic over “crack babies.” Health professionals, legal officials, and scientific experts exerted pressure, sometimes directly―as in antimidwifery campaigns―and sometimes more subtly, through life insurance practices that devalued Black life. Wangui Muigai shows that at every turn, authorities recast infant deaths as the fault of Black women, with ongoing impact on birthing experiences and outcomes. Still, Black women and their communities have always done more than bear loss. They have produced vital knowledge about its causes, trained in specialized care, developed networks of cradle-to-grave support, and organized to reform society in ways that safeguard children.

Centering Black women’s experiences, Perilous Passages insists on visceral confrontation with the deadliness of American racism while also offering a powerful account of what makes life possible.

An award-winning young scholar explores how Black women have remade―and continue to remake―our understanding of the past.

Across centuries, Black women have invented means to preserve what official history could not: friendship albums, kitchen-table philosophy, blogs, playlists, oral histories, and archives held in the mind. In The Light Keepers, Jessica Marie Johnson traces this radical tradition through the centuries-long prism of American empire, from the holds of slave ships to contemporary digital worlds, showing that there is nothing finished or settled about how Black women understand time, trauma, and survival.

Blending personal narrative, archival fragments, and ancestral wisdom, Johnson reframes Black women not as subjects of history but as archivists and historians. Against erasure, against shame, against death itself, Black women have transformed the bitterest waters of history into tools for living, loving, and imagining freedom. The Light Keepers offers readers a daring new way to think about the past―and a powerful lesson in how knowledge is made when survival demands it.

88 illustrations

Sometimes, the perfect match isn't the one you planned for. Fans of The Boyfriend Project by Farrah Rochon and One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London will love Weight for Me.

Julissa Sanders has it all--a thriving PR agency, a superstar NFL quarterback fiancé, and a picture-perfect life. But when a careless comment about her weight gain goes viral, Julissa's world crumbles. Determined to regain control, she hits the gym, only to find an unexpected ally in her fiancé's best friend, Malachi.

As Julissa navigates the pressures of planning a high-profile wedding and managing her image, she finds herself drawn to the man who's supposed to be just her trainer. With her carefully crafted life unraveling, Julissa must choose between the love she thought she wanted and the love that could change everything.

Ten years after her E! reality TV show Rob & Chyna aired, the entrepreneur and actress formerly known as Blac Chyna is subverting expectations and sharing where her faith walk leads her.

For years, Angela White’s public persona and private life was that of the Kardashian-adjacent Blac Chyna, former stripper and reality television star. Born Angela Renée White on May 11, 1988, in Washington, DC, she first burst onto the scene in 2010 as Nicki Minaj’s stunt double in Kanye West’s Monster video. That same year, Drake’s shout-out in Miss Me put her name in the game, sparking buzz that landed her in national magazines. Her exotic look and hustle at Miami’s King of Diamonds strip club turned heads, but it was her high-profile relationships with rapper Tyga (father of her son, King Cairo) and Rob Kardashian (father of her daughter, Dream) that cemented her fame, along wih her unapologetic persona.

What many didn’t realize was that privately her notoriety was additionally complicated by an alcohol addiction that drew her away from the person she’d been raised to be. But four years ago, Angela made the decision to reclaim herself, which meant stepping out of the toxic limelight, removing a number of physical enhancements, and sobering up. Both for herself and for her children.

But Sober Mine is about more than fighting addiction. It’s about redemption, finding balance, and rebuilding one’s self from the inside out. Angela returned to her faith, was baptized in 2022, and she’s been sober for nearly four years and counting. She’s also pursuing a degree in divinity training and education.

In Sober Mine, Angela pulls back the curtain and shares the personal journey that led her to the world stage, giving insight into what you thought you thought you knew about her from those reality television days, and she does it all in her signature voice, direct with a side order of humor.

This book is about grabbing onto faith, discovering one’s strength, and learning you don’t have be perfect to live the life you deserve—you just gotta keep it real.

We Made the World: Five Centuries of Queens, Warriors, and Other Foremothers traces five centuries of history through twelve extraordinary women of African descent—from queens and warriors to artists and activists—weaving together collective memory, oral tradition, and personal grief into a landmark work that places Black women at the center of world history.

In 1949, a seamstress from a small coastal town in the Gold Coast colony stood up in a room full of men and voted to split from the most powerful political party in the country. Her name was Hannah Kudjoe. She spent the next decade organizing the women who would win Ghana's first democratic election and help make it the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from European colonial rule. When Nkrumah published his autobiography, she wasn't in it.

We Made the World does for twelve women what it does for Hannah Kudjoe. It finds the woman who was in the room, who was essential to the room, and whose name was removed from the record the moment her usefulness to powerful men was exhausted.

We're talking about Queen Njinga of Angola, who fought the Portuguese to a standstill for forty years and died at eighty still a sovereign. Wangarĩ Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who saved a Nairobi forest by walking upstream through a river at dawn to plant trees while the police watched. Brenda Fassie, the queer Black pop icon who sang South Africa through the end of apartheid and whose music still stops a room on any continent.

The author traveled to eleven countries to write this book. She gathered oral histories from descendants and community keepers across four continents. And she wrote it while experiencing great loss and grief which means this book knows in its bones what it costs to carry someone's memory, and what it costs not to.

We Made the World is five hundred years of history rewritten from the inside. It is the book that asks what we have lost by not knowing these women's names, and begins the important work of giving that back to us all.

The story that captivated readers―now complete for the first time.

Passion for the Heist introduced readers to the love story of Passion Adams and Percy “Pain” Wells―a tale of survival, betrayal, and love. Now, experience The Wild Hearts Duology in one volume, including Passion for the Heist and the never-before-published sequel, Murder of Crows.

A crime brought them together. Grief bound them. Love made them infamous.

Percy “Pain” Wells returned from prison with two things: a ruined reputation and his grandmother’s medical bills. Debts don’t care if he’s trying to go straight, and the streets he once ruled now whisper his name like a warning.

Passion Adams has nothing left but the locket holding her parents’ ashes, a monster for an uncle, and habits that numb the pain. When the locket is stolen in a robbery, she thinks it’s gone forever. Then it turns up in the hands of a stranger with hardened eyes and a calm that screams danger.

Pain should walk away, but something about Passion―her fire, her pain―won’t let him go. Their lives collide, and what starts as a mission to make things right becomes a fight to stay alive. Their explosive love turns two broken souls into the most wanted names in the city, hunted by cops and the underworld alike.

For Passion and Pain, there are only two ways out: disappear into the shadows or become the story everyone tells.