Reimagines neurodiversity through intersections of race, disability, and social justice

Neurodiversity has progressed from niche activism to a household term; our culture is now saturated with social media ads promising to "train" ADHD brains and media tropes like the quirky savant. But amidst this barrage of content urging self-optimization against a neurotypical template, Neurofutures pauses to ask: what comes next? Editors Diana R. Paulin, M. Remi Yergeau, Ralph James Savarese, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson gather a diverse array of scholars and creatives to think through "crip time" ― sideways, chronic, manic, and executive dysfunction time ― to reimagine the future of cognitive difference.

Moving beyond a simplistic celebration of diversity, the collection interrogates the intersections of race, disability, and social justice. Contributors offer "mad provocations" that span from Black neurodivergence and Afrofuturism to neuroqueer paradigms and animal liberation. Through analyses of cultural texts ― ranging from the folklore of "Little Eight John" to the speculative worlds of Octavia Butler and Shirley Jackson ― the essays deconstruct the violence of neurotypical norms while advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people to full lives and care.

Neurofutures refuses the linear march of progress, instead delving into the complex, often hidden realities of lived experience to map a world that welcomes divergence, dissent, and deep compassion.

A career retrospective of a singular voice in contemporary American art, featuring six decades of artwork that chronicles his vision of the Black American experience
 
New Orleans–based artist, community organizer, and cultural provocateur Willie Birch (b. 1942) has dedicated his career to storytelling. His incisive work across a wide variety of media―including paintings, large-scale drawings, wood and papier-mâché sculpture, and public works―explores his unique vision of Black America and draws on sources as diverse as Egyptian numerology, American folk art, and jazz music.
 
This book showcases more than one hundred of Birch’s artworks alongside essays by eminent scholars and curators. Russell Lord provides an introduction to the artist’s life and work; Lowery Stokes Sims writes about Birch’s use of papier-mâché, for which he garnered acclaim during his time in New York City, and situates Birch within the New York art scene of the 1980s and ’90s; Grace Deveney considers the ways Birch gives visual form to the complex relationship between Black Americans and mass media; and Leslie King Hammond discusses how the city of New Orleans―its history and its communities―has shaped Birch’s work.
 
Published in association with the American Federation of Arts
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
California African American Museum, Los Angeles
May 5–October 4, 2026
 
New Orleans Museum of Art
March 20–September 5, 2027
 
Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, University of North Florida
October 28, 2027–May 14, 2028
 
Hudson River Museum
September 22, 2028–January 14, 2029

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—Ebony
 
From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built.

Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.

The power black athletes have today is as limited as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are invisible.

Praise for Forty Million Dollar Slaves
 
“A provocative, passionate, important, and disturbing book.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Brilliant . . . a beautifully written, complex, and rich narrative.”—Washington Post Book World
 
“A powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.”—Los Angeles Times

Residual textures, patterns and structures of the abandoned Ebony and Jet offices represent both the spirit of a Black publishing empire and the sense of its loss

This book by photographer Barbara Karant commemorates the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of the iconic Ebony and Jet magazines and the most influential Black-owned media corporation of its day. Karant spent more than three years documenting the company’s historic building at 820 S. Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, capturing the last vestiges of the original workspace after the company sold the building in 2010 and relocated in 2012. These vibrant interiors, which remained largely unchanged from 1972 to 2012, fostered the creativity of a staff working in a variety of media. Each floor of the 11-story building flaunted distinct color and pattern combinations, and its bold, contemporary design telegraphed JPC’s position at the forefront of Black American business and culture. Stripped of its furnishings, the interiors of the former JPC headquarters simultaneously represent the spirit of this landmark company and the sense of its loss, of a seminal moment in Black American history and the history of this nation.
Accompanying the approximately 125 color photographs by Karant are documentary images of the original interiors, along with other archival material.  A foreword by Deborah Willis and essays by Aaron Bryant, Cheryl Finley, Carla Williams, Jon Ott, Brenna Wynn Greer, and E. James West address JPC’s dominance as an image and tastemaker in mid- to late-20th century America, the landscape of American Black media, the Ebony in-house photo studio, and the site-specific lobby sculpture by Richard Hunt. Short texts by former employees who worked in the building contribute important documentation to JPC’s history. 820 Ebony/Jet is a tribute to the achievements of this remarkable American company.

"[A]ccessible and intellectually rich…Essential reading to understand the economic state of the nation." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The celebrated legal scholar and author of The Color of Money reveals how neoliberals rigged American law, creating widespread distrust, inequality, and injustice.

With the nation lurching from one crisis to the next, many Americans believe that something fundamental has gone wrong. Why aren’t college graduates able to achieve financial security? Why is government completely inept in the face of natural disasters? And why do pundits tell us that the economy is strong even though the majority of Americans can barely make ends meet? In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran, one of our leading public intellectuals, argues that the system is in fact rigged toward the powerful, though it wasn’t the work of evil puppet masters behind the curtain. Rather, the rigging was carried out by hundreds of (mostly) law-abiding lawyers, judges, regulators, policy makers, and lobbyists. Adherents of a market-centered doctrine called neoliberalism, these individuals, over the course of decades, worked to transform the nation―and succeeded.

They did so by changing the law in unseen ways. Tracing this largely unknown history from the late 1960s to the present, Baradaran demonstrates that far from yielding fewer laws and regulations, neoliberalism has in fact always meant more―and more complex―laws. Those laws have uniformly benefited the wealthy. From the work of a young Alan Greenspan in creating "Black Capitalism," to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s efforts to unshackle big money donors, to the establishment of the "Law and Economics" approach to legal interpretation―in which judges render opinions based on the principles of right-wing economics―Baradaran narrates the key moments in the slow-moving coup that was, and is, neoliberalism. Shifting our focus away from presidents and national policy, she tells the story of how this nation’s laws came to favor the few against the many, threatening the integrity of the market and the state.

Some have claimed that the neoliberal era is behind us. Baradaran shows that such thinking is misguided. Neoliberalism is a failed economic idea―it doesn’t, in fact, create more wealth or more freedom. But it has been successful nevertheless, by seizing the courts and enabling our age of crypto fraud, financial instability, and accelerating inequality. An original account of the forces that have brought us to this dangerous moment in American history, The Quiet Coup reshapes our understanding of the recent past and lights a path toward a better future.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. 

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

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In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work—from Deana Lawson’s disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa’s videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Khalil Joseph’s films and Dawoud Bey’s photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpakwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson—requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.

In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter -- all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.

A stunning first novel about two young Black artists in London falling in and out of love by a new literary virtuoso, and finalist for the BBC Short Story Award, twenty-six-year old writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson

A stunning first novel about two young Black artists in London falling in and out of love by a new literary virtuoso and finalist for the BBC Short Story Award, twenty-six-year-old writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson

“Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.” —Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing

In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control.

Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty.

This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.

“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…” To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either.

James Beard Award-winning chef Nina Compton shares recipes that tell the story of her thrilling culinary journey from St. Lucia to Jamaica, Miami, and New Orleans, and celebrate the diverse African heritage that threads these cuisines together.

Growing up in St. Lucia, a small island in the Eastern Caribbean, chef Nina Compton developed a strong sense of community through cooking and food. As she traveled and worked in restaurants abroad, she was eager to learn, improvise, and innovate by doing what transplants like herself do best: Bring the best of home with them wherever they go. Kwéyòl / Creole explores the cuisines and pivotal locales that form the basis of Nina’s unique culinary perspective: from her birthplace in St. Lucia, to Jamaica where her view of Caribbean cuisines broadened, to Miami where she was immersed in Afro-Latin influences and continued to hone her cooking style, and finally New Orleans, her adopted city whose Creole cuisine brought her home in new ways.

In St. Lucia, when they say “Creole,” they don’t mean French-influenced. The St. Lucian Creole, or Kwéyol, celebrates a diverse African heritage, beautifully reflected in the 100 recipes presented here. The dishes are both transportive and irresistible, each telling a story of its multi-faceted history and influences: steamed snapper with a peppery ginger sauce, slow-cooked curried goat, green fig and saltfish, coconut-braised collard greens, Creole-stewed conch, the countless possibilities of the beloved plantain. In these pages, the weather is warm and tropical, and the vibe is easygoing, just like the places Nina’s lived. The dishes are full of flavor and the mood is chill.

Full of stunning travel photography and anchored by Nina’s singular culinary vision, Kwéyòl / Creole celebrates the rich history of where she comes from, while forging something that feels a little new, a little hers. And now, with this book, a little yours, too.

CORETTA SCOTT KING HONOR ARTIST, SEAN QUALLS

From Coretta Scott King Honor artist and illustrator of Questlove's The Idea in You, Sean Qualls comes a captivating introduction on how Black people have influenced music throughout history and what music means to Black culture.

The people sing; the people dance. The people have the music, and the music is the people.

Music has been embedded into the fabric of Black life since the first notes rang out and found their way into the souls of the first African inhabitants. From the melancholic blues to the funkifyingly upbeat disco, from earth-shattering rock ’n’ roll to groundbreaking jazz and hip-hop, music has been the bedrock of Black hope and culture. From its earliest arrival in the Americas, Black music has shaped American music and the world has never been the same because of it.

Coretta Scott King Honor illustrator Sean Qualls brings us the electrifying history of Black music and moves from one ground-breaking era to another, giving his own vibrant and hip spin on the rhythm and blues that will always have the power to comfort, guide, inspire, and remind us all.

The Music, The People will make for the most fun Black music history guide as it’s:

* A Picture Book That Makes History Fun: The fun, funky, and lively voice present in The Music, The People is unlike any other and delivers the history of music genres created, influenced, and loved by Black individuals in a way that is sure to readily engage and enlighten readers as they move through music history.
* Filled with Important Messages About Music: The Music, The People infuses its pages with important messages regarding music’s ability to uplift, transcend, break barriers, and lead revolutions. Music feeds the soul, and Qualls gratifyingly depicts that.
* Features Art Like No Other: Each page of The Music, The People features Qualls’ signature breathtaking art as he moves through each musical era, making for a reading experience that’s as gratifying as it is captivating.