Thirty years after its original publication, this newly imagined edition brings the work and musings of fifteen Black literary luminaries in conversation with a new generation of writers and readers.

The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Barbara Neely, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world, including Donika Kelly, Safiya Sinclair, Diamond Sharp, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, among others. This new edition also includes an introductory poem by Morgan Parker, a foreword by Salamishah Tillet, and a new author’s note. The new contributors carry the torch of the original interviewees’ lives and words with heart, rigor, gratitude, and radical imagination, illuminating how these conversations are about more than just writing―they are about life, relationships, joy, gratitude, wellness, and self-preservation.

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

Originally published in 2005, former NBA star Etan Thomas’s first poetry collection defies the stereotype of the apolitical athlete; featuring brand-new poems by Thomas and his son―and University of Dayton basketball star―Malcolm Thomas

RETIRED NBA STAR, AUTHOR, AND OUTSPOKEN POLITICAL ACTIVIST, Etan Thomas is more than an athlete. In this, his first collection of poems―originally published in 2005 and reissued here with many new poems―the former center for the NBA’s Washington Wizards defies the stereotype of the apolitical athlete, and plants his roots in his budding literary career. With the conviction of a Bill Russell, and the poetic finesse of Muhammad Ali, Thomas takes on controversial topics such as the Death Penalty, the GOP, and racism. 

This fiery poet approaches his work fearlessly, writing in the strong, historical lineage of his literary elders Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, and in the tradition of more contemporary poets Ras Baraka, Tony Medina, and asha bandele. More Than an Athlete is not just a book of poetry; it’s a statement about new generations not being confined to a box, a definition, or a label. Some people play ball, and some people write poems. Etan Thomas has mastered the art of both.

The reimagined 2027 edition features brand-new poems by Thomas as well as his son Malcolm, who is following in his father’s footsteps on the court as a collegiate athlete, and on―and off―the page as a poet and activist.

Weaving ancestral wisdom with contemporary insight, Black Women Rising speaks directly to Black women’s lived realities of racial trauma, chronic stress, care fatigue, and resilience through a wholistic lens.

Filling a long-standing gap in the self-help and wellness market, Black Women Rising is a culturally grounded, deeply resonant guide created specifically for Black women seeking balance, purpose, and grounding in perilous times. This bold, African-centered book arrives at a moment of profound urgency. Informed by the authors’ expertise in African-centered social work and trauma-informed psychotherapy, each chapter brings to life one of the 18 Principles—rooted in Ma’at and the Nguzo Saba (Kwanzaa)—and closes with an action-oriented exercise readers can immediately apply.

Moving beyond reflection to action, this book offers clear pathways to healing and sustained liberation. Positioned at the intersection of race, gender, and mental health, the book meets a growing demand for self-care that is culturally intentional and affirming. With far-reaching impact in wellness, mental health, and social justice spaces, giving Black women a self-help book that sees and supports their capacity to rise and thrive individually and in community.

Black Women Rising positions healing as sacred and care as a powerful force for renewal and transformation, making it a timely, standout title in wellness, mental health, and cultural nonfiction.

From a powerful new voice in fiction comes a stunning multigenerational epic, spanning from 1920s Haiti to 1990s New York, centered on the disappearance of a little girl from Brooklyn's J'ouvert celebrations

Brooklyn, 1996. Serenity Marcelin and her six-year-old daughter, Jouvay, have spent the summer reeling from an unexpected, devastating loss. Just when the two of them are beginning to find solace within their new family dynamic, Jouvay disappears into a crowd over Labor Day weekend and Serenity’s entire world changes in an instant.

In order to understand the events leading to Jouvay’s sudden disappearance, Serenity must unearth the long-buried secrets―and ghosts―of her family’s shocking past.

Told through the eyes of the unforgettable Marcelin women and the people closest to them, Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili's Backstitch embroiders a profound tale of hope and resistance, transporting readers to the city of Jérémie during the years of the US occupation of Haiti and to the vibrant streets of New York. A sweeping story of motherhood, sisterhood, resistance, generational trauma, and liberation, this novel charts the lives of the ghosts, secrets, and languages we can’t escape from―even when we try to bury them.

COMPANION TO NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER, BLACK GOLD
In this companion picture book to Black Gold, the NAACP Image Award winner, Laura Obuobi and Society of Illustrators’ honoree London Ladd team up to tell a story that celebrates Black life, brims with black joy, and instills an important message about Black resilience.
Black is precious.
Black is holy.
Black is powerful.
Black is many things, and its magnificence can be found all throughout the world. It’s in obsidian, in the rolling fields of calla lilies, and the birth of the universe. Most importantly, Black is a people whose strength, grace, and resilience would foster change, creativity, and a culture from which would emerge a world that would never be the same and a community whose genius continues to inspire all. Despite everything that Black people have endured, they are still present—living and thriving.
Powerhouse duo Laura Obuobi and London Ladd return with another poignant, lyrical text that celebrates all that being Black is, positively reinforcing the magnitude of possibilities that being Black can—and will—be. With its important themes, Black Is will enchant young readers with events and achievements by people in Black history and the Black diaspora, like uprisings, innovations in culture, entertainment, literature, including civil rights work by West Africans, Caribbeans, and Black Americans.

· Brimming with Black Joy: This book is magical, heartwarming, and a bright reminder that diverse stories are hopeful too. Laura has created a world where all facets of Black life, especially joy, are brought to light.
· Champion for Self-Love: This uplifting, impactful, and lyrical book will empower Black children and will inspire them to love themselves exactly as they are. This book delivers the important message that Black is beautiful and powerful.
· Bedtime Story with Lyrical, Poignant Text: Laura spins a story with language that is so rich, it is as though she has captured a dream on the page. Readers will be enthralled by this sweeping, meditative tale.
· Timely and Timeless Picture Book: This is a book that will always resonate with readers as they move on through every stage of their lives, uplifting and empowering, and is the perfect baby shower gift and graduation gift.

Together for the first time in this beautiful boxed set, the landmark Love Song to the Nation trilogy by the feminist icon bell hooks, includes the New York Times bestsellers All About Love, Communion, and Salvation.

All About Love: New Visions reveals how lovelessness results in a polarized society, and how we can do the work to heal these divisions. This book is a roadmap to understanding how we can build caring, compassionate, and loving spaces into our homes, schools, and workplaces.

Communion: The Female Search for Lovechallenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as a heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. It reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives.

Salvation: Black People and Love Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans.

A new book of poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.

Is this who I must be,
or maybe just
what I am?

“Sir” is an honorific, a title that indicates the superiority of its recipient, the subordination of its speaker. Carl Phillips’s SIR examines power and submission, abandon and restraint, whether in our personal, intimate relationships with others and ourselves, or in our relationships with such abstract masters as grief, memory, desire, regret, and the traumas of history. These are all things we’re told to try to overcome, to gain mastery of. Do we have a choice, though? And if so, how to choose ‘correctly,’ in a time when appearance and reality are constantly in flux, when hierarchy is revealed to be a matter of perspective, when even language itself is suspect, with its ability both to structure emotion and to estrange us from it?

In poems filled with tenderness, moral inquiry, and self-reckoning, stretched across natural landscapes both familiar and uncertain, SIR confirms–once again–that Carl Phillips is one of our finest and most enduring poets writing today.

In this Level Three I Can Read, join twins Jada and Jamal, and their best friends Carlita and Josh as they come up with a colorful springtime plan to spruce up their schoolyard. Everyone in the neighborhood is invited!

CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP! It’s springtime on Bradford Street. Jada and Jamal are searching for signs of spring. So are their best friends, Carlita Garcia and Josh Cornell. But the most surprising sign of spring awaits them at school tomorrow . . . a surprise that blossoms into a colorful plan to beautify the schoolyard just in time for Earth Day. Get set to dig in and join the neighborhood fun with the Bradford Street Buddies!

This Level 3 I Can Read title is written for independent readers and includes challenging words and more complex themes and stories.

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From acclaimed short fiction writer Nisi Shawl comes a brilliant alternate history set in the Congo, where heroes strive for a Utopia and endeavor to live together despite their differences.

Now with a beautiful new cover and a foreward from award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull.

In this re-imagining of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo, African American missionaries join forces with British socialists to purchase land from the Congo Free State's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, which they name Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven for native populations of the Congo as well as settlers from around the world, including dream-eyed Europeans attempting to create a better society, formerly enslaved people returning from America, and Chinese railroad builders escaping hard labor. Using the combined knowledge of four continents, Everfair becomes a land of spying cats and gulls, nuclear dirigibles buoyed by barkcloth balloons, and silent pistols that shoot poison knives.

With this technology, Everfair will attempt to defeat the Belgian tyrant Leopold II. But even if they can defeat their great enemy, a looming world war and political infighting may threaten to destroy everything they have built.

How psychedelics can heal historical, intergenerational, and racialized trauma—an Afrofuturistic take on Black psychedelia toward joy and liberation

The mainstream has long seen psychedelic medicine as the purview of people with privilege: money to burn, time to trip, and the social safety to experiment with drugs without risking arrest or worse. Despite psychedelics’ deep roots in Black and Indigenous cultural practices, most psychedelic spaces have excluded Black people and other People of Color. But psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, and ketamine are not just for a rarefied liberal elite—and they’re definitely not just for white people.

Combined with quality therapy, safe and equitable access, and full-scale societal healing, psychedelics are a shortcut to liberation, dignity, and power—the “Promised Land” as envisioned by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Risqué? Sure. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

In Black Psychedelic Revolution, Dr. Nick Powers charts how psychedelics can heal historical, intergenerational, and racialized trauma. He shows how these medicines unlock a return to one’s self, facilitating an embodied experience of safety, peace, and beingness otherwise disrupted by whiteness—and explores psychedelics’ ability to transform individual wellness even as they transcend it. Drugs taken with therapy can heal. But drugs taken with a social movement can heal a nation.

Powers unpacks how the Drug War, racist policing, mass incarceration, and community gatekeeping intersect to sideline POC—and specifically Black people—from the psychedelic movement. He moves past “making space” for Black psychedelia to assert instead the need for a full-stop reclamation and revolution: one that eschews psychedelic exceptionalism, breaks down raced and classed constructs of “good” vs. “bad” drugs, realizes true, full-scale healing, and lives into a free, strong, and independent Blackness. With an Afrofuturist lens, Black Psychedelic Revolution takes utopian politics seriously, re-centering social justice around ownership of historical trauma and giving People of Color the authority to define a new humanism.

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In this joyous collection of essays about historically Black colleges and universities, alumni both famous and up-and-coming write testimonials about the schools and experiences that shaped their lives and made them who they are today.

Edited by the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Ayesha Rascoe—with a distinguished and diverse set of contributors including Oprah Winfrey, Stacey Abrams, and Branford Marsalis, HBCU Made illuminates and celebrates the experience of going to a historically Black college or university. This book is for proud alumni, their loved ones, current students, and anyone considering an HBCU.

The first book featuring famous alumni sharing personal accounts of the Black college experience, HBCU Made offers a series of warm, moving, and candid personal essays about the schools that nurtured and educated them. The contributors write about how they chose their HBCU, their first days on campus, the dynamic atmosphere of classes where students were constantly challenged to do their best, the professors who devoted themselves to the students, the marching bands and majorettes and their rigorous training.

For some, the choice to attend an HBCU was an easy one, as they followed in the footsteps of their parents or siblings. For others, it was a carefully considered step away from a predominantly white institution to be educated in a place where they would never have to justify their presence. And for some authors here, it was an HBCU that took them in and cared for them like family, often helping them to overcome a rough patch.

For all, the pride in their choice is abundantly clear. HBCU Made is a perfect gift for each generation of prospective students and brand new alumni to come.