Winner: Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's Best Subsequent Book 2017
Honorable Mention: Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017

Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.

Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around the refusal of the dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that its goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

A dazzlingly inventive account of kinship and dispossession by a two-time Minnesota Book Award–winning author

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know―and mourn―the kin he was never able to meet.

webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures―Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.

Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, Without Terminus is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists’ today. Rodney lived through the failed –though immensely hopeful -socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere.

The book critically considers Rodney's contribution to Marxist theory and history, his relationship to dependency theory and the contemporary significance of his work in the context of movements and politics today. The first full-length study of Rodney’s life, this book is an essential introduction to Rodney's work.

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.

From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.

One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.

In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

A landmark survey of Black American photojournalism spanning 1945 to 1984, chronicling a critical period in the civil rights movements in the United States

This volume presents work by 57 Black photographers and contributions from scholars such as Joy Bivins, Tina M. Campt and Gerald Horne, chronicling historic events and daily life in the United States from the conclusion of World War II in 1945 to the presidential campaigns of 1984, including the civil rights movements through the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Drawn from archives and collections in the care of journalists, libraries, museums, newspapers, photographers and universities, the photographs in the catalog were circulated and reviewed in publishing offices across the country.
Responding to a dearth of stories about Black lives told from the perspectives of Black people, Black publishers and their staff created groundbreaking editorial and photojournalistic methods and news networks. During a period of urgent social change and civil rights advocacy, newspapers and magazines, including the Afro American News, Atlanta Daily World, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender and Ebony, transformed how people were able to access seeing themselves and their communities. Their impact on the media landscape continues into the digital present.
The catalog is published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Carnegie Museum of Art. The exhibition and catalog are both designed by artist David Hartt, and organized and edited by Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Charles ""Teenie"" Harris, community archivist, and Dan Leers, curator of photography, in dialogue with an expanded network of archivists, curators, historians and scholars.
Photographers include: Harry Adams, Anthony Barboza, Kwame Brathwaite, Don Hogan Charles, Adger Cowans, Guy Crowder, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Bob Douglas, Louis Draper, Theodore Gaffney, Charles "Teenie" Harris, Chester Higgins, Kojo Kamau, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Marilyn Nance, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Bruce Talamon, Deborah Willis-Ryan.

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024. Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries―tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light―in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

An irresistible delight, this hilarious and heartwarming essay collection gathers essential tales about growing up in the South, the pitfalls of date night, and why no one should ever tell a Black girl how to Black Girl.

Black women always find a place to meet: in the natural hair aisle, at Beyoncé concerts, even online in memes and catchphrases. This book is one of those places: a living room where readers can contemplate how a well-picked afro can defy the laws of physics and why boob sweat has to exist in the first place. Here, Black Girl is a verb. Here, Black women can Black Girl in every way we want to.

Amena Brown’s book Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl blends storytelling, humor, and pop culture commentary to traverse the magic and wisdom she's gleaned from being raised by Southern Black women, and supported by the community of Black women who hold her down today. After graduating from the International Black Girl Headquarters (the renowned HBCU Spelman College), Amena has built a career telling stories and celebrating Black womanhood. In her book, she shares stories of dancing in Janelle Monae's "Tightrope" music video and partnering with Tracee Ellis Ross to compose odes to natural hair. She imparts essential life lessons from the Real Housewives of Atlanta, and tells hair tales, including wisdom on the ideal style for her first speaking gig at Essence Fest (box braids, 100 percent).

In the end, Brown shares that Black women are a whole world. A galaxy of customs, language, code, and unspoken understandings, all explored with humor and heart in this unforgettable book.

“A page turner and history lesson at once, Harlem Rhapsody reminds us that our stories are our generational wealth— this book and the real lives that inspired it.”—Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club Pick)

She found the literary voices that would inspire the world…. The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
 
In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.
 
W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.
 
When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

A ragtag group of activists plan a mission to repatriate the bones of a Blackfeet boy who was sent to the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in author Stephen Graham Jones's return to the Blackfeet reservation of his award-winning New York Times bestsellers The Only Good Indians and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

Nate Yellow Tail is one of the survivors of the deadly revenge murders of Stephen Graham Jones's breakout bestseller The Only Good Indians. Five years after the massacre on the Blackfeet reservation, Nate finds himself in the hospital after a terrible accident that should’ve killed him and that nearly killed his best friend Sebby, who is hanging onto life in a room a few doors down.

Nate’s life is out of balance, so when he is given the chance to reset his life, and maybe save Sebby in the process, Nate steps up, again. This time it’s into a camper van that is almost as run down as his broken body, filled with three older Blackfeet, to find the bones of the lone Blackfeet boy who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where many Indigenous children were abused, and repatriate this boy home. The problem is, when they get the bones, something terrible has escaped with them.

Jones has crafted another American Indian novel for our times, shining light on the dark corners of this country’s history while also showing the desperate choices people make when they’re put up against a wall.

An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women’s experiences across the African diaspora
 
Growing up in World War II–era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929–2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature―bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou―Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked. In this elegant literary biography, distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.
 
Beginning with her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story set among Barbadian immigrants and African Americans in Brooklyn, and moving through her later works set in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, Marshall’s novels chart the diasporic life that Marshall herself lived, defined by Black women’s experiences, an unapologetic and sometimes queer sexuality, and the history of the African diaspora. Despite the lush and finely observed inner lives of her heroines, however, Marshall was famous for tightly guarding her own privacy, and it is this enigma―Marshall’s deeply expressive writing versus her guarded public exterior―that Washington draws out. Here is the first look at a prescient, brilliantly talented writer, a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly stages a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.

A Millions Most Anticipated 2026 Selection

"This is poetry of the highest order, and a stunning reminder of what words can do.”—Omar El Akkad

"Hold this book, read every word, study every picture, notice the prints you leave behind—a reminder that no one’s hands are clean."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

From National Book Award Finalist Fady Joudah, a collection of poems, essays, and photographs that offers a Palestinian representation of not only the staggering grief, but the unwavering resilience and prevailing life force of a people and place enduring genocide.  

Fady Joudah writes from the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the United States, a nation complicit in that destruction. He locates the paradox of his position everywhere: in the seed a sparrow eats from his proffered hand; in his writing in English, the oppressor’s language; in the faces of Palestinian children receiving meals from aid kitchens—a glimpse into what his life could have been, and what is being lost in a war disproportionately impacting children and their families. Throughout the book, beauty insists on its survival not only through the Palestinian people, but also through the nonhuman world in which he takes occasional refuge from the devastation that humanity brings upon itself.

By placing before readers a series of carefully chosen images from Gaza, Joudah presses his reader to comprehend that the experience of both the individual and the whole are integral to an explicitly Palestinian understanding of genocide, even if that rendering is a nearly impossible endeavor. Exhibit G insists on the immensity of Palestinian interiority, and finds in this collective act of creation a hyper-present awareness. “By claiming what is being actively erased,” Joudah writes, “I become presence.”

At once an indictment of genocide, a rendering of catastrophic loss, and “an affirmation of life instead of a staging of death” (Katherine Larson), Exhibit G insists that love exists in all its variousness, and that it is the only defense against a totalizing, destructive force.