Search results: 32 results for “by jesmyn ward”
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32 results
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Death Card
Death Card
Sold outA dark contemporary fantasy featuring witchcraft, tarot, death, and a bit of romance that's perfect for fans of Immortal Dark and Cinderella Is Dead.
The paperback edition features stunning stenciled edges!
On an ordinary Monday morning, eighteen-year-old Mikaela Broussard receives the shock of her life. During a customer’s tarot reading at her family’s occult shop, she turns over the Death card and envisions the beautiful stranger stabbing her in the heart.
In order to determine why the girl, Joelle, wants to kill her, she’ll have to keep her close. But the more time Mikaela spends with her soon-to-be murderer, the more irresistible she finds her.
As if imminent death isn’t worrisome enough, witches are turning up with their magic stolen. And it’s clear some very dark magic is at work. Mikaela, as the next Witch Queen of her coven, is tasked with figuring out who’s behind the horrific acts—a mystery that will put her and her power to the test.
Death Card is a dark, pacy, and romantic fantasy about one witch’s journey to find the strength to fight for herself, her future, and her beloved community.
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Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man
Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man
by Joshua Bennett
Sold out*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*
For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal―the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark―in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people―all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.
Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. -
The Story of My Anger
The Story of My Anger
Jasminne Mendez
Sold out*Paperback Release Date - 1/7/27*
The Pura Belpré Honor Award winning author of Aniana del Mar Jumps In makes her YA debut with a powerful novel-in-verse about a Texas teen who is battling racism in her theatre program and book banning efforts by her town’s school board.
Yulieta Lopez is angry. Angry at her racist drama teacher who refuses to cast Black students in lead roles. Angry at the school board threatening her favorite teacher for teaching works of literature that they deem “controversial.” Angry that she has to keep quiet until she can head to college and leave Texas forever.
Yuli is accustomed to playing various roles: the diligent daughter, the honorable hija, the good girl who serves everyone else before serving herself. But as the fire of Yuli's rage spreads and lights her up, she can no longer be silent. Determined to find a way to fight back, Yuli and her friends start a guerilla theatre club which stirs things up and gets people talking, and finally, Yuli steps into the role she was always meant to play.
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A Black Woman Did That
A Black Woman Did That
Sold outA Black Woman Did That! spotlights vibrant, inspiring Black women whose accomplishments have changed the world for the better.
A Black Woman Did That! is a celebration of strong, resilient, innovative, and inspiring women of color. Through vibrant illustrations and engaging storytelling, author Malaika Adero spotlights well-known historical figures including Ida B. Wells, Madam CJ Walker, Mae Jemison, and Shirley Chisholm, as well as contemporary stars including Stacey Abrams, Jesmyn Ward, Ava DuVernay, and Amy Sherald.
Readers will recognize some names in the book, but will also be introduced to many important Black women who have changed history or who are reshaping the cultural landscape. They’ll learn:
*how Barbara Harris became the first female bishop of the Episcopal Church
*how Misty Copeland became the first Black principal dancer of the American Ballet Theater
*how the work and inventions of Dr. Patricia Bath have saved or restored the eyesight of people around the world
*how Shirley Chisolm changed the face of politics in America
*how Glory Edim has turned her passion for reading into a thriving online community
*and much more! -
Conversations with Kiese Laymon (Literary Conversations Series)
Conversations with Kiese Laymon (Literary Conversations Series)
Sold outIn over a dozen interviews, Conversations with Kiese Laymon provides an in-depth look at author Kiese Laymon as an educator, creative writer, activist, family member, and Mississippian. Interviews capture surprising insights into Laymon’s life and craft. Within these pages, Laymon talks about his engagement with other writers, including Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. These revelations situate his memoir, Heavy, among other great Mississippi autobiographies and memoirs, such as Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive. In other interviews, he discusses his obsession with revision and deftly fields questions about pop culture, politics, and Black masculinity, along with a host of other pressing contemporary issues.
As the first collection of its kind, Conversations with Kiese Laymon serves as the perfect introduction to studying Laymon. The cross section of interviews included reflects Laymon’s humility, while simultaneously celebrating his accomplishments. Most importantly, the interviews reflect his stature as a major American literary figure. With topics ranging from hip-hop and family to politics and everything in between, this volume provides an unfiltered look at the prolific Southern writer in his own words.
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Virtual Author Talk: Love Songs of W.E.B DuBois with Honoree Fanonne Jeffers & Jacqueline Allen Trimble-May 10 @7PM CST
Virtual Author Talk: Love Songs of W.E.B DuBois with Honoree Fanonne Jeffers & Jacqueline Allen Trimble-May 10 @7PM CST
Sold outCome celebrate the paperback release of The Long Songs of W.E.B DuBois with author, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers & Jacqueline Allen Tremble.
Event Deets
When: May 10 at 7PM CST
Where: Virtual via Crowdcast
How: Register on this page or head over to register on Crowdcast directly using this link. If you register using our website (with or without purchasing the book) and not Crowdcast, you will register a Crowdcast watch link at least 24 hours before the start of the event.
About the Book
“My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem,” W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood these words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother, the descendant of slaves and tenant farmers—Ailey carries the weight of this Problem on her shoulders.
The daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, Ailey is raised in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. Growing up, she struggles with this duality, a battle for belonging that shapes her identity. On one side are her exacting parents and her imperious, light-skinned grandmother Nana Claire, to whom skin color is paramount. On the other, Ailey feels the pull of the “deep country” of her mother’s land-tending family, whose forebears endured the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.
But how can Ailey live up to everyone’s expectations when half of her family rejects the truth of a fraught racial history, while the rest can’t ever seem to break away from it?
About the Author
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 NBA-nominated collection The Age of Phillis. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma.
About the Moderator
JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow and a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications including The Griot, The Offing, The Louisville Review, and Blue Lake Review. American Happiness (2016), her first collection, published by NewSouth Books, won the Balcones Poetry Prize. Trimble's next collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books in fall of 2022.
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IRL AUTHOR TALK: Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood & Myth with Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton & Delita Martin- March 7@ 7PM CST
IRL AUTHOR TALK: Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood & Myth with Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton & Delita Martin- March 7@ 7PM CST
Sold outJoin us for the official launch event of Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood & Myth with author, Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton and artist, Delita Martin.
Event DEETS
When: March 7, 2023 at 7PM CST
Where: Project Row House Community Gallery (2521 Holman Street, HTX 77004)
How: Please RSVP reserve your spot. Checkout for RSVP with Book to support our store and the author/artists.
About Black Chameleon
In the literary tradition of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, this debut memoir confronts both the challenges and joys of growing up Black and making your own truth.
Growing up as a Black girl in America, Deborah Mouton felt alienated from the stories she learned in class. She yearned for stories she felt connected to—true ones of course—but also fables and mythologies that could help explain both the world and her place in it. What she encountered was almost always written by white writers who prospered in a time when human beings were treated as chattel, such as the Greek and Roman myths, which felt as dusty and foreign as ancient ruins. When she sought myths written by Black authors, they were rooted too far in the past, a continent away.
Mouton writes, “The phrases of my mother and grandmother began to seem less colloquial and more tied to stories that had been lost along the way. . . . Mythmaking isn’t a lie. It is our moment to take the privilege of our own creativity to fill in the gaps that colonization has stolen from us. It is us choosing to write the tales that our children pull strength from. It is hijacking history for the ignorance in its closets. This, a truth that must start with the women.”
Mouton’s memoir is a song of praise and an elegy for Black womanhood. With a poet’s gift for lyricism and poignancy, Mouton reflects on her childhood as the daughter of a preacher and a harsh but loving mother, living in the world as a Black woman whose love is all too often coupled with danger, and finally learning to be a mother to another Black girl in America. Of the moment yet timeless, playful but incendiary, Mouton has staked out new territory in the memoir form.About Deborah DEEP Mouton
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally known writer, educator, activist, and performer and the first Black poet laureate of Houston, Texas. She was formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World (PSI). Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination, was named a finalist for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, and received an honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. Its German translation, under the title Berichtenswert, was released in Summer 2021 by Elif Verlag. The opera Marian’s Song, for which she wrote the libretto, debuted in 2020.
About Delita Martin
Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and an MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formerly a member of the fine arts faculty at UA Little Rock in Arkansas, Martin currently works as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press. Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently Martin’s work was included in the State of the Arts: Discovering American Art Now, an exhibition that included 101 artists from around the United States. Her work is in numerous portfolios and collections.
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Don't Cry for Me: A Novel
Don't Cry for Me: A Novel
by Daniel Black
Sold out"Don't Cry for Me is a perfect song."—Jesmyn Ward
A Black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and forgiveness, for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Jones Jr. and Alice Walker
As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob's tumultuous relationship with Isaac's mother and the shame he carries from the dissolution of their family. Tragedies that informed Jacob's role as a father and his reaction to Isaac's being gay.
But most of all, Jacob must share with Isaac the unspoken truths that reside in his heart. He must give voice to the trauma that Isaac has inherited. And he must create a space for the two to find peace.
With piercing insight and profound empathy, acclaimed author Daniel Black illuminates the lived experiences of Black fathers and queer sons, offering an authentic and ultimately hopeful portrait of reckoning and reconciliation. Spare as it is sweeping, poetic as it is compulsively readable, Don't Cry for Me is a monumental novel about one family grappling with love's hard edges and the unexpected places where hope and healing take flight.
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