"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." — Langston Hughes

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."

So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America—not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

Pleasure refers to the freedom to pursue a desire, deliberately sought in order to satisfy the self. Putting pleasure first is liberating. During their extraordinary lives, Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, Yolande DuBois, and Memphis Minnie enjoyed pleasure as they gave pleasure to both those in their lives and to the public at large. They were Black women who, despite their public profiles, whether through Black society or through the world of entertainment, discovered ways to enjoy pleasure.They left home, undertook careers they loved, and did what they wanted, despite perhaps not meeting the standards for respectability in the interwar era. See Me Naked looks at these women as representative of other Black women of the time, who were watched, criticized, and judged by their families, peers, and, in some cases, the government, yet still managed to enjoy themselves. Among the voyeurs of Black women was Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter was clearly a work of fiction inspired by women he observed in public and knew personally, including Black clubwomen, blues performers, and his mother. How did these complicated women wrest loose from the voyeurs to define their own sense of themselves? At very young ages, they found and celebrated aspects of themselves. Using examples from these women’s lives, Green explores their challenges and achievements.

Award-winning novelist Bernice McFadden's highly anticipated new historical novel set amidst the Harlem Renaissance.

―Glorious was a finalist for the 2011 NAACP Image Award for Fiction.

“McFadden’s lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth. . . . McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.” ―New York Times Book Review

“Bernice L. McFadden’s novel Glorious, which starts with a bang-up prologue, has a strong main character (based in part on Zora Neale Hurston), hard-driving prose, and historic sweep of several decades, including the years of the Harlem Renaissance, which has always fascinated me.” ―Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle President

Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era. Blending fact and fiction, Glorious is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and ultimately revival offers a candid and true portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.

It is a novel informed by the question that is the title of Langston Hughes’s famous poem Harlem: "What happens to a dream deferred?" Based on years of research, this heart-wrenching fictional account is given added resonance by factual events coupled with real and imagined larger-than-life characters. Glorious is an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption.

Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature’s most compelling and influential authors. Hurston’s powerful novels of the South—including Jonah’s Gourd Vine and, most famously, Their Eyes Were Watching God—continue to enthrall readers with their lyrical grace, sharp detail, and captivating emotionality. First published in 1942, Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston’s personal story, told in her own words. The Perennial Modern Classics Deluxe edition includes an all-new forward by Maya Angelou, an extended biography by Valerie Boyd, and a special P.S. section featuring the contemporary reviews that greeted the book’s original publication.

Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an exploration of how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian artists offer candid views of the scene while Wilkins delves into related aspects like slab, the area’s hip hop-related car culture. What emerges is a portrait of a dynamic reciprocal process where an artist, having identified with and embodied a social space, reproduces that space in a performance even as the performance reconstructs the social space.

A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.

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“When Miss Brooks. . . writes out of her heart, out of her rich and living background, out of her very real talent, then she induces almost unbearable excitement.” — New York Times

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. 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.

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.

Asserts how Black artists and activists developed a disability consciousness in response to racialized disabling experiences in the early to mid-twentieth century

Black Crip Modern uncovers how early twentieth-century Black writers, artists, and activists laid the groundwork for modern disability consciousness. Under Jim Crow, Black disabled citizens were excluded from social services and medical reforms, even as racist violence, carceral surveillance, eugenic logic, and exploitative labor conditions deepened disabling experiences. Through literature, film, photography, and personal testimony, Black modernists registered these compounded injustices and articulated new ways of thinking about illness, impairment, and care.

Engaging the work of figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Pauli Murray, Langston Hughes and Marita Bonner, Jess Waggoner traces how Black cultural production challenged both white supremacy and ableist ideals of progress. In their writing, Waggoner finds an early “Black crip modern” consciousness―one that rejected eugenic reform, critiqued racialized caregiving hierarchies, and envisioned collective care grounded in feminist and anti-carceral principles.

In conversation with contemporary disability justice movements, Black Crip Modern reveals how Black thinkers and artists forged a disability politics before it was formally named. By assembling these overlooked histories of Black ill and disabled life, Waggoner reframes the foundations of disability studies and insists that Black cultural production has always been central to the struggle for bodily autonomy, access, and justice.

Featured on NPR's Morning Edition

A Best Book of the Year at The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Poetry School, New York Public Library, and Entropy Magazine

Winner of the Ted Hughes Award, Rathbones Folio Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award; finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Reading the West Book Award

In the wake of his father’s death, the speaker in Raymond Antrobus’ The Perseverance travels to Barcelona. In Gaudi’s Cathedral, he meditates on the idea of silence and sound, wondering whether acoustics really can bring us closer to God. Receiving information through his hearing aid technology, he considers how deaf people are included in this idea. “Even though,” he says, “I have not heard / the golden decibel of angels, / I have been living in a noiseless / palace where the doorbell is pulsating / light and I am able to answer.”

The Perseverance is a collection of poems examining a d/Deaf experience alongside meditations on loss, grief, education, and language, both spoken and signed. It is a book about communication and connection, about cultural inheritance, about identity in a hearing world that takes everything for granted, about the dangers we may find (both individually and as a society) if we fail to understand each other.

A rediscovered classic from the Harlem Renaissance about a young Black woman’s journey passing as white in 1920s New York City and her quest for self-acceptance—with an introduction by Glory Edim, founder and author of Well-Read Black Girl.

Jessie Redmon Fauset is one of the literary titans and foremost tastemakers of the Harlem Renaissance—hired by W. E. B. Du Bois to edit The Crisis, she helped popularize writers like Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, amongst countless others. And yet, her own work has been largely underread in the twenty-first century. Written in 1929, at the height of the Harlem renaissance, Fauset’s celebrated second novel tells the story of Angela Murray.
 
Growing up in a Black middle-class Philadelphia neighborhood, Angela has always dreamed of becoming a painter. But the profession is largely reserved for white society. So when Angela’s parents prematurely pass away, she moves to roaring New York City, where she befriends elite artists and presents herself as a white woman. While her sister Virginia’s complexion resembles that of their father’s, Angela’s is lighter, like her mother’s, and passing, she believes, is the only way she’ll ever achieve success. Virginia, meanwhile, refuses to bow to racist pressures, and stays in Philadelphia to embrace her heritage with pride. 
 
Each time Angela thinks she’s found artistic, professional, and romantic fulfillment, her ethnicity gets exposed and she finds herself stripped of everything she cares about. As she navigates a world of seduction, betrayal, lust, and heartbreak, she’s forced to consider: What does it mean to find genuine success in a society marred by injustice? Fauset’s “novel without morals” never passes judgement and stays teeming with tenderness. Full of moments that underline the joy of every day Black life, Plum Bun is a pertinent meditation on art, identity, and what it means to find community—as relevant today as ever before.

Celebrate E. Hughes' debut poetry collection, Ankle - Deep in Pacific Water! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, December 5 @ 7PM 

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, Houston, Texas, 77004) 

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our programming. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, a debut collection by E. Hughes, marries personal narrative with historical excavation to articulate the intricacies of Black familial love, life, and pain. Tracing the experiences of a southern Black family, their migration to the San Francisco Bay area, and the persistent anti-Blackness there (despite the state’s insistence that it is/was not involved in the US’ projects of imperialism or chattel slavery), Hughes illuminates the intersections of history, grief, and violence.

At the book’s heart is “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant,” a persona poem written from the perspective of the formerly enslaved abolitionist and financier Mary Ellen Pleasant who is thought to have helped fund John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Alongside this historical account, Hughes deftly weaves in the story of a contemporary Black family navigating the generational trauma resulting from the Great Migration: domestic violence and racialized violence, familial love and loyalty, the work of parenting, and the work of being a child. Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water reveals in its pages that, while many things have changed over time, ultimately the question of what “freedom” meant and looked like for Black people in the early 20th century retains the same murkiness and contradictions for Black people today. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

E. Hughes’ poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Guernica, Poet Lore, Indiana Review, and Gulf Coast Magazine—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. In 2021, they received their MFA+MA from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Currently, Hughes is a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University studying black aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism