Fathering yourself might be the most important work you do as a father.

Glen Henry never wanted to be a father. He grew up in a broken home and assumed that the role was worthless. Then he saw what a good father looked like and became passionate about not only being a good father himself but helping others see what fatherhood could be through his wildly popular YouTube channel, Beleaf in Fatherhood.

Maybe you weren’t given a handbook on fatherhood but that doesn’t mean you’re unprepared. In fact, you have what it takes to grow into the kind of father your children need. In Father Yourself First Glen offers hard-earned wisdom, honest storytelling, and six foundational principles that will help you

* father yourself to maintain a healthy inner voice,
* parent from a place of healing by addressing unresolved issues from your own past,
* connect with your children by embracing childishness and adventure,
* identify your children’s unique gifts early on and help fine-tune their skills into productive habits, and
* establish a community of fathers to exchange values and practices and regularly see examples of healthy fatherhood.

Whether you’re stepping into fatherhood for the first time or figuring it out as you go, this book will meet you right where you are—and walk with you as you become the father your family deserves.

From the critically acclaimed and award-winning creators of Crown and I Am Every Good Thing, Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James, comes an illustrated nonfiction young adult homage to Black athlete activists throughout history.

This is not your typical book about sports. This one begins…
“AN ATHLETE PROTESTING THE MISTREATMENT OF AMERICAN CITIZENS DOES NOT MAKE THEM ANTI-AMERICAN.”
And through a series of powerful poems, freedom-oriented prose, and dynamic illustration, Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James introduce young readers and change-makers to athletes such as Muhammad Ali, Curt Flood, and Elgin Baylor who used their voices and influence to shake up the landscape of American sports and justice.

* TIMELY AND TOPICAL: Teaches readers about a continued cultural discussion from a resonant and impactful perspective.
* MADE TO CAPTURE THE ATTENTION OF YOUNG READERS: With a mix of prose, poetry, quotes, and illustrations, readers can dive into important history that might otherwise go untold.
* FROM AN AWARD-WINNING TEAM: Caldecott Honoree Gordon C. James and Kirkus Prize, Coretta Scott King Honor, and Newbery Honor recipient Derrick Barnes have teamed up again to create a memorable, impactful, and important book---this time for young adults.

In her first book for young readers, National Book Award winner Imani Perry chronicles the history of schools and education in Black America.

After emancipation, freed people of all ages wanted to go to school. From the story of John McCline, who learned to read as a boy serving in the Union Army, through the teachers who built one-room schoolhouses across the rural South during Reconstruction to the student-led movement to desegregate schools during the Civil Rights movement, Imani Perry’s intimate and sweeping social history narrates this powerful desire for education and literacy―and how African Americans built and maintained an education system even while segregated and unequal public education failed them. These schools taught Black children to believe in themselves and their future despite Jim Crow and the institutionally racist society they lived in.

Informed by a rich trove of letters, diaries, and other archival materials, Hope in a Classroom is a necessary, expansive new narrative of the Black American experience for young readers, delivered in a propulsive and soaring voice.

illustrations throughout

From the PEN-nominated author of The Blueprint comes a moving novel about two women connected by music, memory—and murder.

Texas, 1983. Lola Jones is in prison for the death of her mother’s former lover, a man whose presence tangled itself through both their lives. After years of silence, Lola writes a letter to the dead man’s daughter—the “secret sister” from the better part of town in whose shadow Lola has lived most of her life.

As Lola reaches across time and memory, her story unfolds in two mirrored movements: the first, a chronicle of her mother, Camille, a blues singer shaped by love, ambition, and loss; the second, a recounting of Lola’s own coming of age in the echo of Camille’s legacy.

Braided with music, memory, and the weight of being misunderstood, Sweet Water explores inheritance, identity, and the ways women learn to survive what they cannot control. It is a story about Black women connected and separated by their experiences with each other, and with the men in their lives. Written as a letter, structured like a blues song—call and response, verse and refrain—the novel asks what it means to reclaim your voice when someone else’s pain has defined your existence.

From MacArthur Genius, award-winning expert on justice transformation, James Bell, Sorrow’s Kitchen presents a groundbreaking and unapologetically hopeful vision of what is possible if we center our communities and justice systems around care and wellbeing rather than punishment and control.

Weaving together powerful stories and solutions from his frontline work with justice practitioners, law enforcement officers, and community members throughout the states and around the globe, James Bell has written a book with a simple and powerful idea at its core: A justice system based on punishment makes all of us less safe. But we each have the power to reimagine and recreate justice in our communities in such a way that all of us are seen and cared for. And justice transformation begins with youth justice.

Sorrow’s Kitchen: The End of Punishment and the Beginning of True Safety delves into the deeply entrenched racial inequities within America’s justice system, tracing their roots to slavery, segregation, and systemic oppression. Through personal anecdotes, historical analysis, and a critique of current practices, James Bell exposes how structural racism has shaped the administration of justice, perpetuating cycles of harm and inequality. The metaphor of "Sorrow’s Kitchen," borrowed from Zora Neale Hurston, serves as a poignant symbol of the collective suffering endured by Black communities, while highlighting their resilience and determination to rise above systemic injustices.

A central focus of Sorrow’s Kitchen is the failure of punitive justice systems to ensure public safety or address the root causes of harm. Bell’s critiques of mass incarceration, racialized social control, and the over-policing of marginalized communities, make the argument that these approaches exacerbate inequality rather than resolve it. He advocates for a transformative vision of justice rooted in care, equity, and community-centered solutions. By centering the voices and expertise of those most impacted by systemic injustice, Sorrow’s Kitchen calls for dismantling harmful structures and replacing them with restorative practices that prioritize wellbeing and healing.

Ultimately, Sorrow’s Kitchen is a call to action, urging readers to reckon with America’s history of racial violence and to imagine a more equitable future. It emphasizes the importance of collective action, power-sharing, and authentic inclusion in reimagining justice systems that serve all people with dignity and humanity. Infused with hope and determination, Sorrow’s Kitchen challenges the status quo and inspires a vision of a society where care replaces control, and justice is truly transformative.

From the award-winning author Jared Lemus comes a novel where myth and danger collide in an isolated Guatemalan town

Huecotenango is a small town in a remote corner of Guatemala, where residents—outcasts, wanderers, and people running from the past—have gathered as if drawn by some unspoken calling. Behind Huecotenango’s daily rhythms, something has been silently approaching for fifteen years, and its inhabitants sense that their lives are about to change forever.

A crash on the outskirts brings two brothers into Huecotenango. The townspeople offer to help without knowing who the brothers are or what danger they might bring. Leo and Santiago see Huecotenango as a place to disappear and continue their illicit work, but their presence soon unsettles the community. Rumors spread and loyalties are tested as the town’s humble existence comes under threat. Extraordinary residents come into focus—a woman who can shapeshift into a jaguar, a healer who absorbs the ailments of others, a young woman with a debt to the god of the underworld—and their pasts, powers, and choices gradually converge with the brothers’ story in ways both dangerous and profound.

Jared Lemus has written a suspenseful, morally complex debut novel about survival, devotion, greed, and the inexorable pull of the past. In Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring, ordinary lives are tested by extraordinary forces, and the consequences of small decisions ripple fatally outward.

The iconic NAACP magazine’s most dynamic and daring African American voices gathered together for the first time in a groundbreaking literary collection, from founding editor W. E. B. DuBois and Jessie Fauset to today's modern day cultural critics, including June Shagaloff and Michael A. Lawrence.

The Crisis magazine is the official publication of NAACP. It was created in 1910 by renowned historian, civil rights activist, and NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois. The magazine appeared three years before Conde Nast launched an American version of Vanity Fair and fifteen years before Harold W. Ross introduced The New Yorker to readers.

Du Bois started The Crisis in one room of the New York Evening Post building in New York City and edited the publication until 1934. A group of NAACP leaders adapted the name from James Russell Lowell's poem The Present Crisis, written at the height of the Civil War.

In the premier issue Du Bois made clear of the publication’s goals: "The Crisis will record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American. Secondly, it will be a review of opinion and literature, recording briefly books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem. Thirdly, it will publish a few short articles. Finally, its editorial page will stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy."

At the time, Du Bois noted, "it was the rule of most white papers never to publish a picture of a colored person except as a criminal and the colored papers published mostly pictures of celebrities who sometimes paid for the honor. In general, the Negro race was just a little afraid to see itself in plain ink." Everything changed with the advent of The Crisis.

Now, for the first time ever The Best of the Crisis will bring together the magazine’s previously published most dynamic and daring voices and stories from its founding until today in one extraordinary collection, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, Francis Grimke, J.A. Rogers, Stetson Kennedy, E. Franklin Frazier, Oswald Garrison Villard, Jessie Fauset and Arna Bontemps.

This edition will spotlight the first section devoted to Negro children, the first presentation of Negro artwork, the first feature stories about successful Negroes, the first full-fledged drive for Pan-Africanism, the first special numbers devoted to Negro educational advancement, the first articles on consumers cooperation all tied together with contemporary voices on where we stand on these issues today.

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.

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.

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.

From the Washington Post’s first race and ethnicity reporter, a poignant investigation into the aftermath of the Great Migration, the promise of a Second Great Migration, and what future Black communities could look like across America in this eye-opening and thoughtful study, a mix of The Warmth of Other Suns and How the Word Is Passed.

Since the 1990s, demographers have been documenting a new Great Migration: millions of Black Americans leaving Northern and Western cities for the South their parents and grandparents fled during Jim Crow. Huge numbers of Black people have been moving to Memphis, Houston, Charlotte, and other booming metropolises in the hopes of recreating the vibrant communities their grandparents once left. Have they found what they were looking for? Is it possible for Black Americans to have community, economic prosperity, and safety all in one place? And if so, where?

In the Search for Black Mecca, Emmanuel Felton examines how these questions are playing out in real lives today, going into the homes of Black Americans who are weighing what they want and where they hope to find it. He identifies three archetypes—“Those Who Stay,” “Those Who Leave,” and “Those Who Build Something New”—and reveals the costs and benefits of each decision, while seeking answers to deeper questions regarding communal responsibility, what’s needed to make Black neighborhoods thrive, and how to manage the fact that white people are often threatened by Black success. He also unravels his own family’s migration story through the lives of his two grandfathers—a prominent New Orleans dentist and a troubled musician who migrated to Oakland, California.

Through these stories, Felton crystalizes our understanding of what it means to find—or to create —our own meccas: radical spaces for Black joy, freedom, and imagination, even when the external world tries to take those places away.

Advice and wisdom from entrepreneur, bestselling author, and business icon Loida Lewis, with useful tips and best practices—from the physical to the mental—to achieve an ageless glow from the inside out, no matter your age

A heartfelt guide for those seeking to age gracefully by embracing self-care practices and positive lifestyle changes. The renowned CEO of the billon-dollar enterprise, TLC Beatrice, Loida Lewis shares her wisdom and actionable advice on maintaining beauty and vitality, detailing the daily practices and rituals that have served her well into her eighties. In this inspiring manual, she beautifully bridges memoir and prescriptive guidance, sharing her age-defying beauty “secrets” so we can also look and feel younger than their chronological age—without expensive cosmetic procedures. Readers will find encouragement to:

* Establish a daily skincare routine focused on hydration and sun protection
* Incorporate physical activities like stretching, walking, and yoga
* Embrace nutritious eating habits and mindful moderation
* Foster emotional and spiritual wellness through meditation, gratitude, and community bonds

Loida's narrative is filled with warmth and authenticity, offering a beacon of joy and resilience. Her personal reflections and practical tips create a valuable resource for anyone looking to enhance their well-being and celebrate life at any age. Rediscover the art of aging gracefully with this empowering and insightful guide, perfect for enhancing both inner and outer beauty.