A new collection of the seminal writings and speeches of a legendary writer, orator, and civil rights leader
 
This compact volume offers a full course on the remarkable, diverse career of Frederick Douglass, letting us hear once more a necessary historical figure whose guiding voice is needed now as urgently as ever. Edited by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Pulitzer Prize–nominated historian John Stauffer, The Portable Frederick Douglass includes the full range of Douglass’s works: the complete Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as well as extracts from My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; The Heroic Slave, one of the first works of African American fiction; the brilliant speeches that launched his political career and that constitute the greatest oratory of the Civil War era; and his journalism, which ranges from cultural and political critique (including his early support for women’s equality) to law, history, philosophy, literature, art, and international affairs, including a never-before-published essay on Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture.
 
The Portable Frederick Douglass is the latest addition in a series of African American classics curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. First published in 2008, the series reflects a selection of great works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by African and African American authors introduced and annotated by leading scholars and acclaimed writers in new or updated editions for Penguin Classics. In his series essay, “What Is an African American Classic?” Gates provides a broader view of the canon of classics of African American literature available from Penguin Classics and beyond. Gates writes, “These texts reveal the human universal through the African American particular: all true art, all classics do this; this is what ‘art’ is, a revelation of that which makes each of us sublimely human, rendered in the minute details of the actions and thoughts and feelings of a compelling character embedded in a time and place.”
 
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Celebrating the storied career of a beloved letterpress printer whose posters spread messages of racial justice

Detroit-based letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. is celebrated for his type-driven messages of social justice and Black power, emblazoned in rhythmically layered and boldly inked posters made for the masses. Citizen Printer tells Kennedy’s inspiring story and contextualizes his important work―and offers readers tools for lifting their voices, too. A vital monograph on a trailblazing contemporary Black artist, Citizen Printer features 800 reproductions representing the breadth of Kennedy’s posters and prints, plus original portraiture of the artist at work, a powerful artist statement and a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Austin Kleon, all presented in a dynamic type-forward design from American Institute of Graphic Arts medalist Gail Anderson and Joe Newton.
Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. (born 1948) was working a corporate job for AT&T when, at the age of 40, he discovered the art of letterpress printing on a tour of Colonial Williamsburg. Kennedy then devoted himself to the craft, earning an MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and teaching at Indiana University. He now operates Kennedy Prints!, a communal letterpress center in Detroit. Borrowing words from social justice heroes Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and others, Kennedy layers bold statements on race, capitalism, history and politics in exuberant, colorful and one-of-a-kind posters. Kennedy has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine and the Economist, and his work has been exhibited by the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and other institutions through the US. He was the subject of a 2012 feature-length documentary, Proceed and Be Bold!

EVENT DEETS:

When: Thursday, January 9 at 7 PM CST

Where: Hogan Brown Community (2310 Elgin Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP WITH BOOK to support our programming and store or grab a free ticket. 

ABOUT THE BOOK:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Irvin is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. His writing has been featured in Esquire, The Atlantic, The Root, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, a BA from Morehouse College and has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNERS

Texas native Anthony Suber is an interdisciplinary artist working and living in SouthEast Texas. He received a BFA from the University of Houston and completed his MFA at Houston Christian University. Throughout his career, Suber has exhibited work and produced multi-tiered activations both nationally and abroad. Suber is a professor of art with the Katherine G. McGovern College at University Houston’s School of Art and an artist-in-residence with Project Row Houses in Houston’s historic Third Ward community. He also serves as the Creative Director for the arts and mental health nonprofit, The Blackman Project. 

Suber’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece, Project Row Houses, Houston, Tinney Contemporary in Nashville, University Museum at Texas Southern University, Houston, Art is Bond Gallery, Houston, John B. Coleman Gallery at Prairie View A&M University, Houston Museum of African American Culture, with solo exhibitions at Red Bud Arts Center in Houston, LRT Gallery, Houston and Cindy Lisica Gallery, Houston. His work has been featured in publications such as Arts and Culture Texas, Glass Tire, The Houston Chronicle, and Free Press Houston. Suber was the recipient of the Artadia Art Prize in 2022. 

Wale is a licensed mental health therapist and a passionate reader who uses her platform (@theehottgirlbooks) to dive deep into powerfully emotional stories written by BIPOC authors. Her love for reading and mental health fosters a passionate approach to her work both online and in the therapy room. When she is not immersed in the literary world, you can find her watching the real housewives or building an elaborate Lego set.

Sumptuous and tender portraits of an empowered Black queer experience

Eric Hart Jr.’s black-and-white photo series presents more than 70 portraits focusing on the notion of power as it relates to the Black queer experience. Begun in 2019, When I Think About Power investigates and expands the contemporary reimagining of men through themed chapters. “I'm fascinated with the intersectionality and the layers of what it means to be Black in the modern day,” he has said. “From masculinity, queerness, to dress, I strive to utilize image-making in a way that displays people like myself in all of their power and all of their beauty.” Hart's approach stems from his own journey toward self-acceptance growing up in Macon, Georgia. By visually exploring the differences and similarities between himself and the men who surround him, studying the words of Black queer icons and researching the visibility of power in eras such as the Ming dynasty or ancient Egypt, Hart has created an iconography of a power that so many queer individuals seek.
The work of Brooklyn-based photographer Eric Hart Jr. (born 1999) has been published in Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the New York Times and i-D magazine, and has been praised by artists such as Beyoncé and Spike Lee. Hart is a two-time Gordon Parks scholar, a 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 Art & Style choice, and in 2020 was named one of Men's Health magazine's “20-year-old mavericks changing America.”

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Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.
 
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

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The new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery.

A literary classic that remains vital to our understanding of the past, Corregidora is Gayl Jones’s powerful debut novel, examining womanhood, sexuality, and the psychological residue of slavery. Jones masterfully tells the story of Ursa, a Kentucky blues singer, who, in the wake of a tragic loss, confronts her maternal history and the legacy of Corregidora, the Brazilian slave master who fathered both her mother and grandmother. Consumed and haunted by her hatred of the man who irrevocably shaped her life and the lives of her family, Ursa Corregidora must come to terms with a past that is never too distant from the present.

Selected, edited, and first edited by Toni Morrison, it is “the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women,” (James Baldwin) and “a tale as American as Mount Rushmore and as murky as the Florida swamps.” (Maya Angelou).

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel

In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest chilling novel that “will give you nightmares. The good kind, of course” (BuzzFeed) from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones.

“Some girls just don’t know how to die…”

Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange.

Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.

Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.

Houston was Boomtown USA in the 1970s, growing through tremendous immigration of people and through frequent annexation of outlying areas. But in the shadow of the high-rise "petropolis" was another city ignored by and invisible to Houston municipal boosters and the national media. Black Houston, the largest black community in the South, remained largely untouched by the benefits of the boom but bore many of the burdens.

Robert D. Bullard systematically explores major demographic, social, economic, and political factors that helped make Houston the "golden buckle" of the Sunbelt. He then chronicles the rise of Houston's black neighborhoods and analyzes the problems that have accrued to the black community over the years, concentrating on the boom era of the 1970s and the dwindling of the economy and of government commitment to affirmative action in the late 1980s. Case studies conducted in Houston's Third Ward--a microcosm of the larger black community--provide data on housing patterns, discrimination, pollution, law enforcement, and leadership, issues that the author discusses and relates to the larger ones of institutional racism, poverty, and politics.

During Houston's rapid growth, freeways were built over black neighborhoods and municipal services were stretched away from the inner city and poverty pockets to the new, far-flung, and mostly white city limits. Businesses thrived, but many jobs called for advanced education and skills, while black youth still suffered from inadequate schools, inexperienced teachers, and, later, unemployment rates nearly double those of whites. When the oil-based economy collapsed in the early eighties, many blacks again bore a heavier share of the burdens.

Invisible Houston describes the rich cultural history of the South's largest black community and analyzes the contemporary issues that offer the chance for black Houston to become visible to itself, to the larger community, and to the nation.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Begin Again, a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary people can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and assume responsibility for what it takes to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.

“Like attending a jazz concert with all of one’s favorite musicians…James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and more…Glaude brilliantly takes us on an epic tour through their lives and work.”
―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race

We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.

Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, the book begins with Glaude’s unease with the Obama years. He felt then, and does even more urgently now, that the excitement around the Obama presidency constrained our politics as we turned to yet another prophet-like figure. He examines his personal history and the traditions that both shape and overwhelm his own voice.

Glaude weaves anecdotes about his evolving views on Black politics together with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, encouraging us to reflect on the lessons of these great thinkers and address imaginatively the challenges of our day in voices uniquely our own.

Narrated with passion and philosophical intensity, this book is a powerful reminder that if American democracy is to survive, we must step out from under the shadows of past giants to build a better society―one that derives its strength from the pew, not the pulpit.

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.

In 1912 a strange confession is given, over several nights, to a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunted the fields of the Blackfeet reservation, looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran Pastor is discovered within a wall and what it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed confessions by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shared the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits, this is a bloody history of the American West that has remained untold until now.

What’s done in the dark…Murderer is a title she never expected to wear. Friend? Sure. Boss? Hell yes. But murderer? Never. If only she hadn’t threatened exactly that, just before someone winds up dead, and her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.Always comes to light…All he wanted was to live a quiet life, without all the danger and darkness of his past. Those plans are blown when he’s accused of a crime he has nothing to do with, leaving him with a hard decision… remain in the shadows, or do what he can to help a friend?When other crimes start stacking up – the handiwork of an anonymous suspect with an unknown vendetta, they’ll discover something that flips their worlds upside down…A murder accusation may be the least of their worries.