181 results for “by ruth j. simmons”

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  • Lonely Crowds: A Novel cover image

    Stephanie Wambugu

    from $18.99

    *Paperback Release Date - 7/7/26*

    Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early '90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.

    Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world. 
     
    While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
     
    Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.

  • Fairfield County: A Novel cover image
    $28.00

    A sweeping family saga about inheritance and the enduring legacy of Southern Black cowboy culture, from the acclaimed author of Redwood Court, a Reese’s Book Club Pick

    A sprawling landscape of sand, red clay, and pine trees, South Carolina’s Fairfield County is the only place the Bolton family has ever called home. For over a century, they have cultivated this land, expertly raising horses to compete in derbies and rodeos and passing this knowledge on from generation to generation.

    But after a devastating tragedy, Dwayne, the next inheritor of the Bolton legacy, buries his family history—particularly from his daughter. Nikki, unlike her father, is a proud, burgeoning horsewoman with no knowledge of her family’s connection to the part of her life she’s most passionate about. But through a series of events that threaten to sever father and daughter from the only land they’ve ever known, Dwayne is forced to confront his past so that Nikki can step into her future.

    With nuance and care, Dameron deftly examines her most beloved subjects: the intricacies of family, and the powerful forces that shape who we are. Fairfield County is at once a moving exploration of the ties that bind us, and a bold reclamation of the American Cowboy—taking this iconic image out of the white-washed Old West and deep into the heart of the Black South, where it has always resided.

  • The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family cover image
    $30.00

    From Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and a writer who “has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades” (Bryan Stevenson), comes a spirited and riveting memoir of growing up in an interracial family in 1960s Chicago and a daughter’s journey to understand her parents’ marriage—and her own identity.

    Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the “colorline.” Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn’t just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages—a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life.

    As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy’s father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s—studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality.

    Decades later, while sorting through her father’s papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father’s research didn’t begin with her parents’ love story—it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father’s intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own.

    Though grounded in her parents’ research, it’s Roberts’ captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents’ interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today’s most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.

  • Freedom: Essays cover image
    $29.00

    ONE OF LIT HUB'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2026

    A radically vulnerable and virtuosic inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the interminable nature of struggle, from the award-winning author of What We Lose

    Weaving personal reflections with piercing insight and expansive vision across nine brilliant essays, Zinzi Clemmons explores the complexities of the elusive concept of freedom. As the daughter of a South African mother and a Trinidadian America father, she recounts growing up in the largely white, affluent town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania—and her frequent travels to Johannesburg, where the lofty promise of freedom was all around her. Coming of age amidst the euphoria of South Africa's first all-race elections, she grapples with the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the shattered hope in the wake of the Obama era. Clemmons critiques the entrenched inequalities that haunt both countries, from the tragic loss of a childhood friend to the violence that often befalls women who have the audacity to be free.

    In a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism, and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe, Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class, and inheritance. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest—the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.

  • Wings of Ebony

    by J. Elle

    $12.99

    “Make a way out of no way” is just the way of life for Rue. But when her mother is shot dead on her doorstep, life for her and her younger sister changes forever. Rue's taken from her neighborhood by the father she never knew, forced to leave her little sister behind, and whisked away to Ghizon—a hidden island of magic wielders.

    Rue is the only half-god, half-human there, where leaders protect their magical powers at all costs and thrive on human suffering. Miserable and desperate to see her sister on the anniversary of their mother’s death, Rue breaks Ghizon’s sacred Do Not Leave Law and returns to Houston, only to discover that Black kids are being forced into crime and violence. And her sister, Tasha, is in danger of falling sway to the very forces that claimed their mother’s life.

    Worse still, evidence mounts that the evil plaguing East Row is the same one that lurks in Ghizon—an evil that will stop at nothing until it has stolen everything from her and everyone she loves. Rue must embrace her true identity and wield the full magnitude of her ancestors’ power to save her neighborhood before the gods burn it to the ground.

    About the author: J. Elle was born in Houston, Texas, and is a first-generation college student with a bachelor’s in journalism and MA in educational administration and human development. An advocate for marginalized voices in both publishing and her community, J. Elle’s passion for empowering youth dates back to her first career in education. She’s worked as a preschool director, middle school teacher, and high school creative writing mentor. In her spare time, she volunteers at an alternative school, provides feedback for aspiring writers, loves on her three littles, and cooks up dishes true to her Texas and Louisiana roots. Wings of Ebony is her first novel.

     

  • Ashes of Gold

    by J. Elle

    from $12.99

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    In the heart-pounding conclusion to the Wings of Ebony duology, which #1 New York Times bestselling author Nicole Yoon calls “bold, inventive, big-hearted and deeply perceptive,” Rue makes her final stand to reclaim her people’s stolen magic.

    Rue has no memory of how she ended up locked in a basement prison without her magic or her allies. But she’s a girl from the East Row. And girls from the East Row don’t give up. Girls from the East Row pick themselves back up when they fall. Girls from the East Row break themselves out.

    But reuniting with her friends is only half the battle. When she finds them again, Rue makes a vow: she will find a way to return the magic that the Chancellor has stolen from her father’s people. Yet even on Yiyo Peak, Rue is a misfit—with half a foot back in Houston and half a heart that is human as well as god, she’s not sure she’s the right person to lead the fight to reclaim a glorious past.

    When a betrayal sends her into a tailspin, Rue must decide who to trust and how to be the leader that her people deserve…because if she doesn’t, it isn’t just Yiyo that will be destroyed—it will be Rue herself.

  • Men We Reaped

    by Jesmyn Ward

    $17.99
    “A brilliant book about beauty and death . . . with lyrical descriptions of the people and the land . . . Men We Reaped is [a] stirring and sad record.” —Los Angeles Times

     

    Universally praised, Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped confirmed her ascendancy as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, her Southern requiem securing its place on bestseller and best books of the year lists, with honors and awards pouring in from around the country.


    Jesmyn's memoir shines a light on the community she comes from, in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young men dear to her, including her beloved brother-lost to drugs, accidents, murder, and suicide. Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected, by identity and place, and as Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: These young men died because of who they were and the place they were from, because certain disadvantages breed a certain kind of bad luck. Because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle. The agonizing reality commanded Jesmyn to write, at last, their true stories and her own.


    Men We Reaped opens up a parallel universe, yet it points to problems whose roots are woven into the soil under all our feet. This indispensable American memoir is destined to become a classic.

  • A Day with No Words cover image

    Tiffany Hammond

    $18.99

    The #1 New York Times bestselling picture book by Tiffany Hammond, the creator of the popular Fidgets and Fries platform, invites readers into the life of an Autistic family who communicate without spoken language.

    Aidan doesn't talk with words. He uses a tablet, tapping buttons with pictures to show what he means.

    When Mama taps “Park . . . now?” Aidan quickly taps back “Yes.” And after Aidan twirls and twirls in the grass until he can no longer stand, he taps, “All done.”

    Not everyone understands their family's unique way of communicating, though. Some think that because Aidan doesn't say words, he doesn't know words. But verbal speech isn't the only way we can connect with others. We can use tablets and letter boards, facial expressions, hand gestures, and written words.

    With tenderness and heart, A Day with No Words illuminates the many unique ways people can understand each other, even if they don't speak.

  • Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol

    by Nell Irvin Painter

    $18.99

    "A pathbreaking biography. It should command the widest popular attention and profound scholarly attention." —David Levering Lewis, author of W. E. B. DuBois

    Sojourner Truth: ex-slave and fiery abolitionist, figure of imposing physique, riveting preacher and spellbinding singer who dazzled listeners with her wit and originality. Straight-talking and unsentimental, Truth became a national symbol for strong black women—indeed, for all strong women. Like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, she is regarded as a radical of immense and enduring influence; yet, unlike them, what is remembered of her consists more of myth than of personality.

    Now, in a masterful blend of scholarship and sympathetic understanding, eminent black historian Nell Irvin Painter goes beyond the myths, words, and photographs to uncover the life of a complex woman who was born into slavery and died a legend. Inspired by religion, Truth transformed herself from a domestic servant named Isabella into an itinerant pentecostal preacher; her words of empowerment have inspired black women and poor people the world over to this day. As an abolitionist and a feminist, Truth defied the notion that slaves were male and women were white, expounding a fact that still bears repeating: among blacks there are women; among women, there are blacks.

    No one who heard her speak ever forgot Sojourner Truth, the power and pathos of her voice, and the intelligence of her message. No one who reads Painter's groundbreaking biography will forget this landmark figure and the story of her courageous life.

  • Book cover image

    Juanita Tolliver

    $29.00

    From an MSNBC Political Analyst, a riveting account of the legendary party hosted by Diahann Carroll for Shirley Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign, which changed the playing field for Black women in politics.

    In 1972, New York Representative Shirley Chisholm broke the ice in American politics when she became the first Black woman to run for president of the United States. Chisholm left behind a coalition-building model personified by a once-in-an-era Hollywood party hosted by legendary actress and singer Diahann Carroll, and attended by the likes of Huey P. Newton, Barbara Lee, Berry Gordy, David Frost, Flip Wilson, Goldie Hawn and others. In A More Perfect Party, MSNBC political analyst Juanita Tolliver presents a path to people-centered politics through the lens of this soiree, with surprising parallels to our current electoral reality.

    Chisholm worked the crowd of movie stars, media moguls, music executives and activists gathered at Carroll's opulent Beverly Hills home, forging relationships with laughter as she urged guests to unify behind her campaign. With the feminist movement on the rise and eighteen- to twenty-year-olds voting for the first time in American history, the Democratic Party and the nation were on the cusp of long-overdue change.

    Zooming in on one party attendee per chapter, A More Perfect Party brings this whimsical event out of the margins of history to demonstrate that there is an opportunity for all of us to fight for a better nation and return power to the people.

  • Yours Forever (Bayou Dreams) cover image
    $9.99

    In Gauthier, love isn’t just found. It’s forever.

    Tamryn West, Ph.D., did not plan to swap Boston lecture halls for dirt roads, a failing radiator, or a surprise motorcycle rescue. But a research grant leads her to Gauthier, Louisiana, where the past opens doors she never meant to knock on, including the one belonging to Matthew Gauthier, the lawyer who avoided her calls and showed up anyway with dimples fully deployed.

    Matt knows the town’s legacy like second nature, a generational inheritance he’d rather protect than narrate. The Gauthier Law Firm has long been the heartbeat of quiet justice, and Matt guards his family history the same way he wins a case, carefully, privately, and without extra commentary. Charming? Occasionally. Cooperative? Never on the first request, or the twentieth.

    Their collision begins with a ride into town, luggage retrieved like a good deed that came with invisible fine print, and a quiet spark that grows louder than expected. Archives and chance meetings steer their summer off course, but their journey to happily ever after is worth the ride.

  • Here Come the Aunties! cover image
    $19.99

    Joyful and warmhearted, this delightful book honors the blessings of every auntie in a child’s life, by distinguished author Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee) and illustrator Aphelandra (Oneida).

    “Hesci! Here come the aunties!”

    Aunts by kinship as well as family friends, neighbors, and community members all step up to fill the important role of “auntie.” They are there for life’s joys, sorrows, and celebrations, bringing their own special love.

    A wonderful gift from or for a treasured auntie!

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