A floundering twenty-something, who’s sworn off romance finds herself roped into her meddling sister’s matchmaking business—in this sparkling debut rom-com that asks: can we protect ourselves while falling in love?

Kaia Harper may not have a plan for her life, but she knows what she won't be doing—falling for somebody's dusty son, promising forever. She'd rather spend the summer after college having disappointing one-night stands and watching crime show reruns. At least she won’t be caught off guard since she already knows how all those stories end.

But when her very pregnant and newly single sister calls for help, Kaia reroutes, stumbling back home to suburban Connecticut…and into the business plan of her sister's new matchmaking company. Kaia’s views on love remain as bleak as her career prospects, but if becoming the inaugural client can distract her from existential questions like "What am I even doing with my life?", Kaia can suffer through a few bad dates and call it a favor.

When Ro Jackson finds Kaia stalled on the side of the road, he isn’t put off by her attitude. His steady disposition is Kaia’s opposite and makes him exactly what she needs—a friend in town who can handle her just as she is. But as Ro talks Kaia through a summer of failed matches, she finds herself drawn to more than just his poetic outlook and friendship.

Kaia hadn’t seen this one coming, but as she and Ro grow closer, she’ll have to decide what’s more important: needing to know the end of every story, or jumping into the unknown.

An exuberant debut picture book about a little girl trying to outmaneuver her mama to avoid wash day for her hair—and all the laughs and love her antics inspire—illustrated by Coretta Scott King Honor winner Kaylani Juanita. The perfect next read for fans of Hair Love and Don’t Touch My Hair.

Nina Belle loves everything about her hair. Everything . . . except wash day.

Wash day is painful! Wash day is boring! She won’t do it this week . . . no way!

Nina Belle has plans to get out of the weekly routine, but Mama knows her way around wash day too—and maybe even the secret to enjoying it. 

No Way, Wash Day is a cheeky and heartfelt look at a cultural touchstone and the time-honored tradition of trying and failing to thwart it.

Nothing is impossible—not even being brave enough to ice skate again after a fall! With a poetic text and dazzling illustrations, Come Catch a Dream will appeal to every child chasing their dream, and fans of The Snowy Day, Jabari Jumps, and After the Fall.

A young Black child passes an ice rink every day walking home with Momma. Last year, the rink was tricky. It looked clear and smooth, but felt rough and rude after a fall. Brrr! Ouch! Even so, the child hasn’t been able to stop thinking about that rink. The young skater is determined to do something for the first time: a spin on the ice. Because, as Momma says, nothing is impossible.

Award-winning author Brittany J. Thurman’s rich use of language and rhythm makes for a text that is perfect for reading aloud, while illustrator Islenia Mil’s vibrant artwork captures the anticipation and excitement of a winter day at the ice rink. For fans of Gaia Cornwall and Dan Santat.

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In this lyrical picture book from two breakout picture book creators, a young Black child waits for—and worries about—her father while he’s away from home. A sensitive, poignant portrayal of a family’s worries, joys, and comforts, to sit alongside books by Jacqueline Woodson and Christian Robinson. Every night when Daddy gets home from work, Olivia gives him a big hug and knows that the evening will be full of love—and fun. Together, she, Daddy, and Momma will make a feast for dinner, clean up, dance to old-school tunes, and read stories. But every morning when Daddy goes to work, Olivia worries, worries, worries. Be safe, she and Momma tell him. But what if he isn’t? Sometimes other people aren’t, like the people Olivia sees on the news. Thud, thud, thud, goes Olivia’s heart. Thump, thump, thump, all through the long day, until she hears the jangle of Daddy’s keys announcing he’s home. Brittany J. Thurman’s poetic text deftly explores the day-to-day life of a young Black child and her family—their joys and their fears—with a rhythm and musicality perfect for reading aloud. Shamar Knight-Justice’s expressive artwork sings with color, texture, and warmth. Forever and Always respects the deep emotions of young readers while offering comfort and reassurance to any child waiting for a loved one to come home. For readers of Nigel and the Moon, The Year We Learned to Fly, and Saturday.

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In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. 

Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it.

Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.

Library of America presents the definitive edition of an essential figure in Black and American theater, spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s and including several works published for the first time

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Politically engaged, formally daring, and making provocative use of material from contemporary history and popular culture, Kennedy’s haunting stage works dramatize and project interior realities that are often marked by disappointment and trauma, madness and terror. Her understanding of the inner lives of African American women expresses a powerfully insightful feminism that has come to influence generations of playwrights and writers.

Now, the Library of America presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Kennedy’s extraordinary and wide-ranging writings, spanning six decades and including ten unpublished works. Here are the early surrealistic one-acts A Lesson in Dead Language and A Rat’s Mass; works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and Film Festival: The Day Jean Seberg Died that reveal Kennedy’s longstanding fascination with Hollywood and film culture; and Ohio State Murders, one of several plays featuring her protagonist Suzanne Alexander and the first of her plays to be staged—belatedly, in 2022—on Broadway. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a searing indictment of racially motivated police violence based on real-life incidents involving her son, who co-wrote the play. Also included here are Kennedy’s adaptations of works by Euripides, Flaubert, and John Lennon, all brilliantly reimagined.

Outside of playwriting Kennedy has made her mark as a fiction writer and memoirist, providing a rich portrait of her life and experience especially in her book People Who Led to My Plays but also in works from her later life such as the essay “Almost Eighty.” Taken together, the work gathered in Collected Plays & Other Writings is a celebration of Kennedy’s indispensable achievement on the stage and on the page alike.

Famously known as the text that Martin Luther King Jr. sought inspiration from in the days leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott, Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited helped shape the civil rights movement and changed our nation’s history forever.

In this classic theological treatise, the acclaimed theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1900-1981) demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus is a partner in the pain of the oppressed and the example of His life offers a solution to ending the descent into moral nihilism. Hatred does not empower--it decays. Only through self-love and love of one another can God's justice prevail.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2025 by Pride • Best New Books of Spring 2025 by Bustle • Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by LitHub • Biggest Books of March by Book Riot • Most Anticipated Books of March by Goodreads

Featuring two new songs written for the audiobook and performed by Bob the Drag Queen!

“Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert is magnificent! I want to send to the folks who do the Nobel Prize for Literature. I don’t know them, but I want them to read this!” —Whoopi Goldberg

“It’s a knockout.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An emotional exploration of religion, external and internalized homophobia, the pressure of progressing Black liberation, and the importance of revisiting the past.” —New York magazine

From RuPaul’s Drag Race winner, Traitors contestant, and host of HBO’s We’re Here comes an inventive, wondrous novel about American hero Harriet Tubman that remixes history into a fresh, dynamic novel about love, freedom, salvation, and hip-hop.

In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say.

Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way. Harriet wants to create a hip-hop album and live show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her.

She calls upon Darnell, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed on a BET talk show. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have a short period of time to write a legendary album she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only create music that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future.

Original, evocative, and historic, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert is a landmark achievement that will burrow deep into our hearts (and ears).

A groundbreaking, yet controversial novel of the Harlem Renaissance about a young, dark-skinned Black woman reckoning with colourism as she navigates 1920s Harlem, reissued and repackaged for the Herald Classics line.

Emma Lou Morgan's dark complexion is a source of sorrow and humiliation not only to herself, but also to her lighter-skinned family members and the white community of her hometown, Boise, Idaho. Hoping to find a safe haven, Emma travels to New York's Harlem, the Black Mecca of the 1920s. Wallace Thurman brings to life this legendary time and place in rich detail, describing Emma's visits to nightclubs, dance halls, and house-rent parties, her sex life and catastrophic love affairs, her dreams and her disillusions and the momentous decision she makes to survive.

A lost classic of Black American literature, The Blacker the Berry is a compelling portrait of the destructive depth of intra-racial bias in the Black community.

An electrifying new picture book by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman

Who are we? We are a billion voices, bright and brave; we are light, standing together in the fight. Girls are strong and powerful alone, but even stronger when they work to uplift one another. In this galvanizing original poem by presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, girls and girlhood are celebrated in their many forms, all beautiful, not for how they look but for how they look into the face of fear. Creating a rousing rallying cry with vivid illustrations by Loveis Wise, Gorman reminds us how girls have shaped our history while marching boldly into the future.

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A tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world.

Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.

Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.