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With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence.

Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.

Winner of the MLA's 2016 Alan Bray Prize for Best Book in GLBTQ Studies
How BDSM can be used as a metaphor for black female sexuality. The Color of Kink explores black women's representations and performances within American pornography and BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism) from the 1930s to the present, revealing the ways in which they illustrate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power for black women.

Based on personal interviews conducted with pornography performers, producers, and professional dominatrices, visual and textual analysis, and extensive archival research, Ariane Cruz reveals BDSM and pornography as critical sites from which to rethink the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. She explores how violence becomes not just a vehicle of pleasure but also a mode of accessing and contesting power. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Cruz argues that BDSM is a productive space from which to consider the complexity and diverseness of black women's sexual practice and the mutability of black female sexuality. Illuminating the cross-pollination of black sexuality and BDSM, The Color of Kink makes a unique contribution to the growing scholarship on racialized sexuality.

A career retrospective of a singular voice in contemporary American art, featuring six decades of artwork that chronicles his vision of the Black American experience
 
New Orleans–based artist, community organizer, and cultural provocateur Willie Birch (b. 1942) has dedicated his career to storytelling. His incisive work across a wide variety of media―including paintings, large-scale drawings, wood and papier-mâché sculpture, and public works―explores his unique vision of Black America and draws on sources as diverse as Egyptian numerology, American folk art, and jazz music.
 
This book showcases more than one hundred of Birch’s artworks alongside essays by eminent scholars and curators. Russell Lord provides an introduction to the artist’s life and work; Lowery Stokes Sims writes about Birch’s use of papier-mâché, for which he garnered acclaim during his time in New York City, and situates Birch within the New York art scene of the 1980s and ’90s; Grace Deveney considers the ways Birch gives visual form to the complex relationship between Black Americans and mass media; and Leslie King Hammond discusses how the city of New Orleans―its history and its communities―has shaped Birch’s work.
 
Published in association with the American Federation of Arts
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
California African American Museum, Los Angeles
May 5–October 4, 2026
 
New Orleans Museum of Art
March 20–September 5, 2027
 
Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, University of North Florida
October 28, 2027–May 14, 2028
 
Hudson River Museum
September 22, 2028–January 14, 2029

In this groundbreaking work, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement offers a new perspective on the troubles facing Africa today. Too often these challenges are portrayed by the media in extreme terms connoting poverty, dependence, and desperation. Wangari Maathai, the author of Unbowed, sees things differently, and here she argues for a moral revolution among Africans themselves. Illuminating the complex and dynamic nature of the continent, Maathai offers “hardheaded hope” and “realistic options” for change and improvement. She deftly describes what Africans can and need to do for themselves, stressing all the while responsibility and accountability. Impassioned and empathetic, The Challenge for Africa is a book of immense importance.

Combining representation and abstraction, Abney's vibrant works reference gender, sexuality and pop culture

Committed to sharing social realities through fantastic, expansive forms, Nina Chanel Abney is an artist possessed of an iconic style and wit. Through stylized, cubistic and highly charged painterly symbols, she references radical traditions of graphic design and street art to communicate urgent political and cultural realities with immediacy to the largest possible audience. Abney’s paintings and collages use dynamic color and form to draw viewers into complex narratives.
Big Butch Energy/Synergy features Abney’s recent exhibitions at ICA Miami and moCa Cleveland. In these works, Abney mines cinematic and media representations of student Greek life to explore how gender perception and performance is inspired by the legacies of social ritual and visual culture. The complex compositions reference scenes from popular slapstick comedy films such as National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Porky’s (1981), while citing traditions of Baroque portraiture and fraternity composites. Inspired by her experience as a masculine-of-center woman, with this body of work Abney asks how viewers gender a figure in a work of art.
Nina Chanel Abney was born in 1982 in Harvey, Illinois, and is based in New York, where she attended Parsons School of Design. Abney’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Bronx Museum, New York; the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among others.

This book was published in conjunction with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami/Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every female to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey she must choose to be truly free. Silencing our fears about becoming women who love too much, Communion answers all of our questions about the place of love in a woman’s life.

bell hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women’s full participation in the workforce, by the culture of self-help and by popular media forces such as television and movies. She celebrates the experiences of women over 30, shares collective wisdom, and the lessons learned as we practice the art of loving. Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman needs to hear.

A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him―the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.

In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors’ footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.

In A Thousand Ways to Die, Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola’s legacy.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—Ebony
 
From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built.

Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.

The power black athletes have today is as limited as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are invisible.

Praise for Forty Million Dollar Slaves
 
“A provocative, passionate, important, and disturbing book.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Brilliant . . . a beautifully written, complex, and rich narrative.”—Washington Post Book World
 
“A powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.”—Los Angeles Times

Reimagines neurodiversity through intersections of race, disability, and social justice

Neurodiversity has progressed from niche activism to a household term; our culture is now saturated with social media ads promising to "train" ADHD brains and media tropes like the quirky savant. But amidst this barrage of content urging self-optimization against a neurotypical template, Neurofutures pauses to ask: what comes next? Editors Diana R. Paulin, M. Remi Yergeau, Ralph James Savarese, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson gather a diverse array of scholars and creatives to think through "crip time" ― sideways, chronic, manic, and executive dysfunction time ― to reimagine the future of cognitive difference.

Moving beyond a simplistic celebration of diversity, the collection interrogates the intersections of race, disability, and social justice. Contributors offer "mad provocations" that span from Black neurodivergence and Afrofuturism to neuroqueer paradigms and animal liberation. Through analyses of cultural texts ― ranging from the folklore of "Little Eight John" to the speculative worlds of Octavia Butler and Shirley Jackson ― the essays deconstruct the violence of neurotypical norms while advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people to full lives and care.

Neurofutures refuses the linear march of progress, instead delving into the complex, often hidden realities of lived experience to map a world that welcomes divergence, dissent, and deep compassion.

After a chance courtside encounter, a fake relationship between a rising influencer and a WNBA star gets a little too real in this swoony sapphic romance.

Chelsea has never cared about sports. But when she’s invited to sit courtside at a New York WNBA game, she welcomes the break from her usual routine. What she doesn’t expect is a basketball nearly colliding with her face—or the six-foot-four hottie who jogs over, flashing a heart-stopping grin, to retrieve it.

Adrienne “AD” Daniels is a player on and off the court, notorious for their inability to stay in a relationship. Still, something about Chelsea sticks with them—even though their instant connection can’t bring AD to offer more than one night.

But AD’s agent makes a pitch: Chelsea should pretend to be AD’s girlfriend. It’s a strategic move. AD, hoping to retire after this season, needs to lock down some brand deals—but their identity as a Black, nonbinary lesbian with a messy dating history makes sponsors wary. Chelsea, a sex-positive influencer, is ready to pivot her platform, and this feels like the perfect next step. With Chelsea’s network and AD’s star power, they could both strengthen their public images. Once the season ends, they’ll go their separate ways.

As the ruse starts to work and their connection deepens, Chelsea finds herself on unsteady ground. Falling for AD wasn’t part of the plan, and if she lets herself get too close, she might lose the future she’s finally starting to build.

A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars―doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age.

First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature. This new edition is presented in full color with updated visuals and text, including a new preface by the author, and matches the composition of Rankine’s best-selling and award-winning Citizen and Just Us as the first book in her acclaimed American trilogy.

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness―a book of rare and vital honesty, complexity, and presence.

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In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work—from Deana Lawson’s disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa’s videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Khalil Joseph’s films and Dawoud Bey’s photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpakwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson—requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.