The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery?

In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration.

Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end.

Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture.

TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The acclaimed collection of Black photography, now featuring more than one hundred photographs from twenty-first-century artists, fundamentally redefines our understanding of American history.

“If a picture truly is worth a thousand words, then Deborah Willis has given us nothing less than an epic history of Homeric proportions. Taken together, Willis’s magnificent gathering of images accompanied by her powerful narrative overturns many common ideas about black life during the last century and a half, and in so doing rewrites American history.”―Robin D. G. Kelley, from the Foreword

Originally published in 2000, Reflections in Black was the first single-volume work to collect the images of leading African American photographers―from the daguerreotype to the digital age. Through its sheer power and inherent beauty, Deborah Willis’s groundbreaking assemblage of photographs of African American life from 1840 to the present triumphantly celebrated family, endurance, and spirituality over the last two centuries as it upended stereotypes and rewrote American history. Aware that so much has changed since 2000, Willis―a world-renowned photographer, curator, and author―has now created a breathtaking twenty-fifth anniversary edition, juxtaposing hundreds of images that appeared in the original edition with 130 new ones.

As the photographic panorama unfolds, we are immersed in hugely moving glimpses of African American life, from the last generation of enslaved people to the urban pioneers of the great migrations of the 1920s, from the rare antebellum daguerreotypes of freemen to the courtly celebrants of the Harlem Renaissance, and from civil rights activists to the postmodern photographic artists of the digital age. Each photograph suggests an astonishing, often spellbinding story. Augustus Washington’s mid-nineteenth-century portraits of key abolitionist figures, for example, offer a seemingly calm window into an era known for its violence. A startling suite of J. P. Ball photographs depicts the life, death, and burial of a Black man hanged for murder in the Montana Territory. Documenting a vibrant family life and a nascent Black middle class as well as Black tenant farmers and educators, the book features James VanDerZee’s famous shot of Marcus Garvey in a Universal Negro Improvement Association parade; Addison N. Scurlock’s dignified portraits of Black intellectuals, artists, and musicians; and John W. Mosley’s World War II–era image of a young drum majorette in an Elks parade in Philadelphia. Reflections in Black also includes a stunning array of celebrity images, among them Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Gladys Bentley, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and a veiled Coretta Scott King, now accompanied in this edition by Michelle Obama, the Roots, and Angela Davis.

This enhanced volume, with a new foreword from Robin D. G. Kelley and a coda from Kalia Brooks, once again affirms the power of photography to reconfigure our conception of Black life in the African diaspora and American history. Featuring the works of photographers such as Albert Chong, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lorna Simpson, Allison Janae Hamilton, Renee Cox, Carrie Mae Weems, Andre D. Wagner, and Hank Willis Thomas, this new edition is dedicated to the artists who stretch the definition of photography, creating pieces more akin to multimedia and conceptual art. Written and curated during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the aftermath of the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, the images that follow serve as a visual response to these unthinkable experiences as well as to the beauty of life.

Exceptionally handsome and historically consequential, Reflections in Black is not only the rare volume that can be given as a gift on any occasion but a work so significant that it has the power to reconfigure the imagination. This anniversary edition demands to be included in every American’s library as an essential part of our country’s heritage.

544 photographs

Young Debbie Allen is destined for fame and everyone will know her name! A poetic, uplifting biography of a Black icon for kids ages 5-8.

New York Times best-selling author Tami Charles tells Debbie Allen’s inspiring story of perseverance and growing up during the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow South.

Young Debbie Allen was blocked from the local dance school in the 1950s Jim Crow American South. In order to allow Debbie to pursue her dream, Debbie's mother moved with her to Mexico where Debbie studied at the Ballet Nacional de Mexico. When they returned to Texas, Debbie was admitted to the Houston Ballet Foundation as the company’s first Black dancer, and a legendary career began.

Inspired by award-winning and NYT best-selling author Tami Charles’s interviews with living legend and dancer/actor Debbie Allen, this is an ode to creativity and perseverance, as well as an amazing history of a pivotal time in Debbie's life.

“This singular memoir stunned me. With a poet’s precision, Rachel Eliza Griffiths renders two interwoven tragedies few others could have lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor.”—Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liars’ Club

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.

Don’t miss out on the stunning DELUXE LIMITED EDITION while supplies last. This breathtaking collectible is only available on a limited first print run in the US and Canada only, a must-have for any book lover.

The Bodyguard meets Romancing the Stone, in this adventure romcom by New York Times bestselling author, Debbie Rigaud, where an R&B singer is recruited to lure a foreign warlord out of hiding after the CIA discovers he is her number one fan.

The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.

*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

New York Times bestselling author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Stacey Abrams, writing under her pen name Selena Montgomery, delivers a “sexy thriller” that is deliciously “twisty and satisfying” (Publishers Weekly).

Tell me no lies . . .

She just witnessed her uncle’s murder, she’s running for her life, and now Dr. Katelyn Lyda is face-to-face with a man who could be her salvation. It’s too bad Sebastian Caine is one of the bad guys . . .

A “recovery specialist” skilled at separating prized possessions from their owners, Sebastian is after an ancient relic. But he reconsiders the job when he finds himself staring at the wrong end of a gun. The lady with her finger on the trigger seems to have everything he needs—and not just the artifact.

In a race against time, Sebastian and Kat must learn to trust each other if they’re going to survive.

In this young adult speculative mystery, a teen must find a way to free a cursed witch in order to save her best friend before time runs out.

Every year horror-loving Simone Washington throws an epic Halloween party for her classmates. Party-planning is her favorite escape from the dark secrets in her past, and this year, she’s taking things up a notch with an invitation-only event to celebrate her eighteenth birthday―something that will leave the halls of Pinegrove Academy flooded with gossip about the big ghoulish bash. The overnight stay at Doll’s Head Lake will be filled with spooky pranks and scary stories told by the fire―including the legend of a local witch named Regret.

But those dark secrets from Simone’s past are forced to the surface at the party when her best friend Kira drowns under questionable circumstances. The witch appears and offers Simone a deal: if Simone can figure out how to release Regret from the curse trapping her at the lake within fourteen days, all of Simone’s regrets will be erased. If Simone accepts, Kira’s life will be immediately restored. But if she fails, Kira will die again―and Simone will be the one to kill her.

From the award-winning New York Times and Indie bestselling author of Ace of Spades comes a mystery about five teen geniuses, their billionaire father, and the aftermath of his murder―perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying, Holly Jackson, and How to Get Away with Murder!

Five prodigies, one dead father, a mansion full of suspects…

Octavius the Maestro.
Fola the Brain.
Bilal the Olympian.
Perdita the Artist.
Romeo the Failure.

These are the five heirs of the illustrious billionaire Leontes Button. Adopted and viciously trained with their father’s infamous “Button Method” to prove his hypothesis for creating prodigies―child geniuses―the Button siblings have had no choice but to be brilliant according to their father's impossibly high standards.

Until he is murdered at his annual Prodigy Ball.

Now, all who attended the ball are required to stay in the Button Manor while the police investigate. But the officers have their work cut out for them―each of the Button siblings has something to hide, but The Heirs aren't the only ones with secrets. After all, Leontes Button was especially good at making enemies. . .

LIMITED TIME DELUXE EDITION

She's hard to hold onto, but he's good with his hands...

Prickly, autistic, and shadowed by a scandalous past, Ruth Kabbah will always be Ravenswood's black sheep. It's a lonely life, but at least it's safe… until Evan Miller comes to town.

Calm, confident, and instantly accepted by their small English town, Evan is Ruth's opposite in every way―yet he meets her suspicion with a smile, handles her awkwardness with ease, and watches her with a hunger that threatens to tear down her all her defenses.

The gossips want to know how she's bewitched him. Ruth just wants to know when he'll get bored and leave. Because if there's one thing she's learned, it's that girls like her don't get happily ever afters.

But when a monster from Ruth's past comes back to haunt her, she's forced to make a choice: should she trust Evan completely? Or is her heart safest alone?