Category
Relating to African American / Black American People
The 1619 Project 2024
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty people stolen from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the...
An Amerikan Family 2024
The long overdue story of the Shakurs, persistent fighters in the U.S. struggle for racial justice, and one of the most prominent, influential and fiercely creative families in recent history.
For over fifty years, the Shakurs have inspired generations of activists, scholars, and music fans. Many...
Belonging 2008
What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong?
These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place. Traversing past...
Beloved 1987
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been...
Beyond Midnight 2025
Ashe Cayne, Book 5
The death of immigrant Juaquin Escobar has been ruled an accidental drowning in Lake Michigan. The only problem is he never drinks and never swims. When the CPD informs his nephew Ivan Ramirez and closes the case, he refuses to believe it’s true. Convinced of foul play, Ivan is referred to Ashe...
Black Cake 2022
In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who...
In the late nineteenth century, Laurinburg, North Carolina, was a beacon of racial calm—a place where Blacks and whites could live and work together. Black families like the Malloys became landlords, business owners, and doctors. Thriving together and changing the economic landscape. But that...
The Blackwoods 2023
The Blackwoods. Everyone knows their name. Blossom Blackwood burst onto the silver screen in 1962, and in the decades that followed, she would become one of the most celebrated actors of our time—and the matriarch of the most famous Black family in Hollywood. To her great-granddaughters, Hollis and...
The Blueprint 2024
Solenne Bonet lives in Texas where choice no longer exists. An algorithm determines a Black woman’s occupation, spouse, and residence. Solenne finds solace in penning the biography of Henriette, an ancestor who’d been an enslaved concubine to a wealthy planter in 1800s Louisiana.
But history...
James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of...
The Bluest Eye 1993
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different....
It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been...
Above Ground 2026
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions....
Blessings, Book 12
Tamar July, town matriarch of Henry Adams, KS, is being haunted by dreams of her humiliating wedding day, sixty years ago, when she discovered her intended, Joel Newton, was already married. The truth left her furious, heartbroken, and carrying a child, her son Malachi “Mal” July. Why are these...
She's a good girl trying to rebuild her restaurant. He's a felon trying to rebuild… everything. Second chances have never been so sweet.
For Jamilah Carver, a by-the-books entrepreneur with refined tastes, running her own restaurant has been a dream come true. Until she’s buried in debt and without...
Citizen 2014
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the...
Cool Machine 2026
The Harlem Trilogy, Book 3
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of...
Counting Descent 2016
In the intricate tapestry of Counting Descent, Clint Smith expertly navigates the nuances of belonging and dissonance. Through his poetic lens, he guides us through the labyrinthine experience of being part of a community that fiercely and unapologetically celebrates the richness of black humanity....
Crook Manifesto 2024
The Harlem Trilogy, Book 2
It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his...
James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of...
Delicious Foods 2015
Held captive by her employers -- and by her own demons -- on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.
Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself...
In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day--and rendered here in graceful and readable...
For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers experienced locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro...
Can a career woman truly have it all?
Powerful marketing executive Kemi Adeyemi has finally found the man she needs, but Tobias Wikström thinks she’s the most selfish woman he has ever met for asking him to give up his life in Sweden and move to the US for her own comfort. Will Kemi be forced to...
In his searing and moving essay, James Baldwin explores the Atlanta child murders that took place over a period of twenty-two months in 1979 and 1980. Examining this incident with a reporter's skill and an essayist's insight, he notes the significance of Atlanta as the site of these brutal...
The Farming of Bones 2013
It is 1937 and Amabelle Désir, a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, has built herself a life as the servant and companion of the wife of a wealthy colonel. She and Sebastien, a cane worker, are deeply in love and plan to marry. But Amabelle's world collapses when a wave of...
A sweeping, narrative history of Black wealth and the economic discrimination embedded in America’s financial system.
The early 2020s will long be known as a period of racial reflection. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans of all backgrounds joined together in historic...
The Fire This Time 2017
Jesmyn Ward, Kevin Young, Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnette Cadogan, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Edwidge Danticat, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel Jose Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson
In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin’s 1962 “Letter to My Nephew,” which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the...
Frenemy Fix-Up 2024
Six Gems, Book 4
Free-spirited yoga guru Shay Davis has only ninety days to get her workaholic former classmate Colin Anderson from work all day to namaste… All they need is a little common ground.
Accountant Colin Anderson is working himself into an early grave. Shay Davis is finally living her dream of owning a...
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin’s first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage born of compassion, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s...
God Help the Child 2016
At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and...
Good Dirt 2026
When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.
The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black...
Harlem Shuffle 2022
The Harlem Trilogy, Book 1
"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if...
Home 2013
When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, he journeys to his native Georgia with a renewed sense of purpose in search of his sister, but it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their...
Homebodies 2024
Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter, but, for now, her days are filled with listicles about lip gloss and click-bait articles about celebrity haircare. Still, the job is flashy and her girlfriend is steady and supportive. The path may be long, but Mickey’s well on her way, and it’s...
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the...
I Am Not Your Negro 2017
Peck weaves these texts together, brilliantly imagining the book that Baldwin never wrote with selected published and unpublished passages, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Peck’s film uses them to jump through time,...
Tish is nineteen years old and in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but when Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime, their families set out to clear his name and reunite the young lovers. As they face an uncertain...
Imagine Freedom 2024
A social activist, journalist, public theologian, and international speaker who has become a powerful and brilliant voice of her generation offers a bold path to liberation and healing for people of African descent struggling in the shadows of the American Dream.
The United States is at a critical...
It's Me They Follow 2025
It’s Me They Follow is an allegorical love story set in a not so distant past. It follows The Shopkeeper, a bookseller and reluctant matchmaker. Helping others find love through books comes easily for The Shopkeeper, until it is time for her to find love for herself. She secretly yearns for her...
Jazz 1992
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse.
John Henry Days 2002
Immortalized in folk ballads, John Henry has been a favorite American hero since the mid-nineteenth century. According to legend, John Henry, a black laborer for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, was a man of superhuman strength and stamina. He proved his mettle in a contest with a steam drill,...
At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing ... it became my way to pray.”...
The Known World 2003
Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at...
Let Us March On 2025
Devoted wife, White House maid, reluctant activist… A stirring novel inspired by the life of an unsung heroine, and real-life crusader, Lizzie McDuffie, who as a maid in FDR’s White House spearheaded the Civil Rights movement of her time.
I’m just a college-educated Southerner with a passion for...
In the 1950s, as a continuation of *Moses, Man of the Mountain*, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great.
In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the...
A Mercy 2009
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in...
American Negra 2024
Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In *American Negra*, a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of...
Americanah 2014
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join...
Merze Tate 2025
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international...
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Cool Machine July 21, 2026
The Harlem Trilogy, Book 3
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of...
Misbehaving at the Crossroads June 23, 2026
Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third...
On Witness and Respair May 19, 2026
True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison....
Above Ground March 10, 2026
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions....
Good Dirt January 27, 2026
When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.
The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black...
Champagne Taste on a Bad Boy Budget December 30, 2025
She's a good girl trying to rebuild her restaurant. He's a felon trying to rebuild… everything. Second chances have never been so sweet.
For Jamilah Carver, a by-the-books entrepreneur with refined tastes, running her own restaurant has been a dream come true. Until she’s buried in debt and without...
Black, White, Colored November 18, 2025
In the late nineteenth century, Laurinburg, North Carolina, was a beacon of racial calm—a place where Blacks and whites could live and work together. Black families like the Malloys became landlords, business owners, and doctors. Thriving together and changing the economic landscape. But that...
Merze Tate November 18, 2025
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international...
Calling All Blessings October 28, 2025
Blessings, Book 12
Tamar July, town matriarch of Henry Adams, KS, is being haunted by dreams of her humiliating wedding day, sixty years ago, when she discovered her intended, Joel Newton, was already married. The truth left her furious, heartbroken, and carrying a child, her son Malachi “Mal” July. Why are these...
No One Gets to Fall Apart October 21, 2025
On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness.
Digging...
It's Me They Follow September 23, 2025
It’s Me They Follow is an allegorical love story set in a not so distant past. It follows The Shopkeeper, a bookseller and reluctant matchmaker. Helping others find love through books comes easily for The Shopkeeper, until it is time for her to find love for herself. She secretly yearns for her...
Surviving Paris September 16, 2025
Surviving Paris is not Emily in Paris. It’s not a story of moving to the City of Light, meeting a dashing Frenchman, and raising beret-wearing enfants. It is not a romantic fantasy. It is a true story about a young, Black single woman and what happens when your Paris dream turns into a Paris...
Joy in the Belly of a Riot September 2, 2025
At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing ... it became my way to pray.”...
Beyond Midnight August 26, 2025
Ashe Cayne, Book 5
The death of immigrant Juaquin Escobar has been ruled an accidental drowning in Lake Michigan. The only problem is he never drinks and never swims. When the CPD informs his nephew Ivan Ramirez and closes the case, he refuses to believe it’s true. Convinced of foul play, Ivan is referred to Ashe...
The Secret Keeper of Main Street June 3, 2025
1954: In the quaint town of Mendol, Oklahoma, Bailey Dowery is a Black dressmaker for the wives and daughters of local oil barons. She earns a good living fitting designer gowns and creating custom wedding dresses for the town’s elite. But beyond her needle and thread lies a deeper talent, one...
Summer on Highland Beach May 20, 2025
Summer Beach, Book 3
Founded in the late 1800s by the son of Frederick Douglass, Highland Beach along the Chesapeake Bay is the oldest Black resort community in America. Inside this proud and secluded beach community of about 100 private homes—a setting rich with African American history—is Olivia Jones’s legacy.
But...
Let Us March On February 4, 2025
Devoted wife, White House maid, reluctant activist… A stirring novel inspired by the life of an unsung heroine, and real-life crusader, Lizzie McDuffie, who as a maid in FDR’s White House spearheaded the Civil Rights movement of her time.
I’m just a college-educated Southerner with a passion for...
The Unexpected Diva January 7, 2025
Before the Civil War, Black opera singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield reigned supreme on Northern stages—even performing at Buckingham Palace. Novelist Tiffany L Warren brings this remarkable but forgotten diva’s remarkable story to life for modern readers.
Born into slavery on a Mississippi...
The Life of Herod the Great January 7, 2025
In the 1950s, as a continuation of *Moses, Man of the Mountain*, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great.
In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the...
My Fairy God Somebody December 3, 2024
The way Clae’s mom tells it, her dad took off when Clae was a baby, end of story. Ever since, it’s just been the two of them, living in the coastal city of Gloucester, where Clae is one of the only few Black girls. But when Clae discovers clues about a mysterious person she calls her fairy god...
Everything Is Not Enough October 1, 2024
Can a career woman truly have it all?
Powerful marketing executive Kemi Adeyemi has finally found the man she needs, but Tobias Wikström thinks she’s the most selfish woman he has ever met for asking him to give up his life in Sweden and move to the US for her own comfort. Will Kemi be forced to...
Homebodies July 2, 2024
Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter, but, for now, her days are filled with listicles about lip gloss and click-bait articles about celebrity haircare. Still, the job is flashy and her girlfriend is steady and supportive. The path may be long, but Mickey’s well on her way, and it’s...
What Love Looks Like June 18, 2024
One question must be answered before Afia can slip into a peaceful sleep: What does love look like?
With the companionship of her loving papa, Afia journeys to find love and learns that it is the warmth of the sun’s hugs, the brook’s soothing song, and other mesmerizing gifts of nature.
But Afia’s...
Fifteen Cents on the Dollar June 18, 2024
A sweeping, narrative history of Black wealth and the economic discrimination embedded in America’s financial system.
The early 2020s will long be known as a period of racial reflection. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans of all backgrounds joined together in historic...
The 1619 Project June 4, 2024
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty people stolen from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the...
Crook Manifesto June 4, 2024
The Harlem Trilogy, Book 2
It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his...
An Amerikan Family May 21, 2024
The long overdue story of the Shakurs, persistent fighters in the U.S. struggle for racial justice, and one of the most prominent, influential and fiercely creative families in recent history.
For over fifty years, the Shakurs have inspired generations of activists, scholars, and music fans. Many...
Out of Office April 23, 2024
Genevieve Raymond was born an overachiever. After opening a hot new hotel chain location in Panama, she’s on track for a major promotion. But first, she desperately needs a break, even if her overbearing mother doesn’t approve. For two glorious weeks, Gen’s giving herself permission to explore the...
The Moment April 23, 2024
In late May in 2020, while discussing the murder of George Floyd on CNN, Bakari Sellers spoke from the heart sharing devastating insight that touched millions around the world: “It’s just so much pain. You get so tired. We have black children. I have a 15-year-old daughter. I mean, what do I tell...
The Span of a Small Forever April 2, 2024
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
With breathtaking...
Imagine Freedom March 5, 2024
A social activist, journalist, public theologian, and international speaker who has become a powerful and brilliant voice of her generation offers a bold path to liberation and healing for people of African descent struggling in the shadows of the American Dream.
The United States is at a critical...
No Better Time February 27, 2024
In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Dorothy Thom, Spelman graduate, librarian and Francophile, joins the Women’s Army Corps wanting to do her part for the war effort. Longing for adventure, she has one question for the recruiter: “Do you think I’ll get to go abroad?”
As...
American Negra February 27, 2024
Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In *American Negra*, a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of...
Frenemy Fix-Up February 20, 2024
Six Gems, Book 4
Free-spirited yoga guru Shay Davis has only ninety days to get her workaholic former classmate Colin Anderson from work all day to namaste… All they need is a little common ground.
Accountant Colin Anderson is working himself into an early grave. Shay Davis is finally living her dream of owning a...
Driving the Green Book February 13, 2024
For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers experienced locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro...
The Blueprint February 13, 2024
Solenne Bonet lives in Texas where choice no longer exists. An algorithm determines a Black woman’s occupation, spouse, and residence. Solenne finds solace in penning the biography of Henriette, an ancestor who’d been an enslaved concubine to a wealthy planter in 1800s Louisiana.
But history...
Someday, Maybe February 6, 2024
Here are three things you should know about my husband: He was the great love of my life despite his penchant for going incommunicado.
1. He was, as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy. Which is significant because…
2. On New Year’s Eve, he died.
3. And here is one thing you...
The Survivors of the Clotilda January 30, 2024
Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic *Barracoon*, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors—the last documented survivors...
Night Wherever We Go January 30, 2024
On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys—as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself—have decided to turn around the farm’s bleak financial prospects by making the women bear...
The Blackwoods October 3, 2023
The Blackwoods. Everyone knows their name. Blossom Blackwood burst onto the silver screen in 1962, and in the decades that followed, she would become one of the most celebrated actors of our time—and the matriarch of the most famous Black family in Hollywood. To her great-granddaughters, Hollis and...
The Untelling August 15, 2023
Aria is no stranger to tragedy -- as a young girl, she and her older sister and mother survived a car crash that took the lives of their father and beloved baby sister. And although relations with her remaining family are strained, she's done her best to establish a solid, normal life for herself,...
How the Word Is Passed December 27, 2022
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the...
Black Cake November 29, 2022
In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who...
The Sleeping Car Porter September 27, 2022
The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter...
Harlem Shuffle August 9, 2022
The Harlem Trilogy, Book 1
"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if...
The Sweetness of Water May 3, 2022
In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an...
Tuff July 13, 2021
Age nineteen and weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston “Tuffy” Foshay is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of earning millions from his idea for Cap’n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light...
Nothing Personal May 4, 2021
Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin’s deep probe into the American condition. Considering the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020—which were met with tear gas and rubber bullets the same year white supremacists entered the US Capitol with...
The Nickel Boys July 16, 2019
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite...
The Tradition April 2, 2019
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...