Collection: Shop Black

In a q&a after a reading I gave at George Mason University in the spring of 2023, I paraphrased a conversation I had with my brother earlier that year. We were on the stoop of his home in Bed-Stuy, talking about technology, about AI and ChatGPT in particular. He uses it for coding, I have used it for writing. I don't remember, not exactly, the details of the conversation but I said something about training GPT on all the emails and texts our mother had written. "After all," I said (and thought), "what else is it good for?" Why else have we built such a strange and challenging tool if not to return to us that which will always be taken? What better use is there? The New York Times recently ran an article called "Using A.I. To Talk to the Dead: Some people are using artificial intelligence chatbots to create avatars of departed loved ones. It's a source of comfort for some, but it makes others a little squeamish." People have always longed for some sort of "direct line" to the dead. Along with purpose-made devices (like a séance trumpet), people have claimed to hear the voices of dead loved ones through the static of everyday radio waves, giving rise to the "ghosts in the machine." Even Thomas Edison tried to invent a "spirit phone," a means of using technology to commune with the dead. In this way technology has always been "haunted" and seen as a gateway to other worlds outside of our perception. In the spirit plane lurk our loved ones, anxiously waiting for the right technology to close the circuit, to connect. Even knowing that the psychic is likely a hoax or the Ouija board unreliable, it is still tantalizing to invest any purported otherworldly connection with a crumb of what if? My own work fine-tuning large language models is influenced by this kind of haunting, the what if, and inquires into how these models model voices that no longer exist, voices of writers we don't often get to hear, such as Gwendolyn Brooks. (No offense, Shakespeare, but you've been dead a while and we hear you all the time.) It is perhaps wrong to say that these models model voices: some machine learning models do generate audible voices, but large language models use wizardry called deep learning to generate new text by analyzing textual data for its patterns. The text in this manuscript has been generated using the large Generative Pre-trained Transformer text-generating neural network known as GPT3. A large language model, or LLM, is a machine learning model that algorithmically processes, understands, and predicts language in a variety of language tasks-such as question and answer chatbots, machine translation, document summary, and more. ChatGPT is a question-and-answer program that uses LLMs as its base architecture and it can perform language tasks quite well, such as writing a book report or term paper for Rhetoric 101. These models have been pre-trained, meaning they're already trained on the task of text generation. Fine-tuning is the process of further training a pre-trained language model, like GPT, on domain-specific data so that it performs better on specific language tasks. The predictions given are more adapted to the new data set, which is usually orders of magnitude smaller than the original training set. For example, an LLM fine-tuned on all of Shakespeare should theoretically perform better on a task related to Shakespearean-style writing than the standard model. I am not a machine learning researcher so I cannot speak to exactly how fine-tuning works or why even a small corpus of text is successful in shifting the model's tone and approach.

When Shirley Chisholm was asked why she would dare run for president, her response was, why not her?
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm rose from being the child of immigrants to the United States to running for the highest office in the land. Her achievement in doing this as a Black woman was not in spite of her background but rather because of it. She became both the first African American woman elected to the US Congress and the first female African American of a major political party to make a serious run for president of the United States.
She persevered by being steadfast in her political convictions and unwillingness to compromise on the issues she believed in. Chisholm directly challenged the political establishment and was successful because she galvanized women, minorities, young people, and the poor not only in her home district in Brooklyn, New York, but across the country.
She was that catalyst for change who gave a political voice to so many segments of society who were, up until that time, ignored: women, minorities, the young, members of the gay community, domestic and agricultural workers, and the poor. Her run for the presidency in 1972 was a win in terms of her forging a unified grassroots campaign in which the voices of the previously voiceless joined together for a single cause of voting for someone who supported their diverse but collective interests.
As many historians have pointed out, without Shirley Chisholm there may not have been a Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Kamala Harris.

An upstanding political candidate. A determined stalker. A shattering lost weekend. Amid the clashes and intrigue of the campaign trail, to what lengths will the elegant, all-too-devoted wife of a seemingly incorruptible politician go in the name of love, loyalty, and ego?

From breakout Tiktok star Shanora Williams, a propulsive, sexy, rich-people-behaving-badly thriller for fans of Kellye Garrett, Sally Hepworth, Liv Constantine, Eliza Jane Brazier, and Tarryn Fisher.

For Jolene "Jo" Baker, the least she can do for her adoring husband, Dominic, is give unwavering support for his North Carolina gubernatorial run. He is not only the love of her life, he's also helping her prove that she's far more than just a pampered trophy wife. With huge crowds showing up at Dominic's speeches and the polls consistently in his favor, she's never been happier to stand proudly by his side . . .

Until she and Dominic start seeing the same, strangely ominous woman turning up all along the campaign trail. Until their tour starts becoming a nightmare of botched events, crucial missed information, and increasingly dangerous "accidents." Suddenly Jo can't get any answers from Dominic--or understand why he is acting so paranoid and terrified . . .

What Jo can do is start digging into his past--one she's never really questioned beyond his perfect image and dazzling accomplishments. What results is an alarming series of events that leave her baffled: Good friends turn into enemies, truths are revealed to be lies, and all clues lead back to one secret, shattering weekend that changes Jo's entire life. With her world splintering into pieces, can Jo risk trying to set things right? Or will hiding the bitter truth by any means necessary destroy her as well?

In late November of 1858 two enslaved Black women--Celia Grayson, age twenty-two, and Eliza Grayson, age twenty--escaped the Stephen F. Nuckolls household in southeastern Nebraska. John Williamson, a man of African American and Cherokee descent from Iowa, guided them through the dark to the Missouri River, where they boarded a skiff and crossed the icy waters, heading for their first stop on the Underground Railroad at Civil Bend, Iowa.

In Journey to Freedom Gail Shaffer Blankenau provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of these two enslaved Black women from Nebraska City. Poised on the "frontier," the Graysons' escape demonstrated that unique opportunities beckoned at the confluence of Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas, and their actions challenged slavery's tentative expansion into the West and its eventual demise in an era of territorial fluidity. Their escape and the violence that followed prompted considerable debate across the country and led to the Nebraska legislature's move to prohibit slavery. Drawing on multiple collections, records, and slave narratives, Journey to Freedom sheds light on the Graysons' courage and agency as they became high-profile figures in the national debate between proslavery and antislavery factions in the antebellum period.

Your Legacy Begins: First Words to Empower is an uplifting board book adapted from author Schele Williamsand illustratorTonya Engel's award-winning picture book Your Legacy: A Bold Reclaiming of Our Enslaved History that celebrates African American children's heritage and the legacy of their ancestors.

Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and receive your ancestors.
They are a part of YOU.

Now reimagined for a younger audience, this board book speaks directly to African American children, introducing empowering vocabulary while inspiring little ones to walk tall and do great things.

With a joyous feel and vibrant art, Your Legacy Begins: First Words to Empower reminds little ones that their ancestors passed down the best of themselves--gifts like determination, courage, dignity, and love. That is your legacy!

Bridget Jones meets Insecure in CURVY GIRL SUMMER, a smoking-hot, hilarious novel about the perils of online dating.

Aaliyah is determined to celebrate her thirtieth birthday with a boyfriend. And after a failed blind date, the local bartender, Ahmad, suggests she joins a dating app.

Filled with lies, catfish, and fetishizing, the wild world of online dating makes Aaliyah think she's in over her head.

And she is. But with her two best friends and a protective bartender by her side, what could go wrong?

Everything.

Everything could go wrong.

And that's the problem.

Because as Aaliyah is set on finding exactly what she's looking for, she ends up finding something she never expects.

A riveting, adventurous novel inspired by the life of pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, a Black woman
who learned to fly at the dawn of aviation, and found freedom in the air.

For fans of Hidden Figures, The Great Circle, and I Was Amelia Earhart, A Pair of Wings is an epic novel about pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, whose story has waited 100 years to be told. A few years after the Wright Brothers' first flight, Bessie was working the Texas cotton fields with her family when an airplane flew right over their heads. It buzzed so low she thought she could catch it in her hands. Bessie wasn't afraid. Without even thinking, she spread her arms out and pretended she was flying. She knew there was freedom in those wings.

The daughter of a woman born into slavery, Bessie answers the call of the great migration, moving to Chicago as a single woman. While working as a manicurist in the White Sox barbershop, she wins the backing of two wealthy, powerful Black men, Robert Abbott, the publisher of The Chicago Defender, and Jesse Binga, Chicago's first Black banker. Abbott becomes her mentor and chronicles her adventures, while the good-looking gun-toting Binga becomes her lover. Her first love, though, remains the airplane.

But in 1920, no one in the U.S. will train a Black woman to fly, so 26- year-old Bessie learns to speak French and bets it all on an epic journey to Europe as she begins a quest to defy the odds and gravity itself. Two years ahead of Amelia Earhart, Bessie is molded by battle-hardened French and German combat pilots, who teach her death-defying stunts. Bessie's signature majestic loops, spiky barrel rolls, and hairpin turns, just like her hardscrabble journey, are spellbinding.

While she finds there is no prejudice in the air, Bessie must wrestle with many challenges: She nearly dies in a plane crash, one of her brothers seems to be crumbling under the weight of Jim Crow, and as she grapples with tough truths about Binga, Bessie begins to wonder if the freedom she finds is the air means she must otherwise fly solo.

With tenderness and verve, Carole Hopson imagines the breathtaking moxie that led Bessie Coleman to strap up knee-high boots and don a self-designed flight suit to become "Queen Bess" of the sky.

Louise Lloyd's time away in Paris is everything she was hoping it would be until a shocking murder turns her entire world upside down.

Louise Lloyd is finally living the quiet life she'd longed for, working in a parfumerie by day and spending time with her new friends every night at the Aquarius club in Paris. When a desperate mother asks for help locating her artist daughter, Louise initially refuses to keep her hard-won but fragile peace intact. But the woman comes with a letter of introduction from an old friend in Harlem, and Louise realizes she has no choice but to do what she can to find the missing young woman.

The woman's daughter, Iris Wright, is part of an elite social circle. Louise soon finds herself drawn into a world of privilege and ice-cold ambition--a young group of artists who will do anything to get ahead--but would they murder one of their own? With the help of some friends from home, Louise must untangle a web of lies, jealousy, and betrayal to find out what really happened to Iris while fighting to keep her new life from crashing down around her.

The anticipated sequel to the instant New York Times bestseller featuring escapist romance and a wealthy Black family in 1910s Chicago

Like the blazing Chicago sun, the drama is heating up for the Davenports and their social set. Before the summer of 1910 drops its last petal, the lives--and loves--of these four young women will change in ways they never could have imagined:

Newly engaged Ruby Tremaine is eagerly planning her wedding to the love of her life when a nasty rumor threatens her reputation and her marriage. Olivia Davenport has committed to the social justice cause and secretly hopes she'll be reunited with dashing lawyer Washington DeWight--until her parents decide she's to marry someone else. Amy-Rose Shepherd is making her lifelong wish of owning a salon come true, but when an incident forces her to return to Freeport Manor, she's back in the path of John Davenport, who still holds her heart. Helen Davenport is determined to get over her own heartbreak and bring the Davenport Carriage Company into the new century, even if it means teaming up with a thrill-seeking racecar driver who just loves to get under her skin.

Inspired by the real-life story of the Patterson family, More Than This is the second book in critically adored Davenports series, following four empowered and passionate young Black women as they navigate a rapidly changing society and discover the courage to steer their own paths in life--and love.

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.

Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

The relentless motions and blinding colors of lucha libre, the high-flying wrestling sport, are the arresting backdrop to Nandi Comer's collection Tapping Out. Mexican freestyle wrestling becomes the poet's lyrical motif, uncovering what is behind the intricate masks we wear in society and our search for place within our personal histories. Comer's poetic narratives include explorations of violence, trauma, and identity. The exquisite complications of the black experience in settled and unsettled spaces propel her linear explorations, which challenge the idea of metaphor and cadence.

The harsh realities of being migrant and immigrant, being birthright and oppressed, are as hard-pressed as the plancha move to the body. Each poem in Tapping Out is a "freestyle movement" of language and complexity put on full display, under the bright lights and roars of survival. Comer's splendid and barbed, Detroit style of language melts the masks with searing words.

"An utterly compelling account of the African Americans who played a crucial and dangerous role in the invasion of Europe. The story of their heroic duty is long overdue." --Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation

The injustices of 1940s Jim Crow America are brought to life in this extraordinary blend of military and social history--a story that pays tribute to the valor of an all-Black battalion whose crucial contributions at D-Day have gone unrecognized to this day.

In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African-American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, an award he would never receive. The nation's highest decoration was not given to Black soldiers in World War II.

Drawing on newly uncovered military records and dozens of original interviews with surviving members of the 320th and their families, Linda Hervieux tells the story of these heroic men charged with an extraordinary mission, whose contributions to one of the most celebrated events in modern history have been overlooked. Members of the 320th--Wilson Monk, a jack-of-all-trades from Atlantic City; Henry Parham, the son of sharecroppers from rural Virginia; William Dabney, an eager 17-year-old from Roanoke, Virginia; Samuel Mattison, a charming romantic from Columbus, Ohio--and thousands of other African Americans were sent abroad to fight for liberties denied them at home. In England and Europe, these soldiers discovered freedom they had not known in a homeland that treated them as second-class citizens--experiences they carried back to America, fueling the budding civil rights movement.

In telling the story of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, Hervieux offers a vivid account of the tension between racial politics and national service in wartime America, and a moving narrative of human bravery and perseverance in the face of injustice.

A powerful illustrated history of the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop.

Over the course of six decades, an unprecedented wave of Black Americans left the South and spread across the nation in search of a better life--a migration that sparked stunning demographic and cultural changes in twentieth-century America. Through gripping and accessible historical narrative paired with illustrations, author and activist Blair Imani examines the largely overlooked impact of The Great Migration and how it affected--and continues to affect--Black identity and America as a whole.

Making Our Way Home explores issues like voting rights, domestic terrorism, discrimination, and segregation alongside the flourishing of arts and culture, activism, and civil rights. Imani shows how these influences shaped America's workforce and wealth distribution by featuring the stories of notable people and events, relevant data, and family histories. The experiences of prominent figures such as James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, and others are woven into the larger historical and cultural narratives of the Great Migration to create a truly singular record of this powerful journey.

Dog Team is a tale of friendship and foes, brought to you by the hottest new voice in the urban crime genre.

Best friends Elontra Montgomery and Shemika Frazier have been keeping a low profile and getting paid, robbing the occasional jewelry store for years. That changes when their childhood friend and hacker, Demeris "Dee Dee" Dennison, is released from prison. With her ability to shut down cameras and alarm systems, the trio quickly steps up to robbing banks.

However, with their newfound focus on bigger targets comes the inevitable involvement of the police. After a few near misses, they decide to lay low for a while--but it's not that easy. The ladies are recruited and forced to do one more job that has the potential to cost them their freedom, if not their lives.

An ambitious reporter stuck doing diversity checks for her white colleagues gets her big break in this compelling debut novel perfect for fans of Jayne Allen, Jasmine Guillory, and Zakiya Dalila Harris.

Genevieve Francis, a 25-year-old Black reporter, assumed she'd go into her fourth year at her newspaper job with a bigger story than the latest seasonal ice cream flavor. Instead, she's relegated to doing copyedits and sensitivity reads on the articles her white colleagues write. So when Gen finally gets the opportunity to cover a prominent CEO's gala, she leaps at the chance--this will be her biggest assignment to date. The only problem: The CEO is her ex, Jude, whose marriage proposal she publicly rejected four years prior.

Following their awkward run-in, Jude personally requests Gen to write the first-ever authorized profile of him. The potential for scandal, if anyone digs into their past, is high, but Gen decides to risk it--if she proves herself with this profile, it could jumpstart her dream of writing articles centered on Black voices. But between the racist backlash from her colleagues and her conflicting feelings toward her ex, Gen soon realizes she's in way over her head. And it may be more than just her career on the line.

Timely and thoughtful, this energetic debut explores what it means to believe in your future when everyone and everything is working against you.

A poetry collection that explores the complexity of race and the body for a Black man in contemporary America.

The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man's lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet's infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, "like too many Black men," if "a heart is not enough to keep me alive."