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God's Trombones
African-American scholars have cited James Weldon Johnson's 1927 book of poems, "God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse" as one of the author's most notable works. Johnson, who is best known for his 1912 work, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man", was an American writer and civil rights activist born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1871. As a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Johnson helped to bring awareness to the problem of black lynching in America during the first part of the 20th century as well as other civil rights issues that people of color faced in America. A collection of eight poems, "God's Trombones" draws upon the tradition in the black church of drawing upon black folklore to preach the word of god. The title of the work has been described by Johnson as a metaphor for the powerfully persuasive nature of the vocal and rhetorical qualities of the sermons of a folk preacher. Immediately upon its publication "God's Trombones" would go on to achieve great critical acclaim in the black community further helping to establish Johnson as one of the principal figures of the Harlem Renaissance. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.
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The Perfect Ruin: A Riveting New Psychological Thriller
A thrilling new novel of lies, deception, and revenge from the bestselling author, perfect for fans of B.A. Paris and Joshilyn Jackson! The glamour of Miami has a dark side in this twisting story where nothing is what it seems, as one wronged woman seeks to destroy the seemingly perfect life of one of the city's most revered socialites.
"A shocking, sensual thriller with sharp twists." --Tarryn Fisher, New York Times bestselling author of The Wives
"Twisty and impossible to put down! 10/10 recommend." --Claire Contreras, New York Times bestselling author "I was hooked from the very first twist." --Alessandra Torre, New York Times bestselling author of Every Last Secret
Book Riot Best Summer 2021 Thrillers
BiblioLifestyle Most Anticipated Summer 2021 Thrillers, Mysteries, And Suspense Novels
Publishers Marketplace BUZZ BOOKS Selection
BookBub Best Thrillers and Mysteries Coming Out This Summer A brutal tragedy ended Ivy Hill's happy family and childhood. Now in her twenties and severely troubled, she barely has a life--or much to live for. Until the day she discovers the name of the woman who destroyed her world: Lola Maxwell--the mega-wealthy socialite with a heart, Miami's beloved "first lady" of charity. Accomplished, gorgeous, and oh-so-caring, Lola has the best of everything--and doesn't deserve any of it. So it's only right that Ivy take it all away . . . Little by little, Ivy infiltrates Lola's elite circle, becomes her new best friend--and plays Lola's envious acquaintances and hangers-on against her. But seducing Lola's handsome, devoted surgeon husband turns into a passionate dream Ivy suddenly can't control. And soon, an insidious someone will twist Ivy's revenge into a nightmare of deception, secrets, and betrayal that Ivy may not wake up from . . . "An ideal summer read." - Booklist, STARRED REVIEW "This fast-paced and incredibly entertaining book is perfect for devouring by the poolside." - Off the Shelf
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M Archive: After the End of the World
Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive-the second book in a planned experimental triptych-is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics. -
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
Ten years ago, bell hooks astonished readers with Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope - a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, any time - not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives.
In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change.
Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."
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A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin
A Robert F. Sibert Honor Book Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award
An ALA-ALSC Notable Children's Book
Winner of the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children As a child in the late 1800s, Horace Pippin loved to draw: He loved the feel of the charcoal as it slid across the floor. He loved looking at something in the room and making it come alive again in front of him. He drew pictures for his sisters, his classmates, his co-workers. Even during W.W.I, Horace filled his notebooks with drawings from the trenches . . . until he was shot. Upon his return home, Horace couldn't lift his right arm, and couldn't make any art. Slowly, with lots of practice, he regained use of his arm, until once again, he was able to paint--and paint, and paint! Soon, people--including the famous painter N. C. Wyeth--started noticing Horace's art, and before long, his paintings were displayed in galleries and museums across the country. Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet team up once again to share this inspiring story of a self-taught painter from humble beginnings who despite many obstacles, was ultimately able to do what he loved, and be recognized for who he was: an artist. -
Magical Negro
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics--of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present--timeless black melancholies and triumphs. -
Amari Y Los Hermanos de la Noche / Amari and the Night Brothers
Amari sabe tres cosas:
Su hermano Quinton ha desaparecido.
Nadie quiere hablar sobre el asunto.
Una misteriosa invitación es su única pista.
La invitación es para una prueba en la Agencia de Investigadores Sobrenaturales y es una oportunidad para descubrir qué le pasó a Quinton. Pero cómo se las arreglará en un mundo donde las sirenas, los alienígenas y la magia son reales? Y con una compañera de habitación que es una niña dragón! Rodeada de peligros, entre ellos un mago que amenaza con destruir a todas las criaturas sobrenaturales, Amari deberá confiar más que nunca en sus amigos y demostrar, de una vez por todas, su verdadero valor. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION New York Times bestseller!
Artemis Fowl meets Men in Black in this exhilarating debut middle grade fantasy, the first in a series filled with #blackgirlmagic. Perfect for fans of Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, the Percy Jackson series, and Nevermoor. Amari Peters has never stopped believing her missing brother, Quinton, is alive. Not even when the police told her otherwise, or when she got in trouble for standing up to bullies who said he was gone for good. So when she finds a ticking briefcase in his closet, containing a nomination for a summer tryout at the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, she's certain the secretive organization holds the key to locating Quinton--if only she can wrap her head around the idea of magicians, fairies, aliens, and other supernatural creatures all being real. Now she must compete for a spot against kids who've known about magic their whole lives. No matter how hard she tries, Amari can't seem to escape their intense doubt and scrutiny--especially once her supernaturally enhanced talent is deemed "illegal." With an evil magician threatening the supernatural world, and her own classmates thinking she's an enemy, Amari has never felt more alone. But if she doesn't stick it out and pass the tryouts, she may never find out what happened to Quinton.
Plus don't miss the thrilling sequel, Amari and the Great Game! -
Heartbreak U: Freshman Year
Four diverse young women, each at a crossroads in their lives, meet at a very popular HBCU. Born and raised in the heart of Brooklyn, Franki doesn't take crap from anyone. Continuously hurt by the men in her life, she finds herself using them for the only thing she believes they're good for: sex. When she's labeled for her promiscuity and a new tragedy strikes, how will she recover? Paris, on the other hand, has led a life of privilege out in Beverly Hills--one that didn't include very many minorities in her circle. When her mother sends her off to an HBCU in hopes that she'll reconnect with her people, she finds herself culture-shocked. Asha, the local girl, is a complete slacker when it comes to school and anything else that doesn't align with her future plans of becoming a basketball wife. She is a user and a mastermind manipulator who will ultimately have to pay a price. Lastly, there's Hope, the good girl. Raised by her father and brought up in the church, she's been sheltered most of her life. When she falls hard for the big man on campus and gets her heart crushed to pieces, will she persist? Told from each character's distinct point of view, this narrative is about young women navigating the dynamics of sex, love, and heartbreak in college. Being outcasts in their own right, these four young women ultimately forge a very unique bond. -
Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
"An elegant and expansive history" (New York Times) of African American women's pursuit of political power--and how it transformed America
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women--Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more--who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.
Now revised to discuss the election of Vice President Kamala Harris and the vital contributions of Black women in the 2020 elections, Vanguard isessential reading for anyone who cares about the past and future of American democracy. -
The Souls of Black Folk: The Unabridged Classic
One of the Most Important Books on Civil Rights, Race, and Freedom Ever Written. "A groundbreaking challenge to white supremacy." --The New York Times A classic work of American literature, African-American history, and sociology by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk is a monumental collection of essays that examines race and racism in America during the early 1900s and prior. Du Bois derived much of the book's content from his own personal experience as an African-American living during these tumultuous times, which resulted in an expertly crafted firsthand account of the trials of oppression and segregation existing in America. Many of the book's essays formulated Du Bois's then-perceived radical thought and platform for change, and eventually became catalysts that sparked protest movements across the country. Containing some of the most revered work on the topic of race, this stunning new trade edition of The Souls of Black Folk is perfect for anyone interested in African-America literature and history. -
How We Can Win: Race, History and Changing the Money Game That's Rigged
A breakdown of the economic and social injustices facing Black people and other marginalized citizens, inspired by political activist Kimberly Jones's viral video "How Can We Win"
"So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for fifty years, every time that I played, if you didn't like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win? How can you win?" When Kimberly Jones declared these words amid the protests spurred by the murder of George Floyd, she gave a history lesson that in just over six minutes captured the economic struggles of Black people in America. Within days the video had been viewed by millions of people around the world, riveted by Jones's damning--and stunningly succinct--analysis of the enduring disparities Black Americans face. In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions--those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves--the most valuable asset we have--in the fight against a system that is still rigged. -
Levels of the Game
Levels of the Game is John McPhee's astonishing account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968.
"This may be the high point of American sports journalism"- Robert Lipsyte, The New York Times
It begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games. -
Binti: Home
The thrilling sequel to the Hugo and Nebula-winning Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, and a finalist for the 2018 Hugo and Nommo Awards
It's been a year since Binti and Okwu enrolled at Oomza University. A year since Binti was declared a hero for uniting two warring planets. A year since she found friendship in the unlikeliest of places. And now she must return home to her people, with her friend Okwu by her side, to face her family and face her elders. But Okwu will be the first of his race to set foot on Earth in over a hundred years, and the first ever to come in peace. After generations of conflict can human and Meduse ever learn to truly live in harmony? The Binti Series
Book 1: Binti
Book 2: Binti: Home
Book 3: Binti: The Night Masquerade Praise for Nnedi Okorafor: "Binti is a supreme read about a sexy, edgy Afropolitan in space! It's a wondrous combination of extra-terrestrial adventure and age-old African diplomacy. Unforgettable!" - Wanuri Kahiu, award winning Kenyan film director of Pumzi and From a Whisper "A perfect dove-tailing of tribal and futuristic, of sentient space ships and ancient cultural traditions, Binti was a beautiful story to read." - Little Red Reviewer "Binti is a wonderful and memorable coming of age story which, to paraphrase Lord of the Rings, shows that one girl can change the course of the galaxy." - Geek Syndicate "Binti packs a punch because it is such a rich, complex tale of identity, both personal and cultural... and like all of Nnedi Okorafor's works, this one is also highly, highly recommended." - Kirkus Reviews "There's more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor's work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics." -Ursula Le Guin "Okorafor's impressive inventiveness never flags." - Gary K. Wolfe on Lagoon -
Autobiography of My Dead Brother
A powerful National Book Award Finalist from the acclaimed, bestselling author of Monster. "This novel is like photorealism; it paints a vivid and genuine portrait of life that will have a palpable effect on its readers." (School Library Journal starred review)
With Harlem as its backdrop, Autobiography of My Dead Brother follows the diverging paths of best friends Rise and Jesse. When Rise becomes engulfed in gang activity and starts dealing drugs, Jesse, a budding artist, tries to make sense of the complexities of friendship, loyalty, and loss in a neighborhood plagued by drive-by shootings, vicious gangs, and an indifferent juvenile justice system.
The innovative first-person storytelling, along with cartoons and photos, pulls in readers and makes Autobiography of My Dead Brother a strong and thought-provoking choice for sharing in a classroom or at home.
"Though the story is starkly realistic, there is always hope in the gifts of Jesse the artist and C. J. the musician, of schools and churches and of caring parents." (Kirkus)
"Touching and impactful, Autobiography cannot fail to intrigue, and hopefully influence youngsters with its poignant statement of two roads taken." (Judges' Citation, National Book Award)
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100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof: A Short Cut to The World History of The Negro
In this book, you'll find a collection of Joel Augustus Rogers' newspaper columns from a series called "Your History." Think of it like a version of Ripley's "Believe It or Not." In each episode, there are many short stories based on Rogers' research.
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City Without Altar
CITY WITHOUT ALTAR is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. The titular play in verse that sits at the center of the book seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Between the scenes of the play are interludes that explore a different kind of cutting and what it means to feel othered because of illness, disability and blackness. Ultimately, Machete is a meditation on being/feeling blacked out by the archive, on the world stage and in one's daily life.
Poetry. Drama. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.