Category
Relating to People of the African Diasporas / Heritage
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...
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...
Black Deutschland 2017
Jed—young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago—flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin.
Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be...
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...
Bluebird, Bluebird 2017
Highway 59, Book 1
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules -- a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the Lone Star State, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him...
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...
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....
The Book of Chuck 2026
Pa, no go. Him burn. When baby Nannie utters these prophetic words in 1936, she marks herself as cursed. The ability to see death before it happens forever changes the course of her life, and the life of her descendants.
Forty years later, Chuck is about to become a father. He intends to make a...
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...
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...
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...
Crabcakes 1999
With the same grace and lyrical precision that distinguish his vibrant short stories, James McPherson surveys the emotional upheaval of his last twenty-one years. From Baltimore, Maryland, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Iowa and Japan, Crabcakes witnesses McPherson's confrontation with the past,...
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...
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...
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an...
King Oliver, Book 1
Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD's finest investigators until he was framed for sexual assault by unknown enemies within the force. A decade has passed since his release from Rikers, and he now runs a private detective agency with the help of his teenage daughter.
Physically and emotionally...
Dr. No 2022
The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing,...
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...
Erasure 2011
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric...
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...
Fairfield County 2026
A sprawling landscape of sand, red clay, and pine trees, South Carolina’s Fairfield County is the only place the Bolton family has ever called home. For more than a century, they have cultivated this land, expertly raising horses to compete in derbies and rodeos and passing their knowledge from...
Fanon 2010
A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France during World War II but later against France in Algeria’s war for independence. His last book, The...
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...
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...
Afropean 2020
'Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity ... A continent of Algerian flea markets, Surinamese shamanism, German Reggae and Moorish castles. Yes, all this was part of Europe too ... With my brown skin and my British passport - still a ticket into...
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...
Alice Walker sums up the premise and purpose for this year of poems in her Preface: "I was born into a family of eight siblings. I am the youngest. Five of us have died. I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human condition, especially in these times of war, poverty,...
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...
Set across contemporary Black communities—often among middle-class professionals and academics—Heads of the Colored People weaves together a series of stories that examine identity, ambition, and the pressure to define oneself in spaces shaped by expectation and scrutiny. The characters range from...
The Help 2009
Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who’s always taken orders quietly, but lately she’s unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just...
High Cotton 2017
An elegant, insightful novel that evokes the world of upper-middle-class blacks, following an unnamed narrator from a safe childhood in conservative Indianapolis, to a brief tenure as minister of information for a local radical organization, to the life of an expatriate in Paris.
Through it all,...
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...
We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands...
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 was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.
Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his...
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...
In Love & Trouble 2004
Here are stories of women traveling with the weight of broken dreams, with kids in tow, with doubt and regret, with memories of lost loves, with lovers who have their own hard pasts and hard edges. Some from the South, some from the North, some rich and some poor, the characters that inhabit In Love...
In West Mills 2020
Azalea “Knot” Centre is determined to live life as she pleases. Let the people of West Mills say what they will; the neighbors’ gossip won’t keep Knot from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men.
And yet, Knot is starting to learn that her...
When first published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent black woman was generally dismissed by male reviewers. It was out of print for almost thirty years, but since its reissue in paperback edition by the University of Illinois Press in 1978 it has become perhaps the most widely read...
It Starts With Anger 2026
In 1991, fifteen-year-old James Spooner arrives in New York’s West Village, hopeful that he’s finally escaped the extremist racism of his Southern California desert town. Still, a question looms large over his cross-country move: What will New York City make of this tartan plaid-and-leather-clad,...
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The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window January 12, 2027
First staged in 1964, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is the probing, hilarious, and provocative story of Sidney, a disenchanted Greenwich Village intellectual, his wife Iris, an aspiring actress, and their colorful circle of friends and relations.
Set against the shenanigans of a stormy...
Stolen Man on Stolen Land November 24, 2026
When Tyree Barnette moved to Sydney from North Carolina, he knew little of his new home. On first arriving, he was pleasantly surprised: the police treated him with respect and Black American culture seemed to be widely admired and celebrated.
But in time, Tyree saw the darker side to Australia’s...
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman September 29, 2026
From the moment Scharisse Freeman ditched her humble roots and married a megachurch pastor fifteen years her senior, she’s been labeled too brash and too “of the world” by church folks who grudgingly accepted her into their fold, and too holy by her estranged childhood bestie Petra. Schar doesn’t...
The Book of Chuck August 18, 2026
Pa, no go. Him burn. When baby Nannie utters these prophetic words in 1936, she marks herself as cursed. The ability to see death before it happens forever changes the course of her life, and the life of her descendants.
Forty years later, Chuck is about to become a father. He intends to make a...
It Starts With Anger August 4, 2026
In 1991, fifteen-year-old James Spooner arrives in New York’s West Village, hopeful that he’s finally escaped the extremist racism of his Southern California desert town. Still, a question looms large over his cross-country move: What will New York City make of this tartan plaid-and-leather-clad,...
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...
The Lady Imam June 16, 2026
A feminist scholar-activist, single mother of five, and queer advocate, Amina Wadud has led a struggle against Islam’s patriarchal establishment that’s been felt keenly all over the world. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X before her, Wadud has mobilized faith’s potential as an engine of...
Fairfield County June 9, 2026
A sprawling landscape of sand, red clay, and pine trees, South Carolina’s Fairfield County is the only place the Bolton family has ever called home. For more than a century, they have cultivated this land, expertly raising horses to compete in derbies and rodeos and passing their knowledge from...
My Fighting Family June 2, 2026
Campbell comes from “a fighting family,” a connection and clash that reaches back to the south side of Chicago in the 1930s. His father’s and mother’s families were both part of the Great Migration from the U.S. rural south to the industrial north, but a history of perceived slights and social-class...
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818 on a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He lived in bondage for two decades, experiencing nearly every brutal treatment, physical and psychological, that a young slave could face—but he also learned to read, a key that would unlock his freedom, even as...
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...
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...
Slaveroad October 8, 2024
John Edgar Wideman’s Slaveroad is a groundbreaking work of “bruising candor and obsessive originality” (The Wall Street Journal). For centuries, the buying and selling of human beings was legal, and millions of Africans were kidnapped then forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to serve as...
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...
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 Temple of My Familiar November 28, 2023
Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of the dozens of astonishing characters in The Temple of My Familiar, all of whom are dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race...
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,...
On Becoming an American Writer January 17, 2023
Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside...
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...
Dr. No November 1, 2022
The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing,...