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African-American Literature June 2019
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The poet X
by Elizabeth Acevedo
When Xiomara Batista, who pours all her frustrations and passion into poetry, is invited to join the school slam poetry club, she struggles with her mother's expectations and her need to be heard. YA Fiction.
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The confessions of Frannie Langton : a novel
by Sara Collins
A servant and former slave enduring a sensational trial for her employers' murders reflects on her Jamaican childhood and her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist whose questionable ethics set the stage for a forbidden affair. 75,000 first printing.
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This mournable body : a novel
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The protagonist of Nervous Conditions struggles to make a life for herself in Harare, Zimbabwe, eventually taking an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents' impoverished homestead, leading to an unforgivable betrayal.
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Freshwater
by Akwaeke Emezi
Traces the experiences of a deeply troubled young woman who alarms her devout Nigerian family as she succumbs to multiple personality disorder and begins to display increasingly dark and dangerous traits in accordance with her fractured personalities. A first novel.
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The wedding date
by Jasmine Guillory
Stranded together in an elevator during a power outage, Drew and Alexa agree to pose as a couple at an ex's wedding and discover afterwards that they are unable to forget each other.
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Sister citizen : shame, stereotypes, and Black women in America
by Melissa V. Harris-Perry
Discusses the stereotypes of black women in contemporary American life and how it affects African Americans, and uses literary analysis, political theory, and experimental research to fully understand the pervasiveness of their marginalization. Reprint.
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When they call you a terrorist : a Black Lives Matter memoir
by Patrisse Khan-Cullors
A lyrical memoir by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement urges readers to understand the movement's position of love, humanity and justice, challenging perspectives that have negatively labeled the movement's activists while calling for essential political changes. Co-written by the award-winning author of The Prisoner's Wife.
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Heavy : an American memoir
by Kiese Laymon
An essayist and novelist explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse
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Jane Crow : the life of Pauli Murray
by Rosalind Rosenberg
Euro-African-American activist Pauli Murray was a feminist lawyer who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements, and later become the first woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church. Born in 1910 and identified as female, she believed from childhood that she was male. Jane Crow is her definitive biography, exploring how she engaged the arguments used to challenge race discrimination to battle gender discrimination in the 1960s and 70s. She mounted attacks on all arbitrary categories of distinction. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall to shift his course and attack segregation frontally in Brown v. Board of Education. In the1960s, Murray persuaded Betty Friedan to help her found an NAACP for women, which Friedan named NOW. Appointed by Eleanor Rossevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to attack race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsberg with the argument Ginsberg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women--and potentially other minority groups--from discrimination. Murray accomplished all of this as someone who would today be identified as transgender but who, due to the limitations of her time, focused her attention on dismantling systematic injustices of all sorts, transforming the idea of what equality means.
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The Tastemaker : Carl Van Vechten and the birth of modern America
by Edward White
Describes the life of the influential critic, novelist and photographer who was friends with Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes and F. Scott Fitzgerald and captured the Jazz Age's pop icons at clubs, speakeasies and the underground gay scene of Greenwich Village.
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Lagniappe-- past Phyllis Wheatley book award honorees This year's awards will be announced July 20.
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Bastards of the Reagan era
by Reginald Dwayne Betts
A collection of poems explores the author's generation, country, and the harshness of the criminal justice system
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Willow
by Tonya Hegamin
Taught to read and write by a master whom she believes is good to her, 15-year-old Willow lives on one side of the Mason-Dixon Line fearing "rebel slave" runaways before her life intersects with 17-year-old freeborn Cato, who has dedicated his life to sneaking fugitive slaves to freedom. By the award-winning author of Most Loved in All the World.
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The madman of Piney Woods
by Christopher Paul Curtis
A companion to the award-winning Elijah of Buxton follows the chance meeting of opposites Benji and Red, who encounter a strange presence in the forest that might be the mythological Madman of Piney Woods. By the Newbery Honor-winning author of The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963.
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Jimmie Lee & James : two lives, two deaths, and the movement that changed America
by Steve Fiffer
"Bloody Sunday"--March 7, 1965--was a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. Days earlier, during the crackdown on another protest in nearby Marion, a state trooper, claiming self-defense, shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old unarmed deacon and civil rights protester. Jackson's subsequent death spurred local civil rights leaders to make the march to Montgomery; when that day also ended in violence, the call went out to activists across the nation to join in the next attempt. One of the many who came down was a minister from Boston named James Reeb. Shortly after his arrival, he was attacked in the street by racist vigilantes, eventually dying of his injuries. Lyndon Johnson evoked Reeb's memory when he brought his voting rights legislation to Congress, and the national outcry over the brutal killings ensured its passage
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New Hanover County Library201 Chestnut Street Wilmington, North Carolina 28401 910-798-6301www.nhclibrary.org/ |
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