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Watch Where They Hide : A Jordan Manning Novel
by Tamron Hall
Journalist Jordan Manning delves into the case of a mother in danger and uncovers a dangerous web of secrets that could lead right to the missing woman—or put Jordan in the crosshairs of her abductors.
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House gone quiet : stories
by Kelsey Norris
A collection of short stories from satire to magical realism include the tales of a group of traumatized joggers who meet to discuss the bodies they've found while running and a town that replaces a Confederate monument with locals. Original.
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What Fire Brings
by Rachel Howzell Hall
A writer’s search for her missing friend becomes a real-life thriller in a twisting novel of suspense by the New York Times bestselling author of These Toxic Things. Bailey Meadows has just moved into the remote Topanga Canyon home of thriller author Jack Beckham. As his writer-in-residence, she’s supposed to help him once again reach the bestseller list. But she’s not there to write a thriller—she’s there to find Sam Morris, a community leader dedicated to finding missing people, who has disappeared in the canyon surrounding Beckham’s property.
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Mr. and Mrs. Doctor
by Julie Iromuanya
Ifi and Job, a Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, begin their lives together in Nebraska with a single, outrageous lie: that Job is a doctor, not a college dropout. Unwittingly, Ifi becomes his co-conspirator--that is until his first wife, Cheryl, whom he married for a green card years ago, reenters the picture and upsets Job's tenuous balancing act. Julie Iromuanya has short stories and novel excerpts appearing or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review , Passages North , the Cream City Review , and the Tampa Review , among other journals. She is a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Mr. and Mrs. Doctor is her first novel.
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What Napoleon could not do
by DK Nnuro
Envious of his sister, who achieved, as their father put it,“what Napoleon could not do,” by graduating law school in the U.S. and marrying a wealthy black businessman from Texas, Jacob, fighting for a visa to join his wife in Virginia, must learn from his dashed hopes to fulfill his own dreams.
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Gone like yesterday : a novel
by Janelle M. Williams
Zahra, a young black woman who can hear the voices of her ancestors singing to her through moths, teams up with Sammie, an outspoken Trini-American teenager who can also hear them, as the pair search for Zahra's missing brother.
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The temple of my familiar : a novel
by Alice Walker
In a story spanning 500,000 years, and moving through America, England, and Africa, men, women, and animals share a spiritual world and learn the intricacies of their connecting lives
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The Hive
by Scarlett Brade
A feminist thriller for anyone who's ever sworn revenge on an ex. Perfect for fans of How to Kill Your Family and The List.
'Lively, shocking ... A fresh, modern take on the revenge story' THE GUARDIAN
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The gardins of Edin : a novel
by Rosey Lee
"When the bonds in their family begin to fray, four Black women fight to preserve their legacy, heal their wounds, and move forward together in this heartwarming contemporary debut novel with loose parallels to beloved women from the Bible"
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Francisco
by Alison Mills Newman
"Alison Mills Newman's innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A "fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English," as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, as well asher involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Love and friendship, long, meaningful conversations, parties and dancing-Francisco celebrates, as she improvises in the book, "the workings of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth ... the gift of art for the survival of the human heart.""
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The blue, beautiful world
by Karen Lord
Vying to prepare humanity for first contact with other worlds, a group of gifted visionaries see pop megastar Owen, who has a hidden talent, as the key to uniting the Earth as it looks toward the stars, but soon realize his unique abilities are uncontrollable.
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Touched : a novel
by Walter Mosley
When he wakes up with the knowledge that humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence and he is the cure, Martin, uses his new physical strengths to violently defend his family—the only Black family in their neighborhood in Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles—against pure evil.
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Stars in your eyes
by Kacen Callender
To create positive buzz about their new romantic comedy, Hollywood bad boy Logan Gray, a talented but troubled actor who the public loves to hate, and Mattie Cole, an up-and-coming golden boy, are persuaded into a fake-dating scheme that soon becomes all too real, opening up old wounds and insecurities.
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Shigidi and the brass head of Obalufon
by Wole Talabi
From Lagos to Singapore to London, Shigidi, a disgruntled and demotivated nightmare god in the Orisha spirit company, and Nneoma, a sort-of succubus with a long and secretive past, are drawn into a web of revenge, spirit business and a spectacular heist across two worlds.
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Holler, child : stories
by LaToya Watkins
Set in the same black community as her debut novel, Perish, a collection of short stories highlight the character's lives in Texas exploring themes including race, power, inequality, guilt, betrayal and forgiveness. A first novel.
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Every Black girl dances
by Candice Y. Johnson
A film school Hollywood darling known for making "Black trauma” films flees her latest production for her Texas hometown to reconsider her career and deteriorating relationship with her producer and makes a romantic connection with a high school teacher.
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The Morning Show Murders
by Al Roker
When the celebrity chef from a popular morning news program becomes a prime suspect in a murder investigation, things start to sizzle in this delightful mystery from bestselling author and legendary news personality, Al Roker. Billy Blessing, owner of the popular Manhattan restaurant Blessing’s Bistro, is a regular contributor on the morning news show, Wake Up, America! Now he’s creating a fresh cooking competition show, but finds himself clashing Rudy Gallagher, the executive producer. Things get heated in the news room, and after exchanging some sharp words both Billy and Rudy walk away feeling burned.
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Africa risen : a new era of speculative fiction
by Sheree R. Thomas
A team of editors present an anthology showcasing over 30 original stories that showcase fantasy and science fiction from Africa, including contributions by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight.
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Redwood Court
by Délana R. A. Dameron
Mika Tabor, the baby of the family, learns important lessons from the people who raise her: her hardworking parents, her older sister, her retired grandparents and the community on Redwood Court, who are committed to fostering joy and love in an America so insistent on seeing Black people stumble and fall.
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Romance in Marseille
by Claude McKay
"Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers--collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor"
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Symphony of secrets
by Brendan Slocumb
When he is asked to authenticate a newly discovered piece from famed 20th-century composer Frederick Delaney, Bern Hendricks uncovers clues that indicate Delaney may have had help composing his most successful work, which makes him a target of a powerful organization that will stop at nothing to keep its secret hidden.
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Dazzling
by Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ
The Girl with the Louding Voice meets The Water Dancer in Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ’s magical, award-winning literary debut, Dazzling, offering a new take on West African mythology. A story based on West African mythology follows a woman who meets a spirit and agrees to do one terrible thing for him in exchange for bringing back her beloved, deceased father. 30,000 first printing.
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Erasure
by Percival L. Everett
Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross
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 success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies―his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before.
In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is―under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh―and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.
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The human origins of Beatrice Porter and other essential ghosts : a novel
by Soraya Palmer
Two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn, Zora and Sasha Porter, drifting apart as they bear witness to their father's violence and their mother's worsening illness must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know—and confront a long-buried family secret.
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Can't we be friends : a novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe
by Denny S. Bryce
"One woman was recognized as the premiere singer of her era with perfect pitch and tireless ambition. One woman was the most glamorous star in Hollywood, a sex symbol who took the world by storm. And their friendship was fast and firm... 1952: Ella Fitzgerald is a renowned jazz singer whose only roadblock to longevity is society's attitude toward women and race. Marilyn Monroe's star is rising despite ongoing battles with movie studio bigwigs and boyfriends. When she needs help with her singing, she wants only the best-and the best is the brilliant Ella Fitzgerald. But Ella isn't a singing teacher and declines-then the two women meet, and to everyone's surprise but their own, they become fast friends. On the surface, what could they have in common? Yet each was underestimated by the men in their lives-husbands, managers, hangers-on. And both were determined to gain. Each fought for professional independence and personal agency in a time when women were expected to surrender control to those same men. This novel reveals and celebrates their surprising bond over a decade and serves as a poignant reminder of how true friendship can cross differences to bolster and sustain us through haunting heartbreak and wild success"
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Lote
by Shola von Reinhold
"Solitary Mathilda has long been enamored with the 'Bright Young Things' of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda's journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured"
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A love song for Ricki Wilde
by Tia Williams
"Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing. Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn't one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she's the oppositeof her famous socialite sisters. Where they're long-stemmed roses, she's a dandelion: an adorable bloom that's actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her. When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmer. One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way. Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked"
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The wildest sun : a novel
by Asha Lemmie
Forced from her home in postwar Paris, aspiring young writer Delphine Auber embarks on a journey to New York's Harlem, and then to Havana and Key West, in search of her father, whom she believes is famed luminary Ernest Hemingway.
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The Homewood trilogy
by John Edgar Wideman
In 1983, The Homewood Trilogy signaled the arrival of a major voice in American literature. Forty years later, this edition of the Trilogy celebrates Wideman's ongoing contribution by offering these masterworks to a new generation of readers
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The new naturals : a novel
by Gabriel Bump
rom the Ernest J. Gaines Award-winning author of Everywhere You Don't Belong, a touching, timely novel—called a "tour de force" by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Libertie) and "wry and astonishing" by Publishers Weekly—about an attempt to found an underground utopia and the interwoven stories of those drawn to it. After losing their child, a husband and wife construct a separate society, where everyone can feel loved and wanted, but when others hear about the place and want in, it doesn't take long for problems to develop, for conflicts to surface, and for the children to crave life beyond this place.
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Dixon, descending : a novel
by Karen Outen
"A powerful, heart-wrenching debut novel about ambition, survival, and our responsibility toward one another. Dixon was once an Olympic-level runner. But he missed the team by two-tenths of a second, and ever since that pain decades ago, he hasn't allowed a goal to consume him. But when his charming older brother, Nate, suggests that they attempt to be the first Black American men to summit Mount Everest, Dixon can't refuse. The brothers are determined to prove something--to themselves and to each other.Dixon interrupts his orderly life as a school psychologist, leaving behind disapproving friends, family, and one particularly fragile student, Marcus. Once on the mountain, they are met with extreme weather conditions, oxygen deprivation, and precarious terrain. But as much as they've prepared for this, Mt. Everest is always fickle. And in one devastating moment, Dixon's world is upended. Dixon returns home and attempts to resume his job, but things have shifted: for him and for the students he left behind when he chose Mt. Everest. Ultimately, Dixon must confront the truth of what happened on the mountain and come to terms with who can and cannot be saved. DIXON, DESCENDING offers us a captivating, shattering portrait of the ways we're reshaped by our decisions--and what it takes to angle ourselves, once again, toward hope"
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Faebound : a novel
by Saara El-Arifi
Forced into the terrifying wilderness beyond their homeland's borders an elven warrior and her prophet sister encounter the fae court, in the first book of a new trilogy from the Sunday Times best-selling author of the The Final Strife.
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Bibliophile : diverse spines
by Jamise Harper
"This richly illustrated and vastly inclusive collection uplifts the works of authors who are often underrepresented in the literary world. Using their keen knowledge and deep love for all things literary, coauthors Jamise Harper (founder of the Diverse Spines book community) and Jane Mount (author of Bibliophile) collaborated to create an essential volume filled with treasures for every reader"
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The equity mindset : designing human spaces through journeys, reflections, and practices
by Ifeomasinachi Ike
"Equity mindset journeys, moving the reader via narratives and voice to deepen how we grasp the very live dynamics of normalized institutional oppression, then transporting us to our current landscape, with case studies across industries of what's working-and what's not. Finally, it trains us with new practices, new milestones, new KPIs (Key Performance Indicator). The transformation occurs when the readers make up in their mind that no Black, brown, disabled, queer, immigrant, neurodivergent or othered community member should be left behind. The layering of principles, practices and production makes this a go-to for the newcomer to the impacted laborer to the seasoned practitioner. This book is built on the assumption that the reader has a role in improving our culture, and that no one specific title qualifies, or disqualifies, one to be a changemaker"
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The upcycled self : a memoir on the art of becoming who we are
by Black Thought
Through vivid vignettes, the platinum-selling, Grammy-winning cofounder of The Roots tells dramatic stories of the four powerful relationships that shaped him, each a complex weave of love, discovery, trauma and loss, illuminating the redemptive power of the upcycle.
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Soil : the story of a Black mother's garden
by Camille T. Dungy
"In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it"
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My everyday Lagos : Nigerian cooking at home and in the diaspora
by Yewande Komolafe
Weaving personal stories throughout, an acclaimed recipe developer and food stylist takes readers on a culinary tour of Lagos, Nigeria, through 75 dishes that reflect the regional cooking of the country and reveal the singularity and accessibility of Nigerian cuisine. Illustrations.
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The mamas : what I learned about kids, class, and race from moms not like me
by Helena Andrews-Dyer
A senior culture writer at The Washington Post recounts her experiences in a mostly white motherhood support group—“The Mamas”—during a time of gentrification, racial reckoning and a global pandemic as she tries to find out if moms from different backgrounds can truly understand one another.
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Return to my native land
by Aimé Césaire
A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a "break into the forbidden," at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity.
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Sure, I'll be your black friend : notes from the other side of the fist bump
by Ben Philippe
"In the biting, hilarious vein of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life comes Ben Philippe's candid memoir-in-essays, chronicling a lifetime of being the Black friend (see also: foreign kid, boyfriend, coworker, student, teacher, roommate, enemy) in predominantly white spaces. From cheating his way out of swim tests to discovering stray family members in unlikely places, he finds the punchline in the serious while acknowledging the blunt truths of existing as a Black man in today's world"
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This is the canon : decolonize your bookshelf in 50 books
by Joan Anim-Addo
"Upending our traditionally white-dominated 'to be read' piles, Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay push to the fore the voices and cultural perspectives that demand a place on everyone's shelves. From literary giants such as Toni Morrison,Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe to recent Man Booker Prize winners Paul Beatty and Bernardine Evaristo, the novels recommended here are in turn haunting and lyrical; innovative and inspiring; edgy and poignant. They are books that reflect the wide and diverse experiences of people from around the world, of all backgrounds and all races. They are books that represent voices that have for too long been silenced or side-lined"
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Above ground : poems
by Clint Smith
"The number one New York Times bestselling author, intellectual, and spoken word poet Clint Smith gives his devoted readers a collection of poetry straight from the heart. It is a meditation on the country he studies through the lens of all he has learned from fatherhood. The poems are manifestations of Smith's wisdom and latest observations, starting with the precarious birth of his son, to the current political and social state of the country, to childhood memories, and back again. Smith traverses the periods of his life from four different cities and the process pf realizing what it means to build a life that orbits around his family. Amid all of it, he has watched as the country has been forced to confront the ugliest manifestations of itself, and has thought about what it means to raise children amid the backdrop of political tumult. Smith is a poet who uses the form to interrogate his own autobiography and the state of the country today, affording those who prefer reading poetry a shot of news, andthose who normally seek out nonfiction, some lyrical beauty"
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Backlash : what happens when we talk honestly about racism in America
by George Yancy
"When George Yancy penned a New York Times article entitled "Dear White America," he knew that he was courting controversy. Here, Yancy chronicles the ensuing blowback as he seeks to understand what it was that created so much rage among so many white readers. He challenges white Americans to develop a new empathy for the African American experience."--Provided by publisher
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You don't have to go to mars for love
by Yona Harvey
The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey’s much anticipated You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers. Half-superhero, half-secret-identity, she encounters side-slipping, speculative realities testing her in poems that appear like the panels of a comic book. Music directs readers through large and small emotional arcs, constantly retroubled by lyric experimentation. Harvey layers her poems with a chorus of women’s voices. Her artful use of refrain emphasizes the protagonist’s meaning making and doubling back: “Who am I to say? The eye is often mistaken. Or is it the mind? Always eager to interpret.” Our hero is captured, escapes, scuba dives, goes interstellar, and she emerges on the other end of her journey renewed, invoking the gods: “taunt the sharks. & when the glaciers get to melting, / all God’s River’s we shall haunt.”"
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They can't kill us until they kill us : essays
by Hanif Abdurraqib
A collection of literary essays by the cultural critic, MTV News columnist and author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much uses music and culture as a gauge for better understanding the world, the self and the challenges of today. Original.
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Imagination : A Manifesto
by Ruha Benjamin
A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn't strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn't a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation. Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable--but all emerged from the human imagination. The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems. Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison's instruction: "Dream a little before you think."
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I always knew : a memoir
by Barbara Chase-Riboud
"American artist, poet, and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939), has had an unusually varied and highly successful career across genres and media. As a poet, her work was edited by Toni Morrison and she is a recipient of the Carl Sandburg Prize. As afiction writer, she was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis, and her first historical novel, Sally Hemmings (1979) was a bestseller. But Chase-Riboud trained as a visual artist, primarily as a sculptor, and her large installations made of fabric and bronze are powerful, with references to the human figure, her travels in North Africa and China, and the American Civil Rights Movement. She and Bettye Saar were the first African-American women to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art, and her work is in manymajor collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou. This book, framed as a memoir, is composed of over forty years' worth of letters Chase-Riboud wrote to her beloved mother, and which she found in her mother's house around the time of her death. The letters begin in 1957, while the artist was a student in Paris, and continue through 1991. As Chase-Riboud writes in the introduction, "This is not autobiography, nor biography, nor memoir nor fiction but a strange hybrid mixture of disparate and even contradictory narratives out of which portraits of the two of us emerge, separate yet united and indivisible.""
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