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Book Award Spotlight The Kirkus Prize
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The love songs of W.E.B. Du Bois : a novel
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family’s past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.
Fiction
Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois
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Harlem shuffle
by Colson Whitehead
A furniture salesman in 1960s Harlem becomes a fence for shady cops, local gangsters and low-life pornographers after his cousin involves him in a failed heist, in the new novel from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad.
Fiction
Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois
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Punch me up to the gods
by Brian Broome
Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. 50,000 first printing
Nonfiction
Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois
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People love dead Jews : reports from a haunted present
by Dara Horn
A startling exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Reflecting on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster travelling exhibition called "Auschwitz," the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin, and the little known "righteous-gentile" Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of the worst of evils the world has to offer, and so little respect for Jewish lives, as they continue to unfold in the present. Horn draws upon her own family life ... to assert the vitality, complexity and depth of this life against an anti-Semitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise.
Nonfiction
Available on Overdrive
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All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake
by Tiya Miles
Sitting in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is a rough cotton bag, called "Ashley's Sack," embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, just before nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag--including Rose's message that "It be filled with my Love always." Historian Tiya Miles carefully follows faint archival traces back to Charleston to find Rose in the kitchen where she may have packed the sack for Ashley. From Rose's last resourceful gift to her daughter, Miles then follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States.
Nonfiction
Available in print and on Overdrive
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Horizontal vertigo : a city called Mexico
by Juan Villoro
A history and tour of Mexico City from the Aztec period to today’s status as one of the great world metropolises, and how fear of earthquakes led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward.
Nonfiction
Available on Overdrive
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The surprising power of a good dumpling
by Wai Chim
Working almost constantly to help out at her father’s restaurant and care for her siblings, a teen from a migrant Asian family starts dating a delivery boy before her mother’s progressing mental illness upends everything she understood about her family.
Young Adult
Available in print
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The life I'm in
by Sharon G. Flake
In 'The Skin I'm In,' readers saw into the life of Maleeka Madison, a teen who suffered from the ridicule she received because of her dark skin color. For decades fans have wanted to know the fate of the bully who made Maleeka's life miserable, Char. Now in Sharon Flake's latest and unflinching novel, 'The Life I'm In,' we follow Charlese Jones, who, with her raw, blistering voice speaks the truths many girls face, offering insight to some of the causes and conditions that make a bully. Turned out of the only home she has known, Char boards a bus to nowhere where she is lured into the dangerous web of human trafficking. Much is revealed behind the complex system of men who take advantage of vulnerable teens in the underbelly of society.
Young Adult
Available on Overdrive and eReadIllinois
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Luster
by Raven Leilani
A young black artist falls into an affair with a man in an open marriage before gradually befriending his wife and adopted daughter against a backdrop of dynamic racial politics. A first novel.
Fiction
Available in print and on Overdrive
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Stakes is high : life after the American dream
by Mychal Denzel Smith
Exposing the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, the New York Times bestselling author presents this important work in which he holds all of us accountable for looking away from the fissures and casual violence that are ever-present.
Nonfiction
Available in print and on Overdrive
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The nickel boys : a novel
by Colson Whitehead
Follows the experiences of two African-American teenagers at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
Fiction
Available in print, on audiobook CD, Overdrive, and eReadIllinois
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How we fight for our lives : a memoir
by Saeed Jones
The co-host of BuzzFeed’s AM to DM, award-winning poet and author of Prelude to Bruise documents his coming-of-age as a young, gay, black man in an American South at a crossroads of sex, race and power.
Nonfiction
Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois
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