African American English

Coreen Treadwell heads a prominent social welfare agency, but she is haunted by her past. Raped and impregnated as a teenager, she gave up her baby without ever seeing her. Now the legacy of violence continues in her daughter's life. Abused by her adoptive father, the young woman has vowed vengeance on Coreen for abandoning her.

Chyanne Johnson has finally gotten her act together. She's found a man to call her own and is raising a son. After all of the drama that ensued behind finding out that Aric McHale, former boss, lover, and father to her son, was married, Chyanne finally has it made in the shade...or so she thinks. Stephanie, Aric's ex-wife, may have been found guilty of attempted murder, but she hasn't been sentenced yet and is still free to walk to streets.

In 1994, The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

Keita Ali has nothing: no bank account, no papers, no legal identity. A runner, he has fled home - a brutal dictatorship that produces the world's fastest marathoners - to live as an illegal refugee in a wealthy Western nation, surviving on winnings from local races. But the government is cracking down on illegal immigrants, so Keita - who will be executed if he is deported to his homeland - goes underground.

Family ties no longer bind the once close King siblings, Zach and Jay. Their desire for the same woman transforms them from loving brother and sister to bitter arch rivals. Jamaican beauty Jillian Bessette is Jay's lover, but Zach's uncontrollable yearning to have her overpowers him, causing him to commit the ultimate act of betrayal against his flesh and blood. For his sin, Jay orders a hit on her brother, but her plan for revenge backfires, and she is exposed. Her only way to avoid justice is to flee. In exile, Jay's hatred and resentment for Zach and Jill consumes her every waking moment.

To discover the true role of Black women in the creation of American, and especially Southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African-American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind. The Jemima Code presents more than 150 Black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual to modern classics.

A luminous figure in both Christian and African American fiction, Vanessa Davis Griggs pens gripping faith-based tales eagerly anticipated by fans. In The Other Side of Goodness, 50-year-old Alabama Congressman Lawrence Rudolph Simmons is facing an uphill battle in his bid for re-election. His chances are further jeopardized when a woman from his past resurfaces with terrible news: the love child they gave up for adoption needs a bone marrow transplant. Helping the child could ruin Lawrence’s career, but that may be the only right thing to do.

Reverend Grayson Young and his wife Chyna seem to have the perfect marriage. Yet despite Grayson and Chyna's public railings against adultery, they're both involved in multiple affairs. And then the lecherous poser catches his wayward wife in flagrante.

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act.

Award-winning author Wanda Morris returns with a powerful, haunting thriller following a lawyer who after the mysterious disappearance of a local landowner and the death of his sister just months before, uncovers a conspiracy that dates back to Reconstruction and persists in half the United States today.

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest's iconic city: Detroit. In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree - both native and African American - in the frontier outpost of Detroit.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents' home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time—and in the cruelest way imaginable—of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South.

Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes she's been given a challenge.

Jealousy, greed, and violent revenge are all at the forefront in this addictive listen by Brenda Hampton, the queen of girlfriends' drama. Kayla, Evelyn, and Trina have been on-and-off-again girlfriends for many years, but the lines of true friendship have been crossed, the knives that went into another friend's back cut deep, and trust no longer applies when one woman has an affair with another's man. Will this trio ever be able to regain the bond of loyalty they once shared?

Cam is a young man with a bright future in the music business who seemed to be on his way to the top after signing one of the hottest R&B singers in the world -a singer who goes by the name Honey. Cam and Honey hit it off hot and heavy as they mix business with pleasure. The sky is the limit for the young powerhouse couple. The only problem is Cam's fiancée, Yolanda. She and Cam have been together for seven long years, and she hates the fact that her man has to work with Honey.

In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.”

Africa has played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture from its infancy. Some of the most decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood in Africa before they were in Europe. If this is so, why is Christianity so often perceived in Africa as a Western colonial import? How can Christians in Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, indeed, how can Christians throughout the world, rediscover and learn from this ancient heritage?