African American English

Aaliyah is determined to celebrate her thirtieth birthday with a boyfriend. And after a failed blind date, the local bartender, Ahmad, suggests she joins a dating app. Filled with lies, catfish, and fetishizing, the wild world of online dating makes Aaliyah think she’s in over her head. And she is. But with her two best friends and a protective bartender by her side, what could go wrong?

From the best-selling author of Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade - and who must pass as a girl to survive. Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856 - a battleground between anti - and pro-slavery forces - when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry's master turns violent, Henry is forced to leave town.

This is a fabulous resource for anyone who wants to understand African American spirituality, shamanism, and indigenous spiritual practices and beliefs. It is designed to be informative while providing hands-on recipes, rituals, projects, and resources to help you become an active participant in its wonderfully soulful traditions.

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.

Winter Santiaga hit time served. Still stunning, still pretty, still bold, still loves her father more than any man in the world, still got her hustle and high fashion flow. She’s eager to pay back her enemies, rebuild her father’s empire, reset his crown, and ultimately to snatch Midnight back into her life no matter which bitch had him while she was locked up. But Winter is not the only one with revenge on her mind.

After the Civil War, the pillars of Black Republicanism were a balanced critique of both political parties, civil rights for all Americans, reinventing an economy based on exploitation, and, most importantly, building thriving Black communities. How did Black Republicanism devolve from revolutionaries like Frederick Douglass to the puppets in the Trump era?

Writer John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) decided to perform an experiment in order to learn from the inside out how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another race. Through medication, he dyed his skin dark and left his family and home in Texas to find out.

"My name is 'J' and I'm awkward--and Black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be. That someone was right. Where do I start?" Being an introvert in a world that glorifies cool isn't easy. But when Issa Rae, the creator of the Shorty Award-winning hit series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, is that introvert--whether she's navigating love, work, friendships, or rapping--it sure is entertaining.

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions listeners don't dare ask and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her 12 Black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand's first major book of non-fiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and of what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, among other still-widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.

The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary McLeod Bethune refuses to back down as white supremacists attempt to thwart her work. She marches on as an activist and an educator, and as her reputation grows she becomes a celebrity, revered by titans of business and recognized by U.S. Presidents. Eleanor Roosevelt herself is awestruck and eager to make her acquaintance.

A booksmart kid from Toronto, Eternity Martis was excited to move away to Western University for her undergraduate degree. But as one of the few Black students there, she soon discovered that the campus experiences she'd seen in movies were far more complex in reality. Over the next four years, Eternity learned more about what someone like her brought out in other people than she did about herself. She was confronted by White students in blackface at parties, dealt with being the only person of colour in class and was tokenized by her romantic partners.

The year is 1921, and America is burning. A fire of vice and virtue rages on every shore, and Chicago is its beating heart. Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the “wealthiest Negro in America”, whose affluence catapulted his family to the heights of Black society. After the unexpected death of her only brother, Nelly becomes the premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations beyond society influence and marriage.

Black Americans have long been shackled to the Democrats. Seeing no viable alternative, they have watched liberal politicians take the Black vote for granted without pledging anything in return. In Blackout, Owens argues that this automatic allegiance is both illogical and unearned. She contends that the Democrat Party has a long history of racism and exposes the ideals that hinder the Black community’s ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American dream.

Yetu holds the memories for her people - water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners - who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one - the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities.

In a land ruled by ruthless Fae, twenty-one-year-old Lore Alemeyu’s village is trapped in a forested prison. Lore knows that any escape attempt is futile—her scars are a testament to her past failures. But when her village is threatened, Lore makes a desperate deal with a Fae lord. She will leave her home to catalog/organize an enchanted library that hasn’t been touched in a thousand years. No Fae may enter the library, but there is a chance a human might be able to breach the cursed doors.

Yejide and Akin have been married since they met and fell in love at university. Though many expected Akin to take several wives, he and Yejide have always agreed: Polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage - after consulting fertility doctors and healers, trying strange teas and unlikely cures - Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time - until her family arrives on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin's second wife.