African American English

Harlow Shaw feels naïve for believing in happily ever afters, but she craves a love that lights her up. She thinks she has it all with her boyfriend—Until his promising baseball career overshadows their relationship, and he asks her a life-changing question. It causes her to wonder if what they have is all she ever truly wanted. Harlow is yearning for more than the curated life she is living. A trip to Bali, a move to Seattle, and an alleged burned cup of coffee lead her to a friendship she didn't know she needed and a love so deep she can feel it in her bones.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions.

When their parents are discovered brutally murdered in a ditch, Kenya and London are left orphaned and forced to navigate the unforgiving streets of Detroit. They might be identical twins, but they are as different as night and day. While one of them fights relentlessly to make it out of the ghetto, the other eagerly embraces true hood life and everything their parents believed in - selling drugs, living fast, and even dying young (if it means getting paid!).

Around the Way Girls 10, like its predecessors, is a fast-paced look at the lives of some street-smart women who think they know it all but are about to get the lessons of their lives.

This collection is full of gritty stories of strong, spirited women who deal with everything from homicide and drugs to all sorts of turmoil - all while showing the men of the streets of Brooklyn that they are not afraid of anything. Perhaps the edgiest of all the Girls from da Hood books, this drama-filled installment follows a drug-fueled crime operation, which could put the girls and their extravagant lifestyles in permanent danger. But these girls from da hood are trying to find a way out of their troubles, by any means necessary.

A biography of the African American artist who grew up in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance and became one of the most renowned painters of the life of his people.

To many in the age of Obama, America had succeeded in "going beyond race", putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: Young Black men are an endangered species.

In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them.

College Professors Grace and David Andrews are a married couple keeping secrets from each other. This is no run-of-the-mill marital infidelity, though. David doesn’t know that his someone-on-the-side shares a painful link to Grace’s past. One man's actions have resulted in the dismemberment of three families. Now that the loose ends have begun to unravel, will any of them be able to pull their lives back together?

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile.

For successful African American businesswoman Zoe Reynard, finding the pleasure she wants, the way she wants it, is not worth the risk of losing everything she has: marriage to the man she has loved since childhood, a thriving company, three wonderful children. But Zoe feels helpless in the grip of an overpowering addiction—to sex.

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of listeners. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world.

The classic, New York Times best-selling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America. Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? How can we get past our reluctance to discuss racial issues? This fully revised edition is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand dynamics of race and racial inequality in America.

T'was the night before Christmas and all through house a whole family slept soundly, three kids, two grandchildren, a husband and his spouse...Ezra "Ethic" Okafor and his family are finally complete. After years of loneliness Ethic has met his match in Alani. She's the queen of his castle and is a doting mother figure to his children. Only a few months have passed since they wed, but they've spent them happily and peacefully. Alani can't wait to start new traditions with her family and she is determined to make the 12 days before Christmas memorable for them all.

In 1932, the US Public Health Service recruited 623 African American men from Macon County, Alabama, for a study of "the effects of untreated syphilis in the Negro male". For the next 40 years - even after the development of penicillin, the cure for syphilis - these men were denied medical care for this potentially fatal disease.

Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle-class peers. After a messy breakup from her White long-term boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places...including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

In this luminous memoir, a true American icon looks back on his celebrated life and career. His body of work is arguably the most morally significant in cinematic history, and the power and influence of that work are indicative of the character of the man behind the many storied roles. Sidney Poitier here explores these elements of character and personal values to take his own measure: as a man, as a husband and a father, and as an actor.

Through clouds and over mountains and farmland... Two flies accompany listeners on an adrenaline-pumping flight over war-torn Europe as the U.S. Army Air Corps' Tuskegee airmen take on a heroic, history-making mission during World War II.