African American English

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality - the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood - and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces", Smith writes, "some of us all at once."

A star athlete and Olympic prospect, Kal Carter is bound for greatness. Everyone says it, only he's not sure he entirely believes it. Because he's lost something he can't replace, and most days he feels like he's holding up the sky; and doing it all on his own. To maintain focus, he never lets anyone close except in the most superficial ways, and he's become very good at it. Until a long, cold week when the solitary girl next door who never speaks, smiles, or makes eye contact barges into his life and seems poised to upend the whole doggone thing.

Carl Weber is the New York Times best-selling author of Baby Momma Drama and Player Haters. To be a member of the Big Girls Book Club, there's just one requirement: be a size 14 - at least.

Angel, Jaz, Tasha, and Kyra are four girlfriends pulling themselves out of the ghetto - and trying to bring their hearts up to higher ground with them. Now Angel has started her own law practice and new life with Kaylin. But when an unwanted guest crashes their wedding, all the rage and bloodlust from the hood comes bustin' out - and Angel's gonna need every prayer in heaven to make it to the altar alive....

A retired employee of the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles, Mrs. Washington runs the mean, cold streets of Chi-town messing with all types of young thugs with multiple felonies. A widow for some time now, Vernita is determined to make up for her stale marriage. However, when a major health scare sets her back, she finds herself losing everything. Reality sets in that her time on Earth is about to come to a close. Now faced with a death sentence, Vernita seeks to live out her remaining days being the biggest old super freak.

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.

This first-of-its-kind herbal guide takes you through the origins of herbal practices rooted in African American tradition—from Ancient Egypt and the African tropics to the Caribbean and the United States. Inside you'll find the stories of herbal healers like Emma Dupree and Henrietta Jeffries, who made modern American herbalism what it is today. After rediscovering the forgotten legacies of these healers, African American Herbalism dives into the important contributions they made to the world of herbalism.

William Pepper was James Earl Ray's lawyer in the trial for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., and even after Ray's conviction and death, Pepper continues to adamantly argue Ray's innocence. This myth-shattering expose is a revised, updated, and heavily expanded volume of Pepper's original best-selling and critically-acclaimed book of the same name, with 26 years of additional research included. The result reveals dramatic new details of the night of the murder, the trial, and why Ray was chosen to take the fall for an evil conspiracy.

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together 18 essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with 36 poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.

After taking us through the rugged, thug-filled lives of Jaz, Kyra, and Angel, Wahida now takes us into the drama-filled life of their best friend, Roz, aka Tasha. She is sexy, beautiful, and torn between her desires to distance herself from the streets and the magnetic attraction to the irresistible and thuggish Trae Macklin, who acknowledges that mature women are a turn-on. Women come and go for a thug who is more about his business over everything else, yet Trae surprisingly falls head over heels for his business partner's woman, Tasha.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.

Beauty isn't everything. Beneath Simone's long fake hair, phony smile, and saline booty is a web of trickery, lies, and murder. After being attacked by Jimmy, Simone's web of lies begins to violently unravel. One by one, her skeletons are falling out of the closet and revealing her true colors. While Simone fights to keep the man and life that she stole, Chance is fighting desperately to keep his life with Gia. Amidst the hot and steamy passion, which builds between Gia and Chance like a scorching inferno, is the fear of Chance being locked away for the rest of his life.

Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.

The Black household is swiftly deteriorating. Frustrated and angry at her prosperous preacher husband's obvious infidelities, Tanya cannot believe the man she once loved has been replaced by this pathological liar obsessed with material wealth.

When two English brothers arrive at a Barbados sugar plantation, they bring with them a darkness beyond what the slaves have already known. Washington Black - an 11-year-old field slave - is horrified to find himself chosen to live in the quarters of one of these men. But the man is not as Washington expects him to be. His new master is the eccentric Christopher Wilde - naturalist, explorer, inventor and abolitionist - whose obsession to perfect a winged flying machine disturbs all who know him.

Mayme and Katie have become friends, which is unusual given that their friendship has spouted at the end of the Civil War and that Mayme is a former slave, while Katie is the daughter of a plantation owner. Both girls have been orphaned by the war, left alone on Katie's family plantation. The land is the one thing they still share, and they don't want to leave it. But if anyone finds out the two of them live there alone, they will be forced to move.

From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat.

Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner's Lincoln emerges as a leader, one whose greatness lies in his capacity for moral and political growth through real engagement with allies and critics alike. This powerful work will transform our understanding of the nation's greatest president and the issue that mattered most.

Playwright, poet, and novelist Ntozake Shange originally composed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in as a mesmerizingly original choreopoem. The New York Post called it "rich with the author's special voice: by turns bitter, funny, ironic, and savage; fiercely honest and personal." Now a new audiobook, it chronicles the interconnected lives of a group of women facing shatteringly difficult issues, and evokes the indomitable power of enduring hope and joy.