African American Families

Of all the many horrors of slavery, the cruelest was the separation of families in slave auctions. Spouses and siblings were sold away from one other. Young children were separated from their mothers. Fathers were sent down river and never saw their families again. As soon as slavery ended in 1865, family members began to search for one another, in some cases persisting until as late as the 1920s. They took out advertisements in newspapers and sent letters to the editor. Judith Giesberg draws on the archive that she founded to compile these stories in a narrative form for the first time.

Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah's fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world.

Sophomore Kalvin Shmelton has finally perfected his underground candy-selling hustle at school. He keeps his prices reasonable, his inventory fresh, and himself out of the drama. But when a heartbroken Sterling Glistern—Kal’s longtime crush—barges into the storage closet where he keeps his candy supply, a new source of income unexpectedly presents itself: relationship therapist. He only meant to help Sterling realize she’s dating a jerk—and maybe win her over—but news spreads fast that Kalvin’s not just the master of sweets…but hearts, too!

Isaiah ""Ice"" Abernathy has always worshiped his older brother, Seth. For years they’ve been not just brothers but best friends—and as Seth starts his senior year, Ice is eager to spend as much time with his brother as he can, making memories before Seth goes to college.

This is not how seventeen-year-old Gil imagined beginning his senior year—on the subway dressed in a tie and khakis headed towards Manhattan instead of his old public school in Brooklyn. Augustin Prep may only be a borough away, but the exclusive private school feels like it's a different world entirely compared to Gil's predominately Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn. If it weren't for the partial scholarship, the school's robotic program and the chance for a better future, Gil wouldn't have even considered going.

On a routine trip to the Piggly Wiggly in Albany, Georgia, widower Fletcher Dukes smells a familiar perfume, then sees a tall woman the color of papershell pecans with a strawberry birthmark on the nape of her neck. He knows immediately that she is his lost love, Altovise Benson. Their bond, built on county fairs, sit-ins, and marches, once seemed a sure and forever thing. But their marriage plans were disrupted when the police turned a peaceful protest violent.

In the early 1900s an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea, just as the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule. Orphaned by the sunk vessel are two sisters and their half-brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them. Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic.

Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice. This book is at once a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Rev. Moses’s demand for liberation.

The sudden death of an alcoholic, lying, and manipulative mother sets off a chain of events that forces two worlds to eventually collide, releasing secrets and pain that could change the lives of everyone involved. Janice Williams is finally living the life that she's always dreamed. A respected dean of a university, with an adoring husband, she is finally happy - except for the hole in her heart that remains from a long-ago tragedy. Nicole Henry is enjoying the carefree life of a college student, until her adoptive parents announce they're divorcing and tapped out financially.

Timbuktu, western Africa, 1706. Folashade, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a professor of linguistics, is sent south with her older sisters, Bibi and Adaeze, to endure the painful ceremony that a girl on the cusp of womanhood is expected to. In Djenné, on the banks of the Niger, the sisters’ fate and that of their fellow Bambara are changed forever when they’re kidnapped, marched toward grueling indignities on Gorée Island, and eventually hauled aboard an English slaver bound for the Americas.

Growing up poor in Texas, Vera Lomax used every gold-digging trick in the book to land a rich husband. Now living in the lap of luxury in San Francisco, her only job is to fawn over her much-older husband, so it's been easy for her to balance a life of shopping and affairs with younger men with a major secret: the 16-year bribery of one of her husband's mistresses to keep her pregnancy under wraps. Vera figures that a little hush money every month will ensure her husband's fortune is hers alone....

Sicily Jordan’s worst nightmare has come true! She’s been enrolled in a new school, with zero of her friends and stuck wearing a fashion catastrophe of a uniform. But however bad Sicily thought sixth grade was going to be, it only gets worse when she does her class presentation.

Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.

The drama and dangerous secrets continue to build in the lives of the Georgetown house members. Gloria Towson is keeping her secret from David Carter. Melissa Charles does everything in her power to keep her secret, as well as simultaneously hold on to the love of her life, Alan Lightfoot. However, Alan knows he must let Melissa go to serve the tenets of his Indigenous American heritage.

Grandma BB, the unofficial matriarch of the Jamieson clan, is getting her house in order for the perfect homegoing celebration. After all, she’s eighty-something. She summons Parke Jamieson VI, his brothers, cousins, and their families to play a part in the practice funeral program—only if they follow her instructions to the letter. Since the Jamiesons are at her house with bodyguards Chip and Dale, they might have an impromptu family game night. The evening is full of surprises, especially when an unexpected visitor shows up to steal the show.

A grieving Hector Peterson and his estranged father Winston Telemacque arrive on the lush island of Dominica in 2017 to spread his mother’s ashes when Hurricane Maria strikes. Amid the devastation, the fragile peace between father and son is tested as long-buried family secrets at the heart of Hector’s identity are unearthed. Hector faces down his failed marriage, shipwrecked career, and his own failures as a father, while Winston, after three decades of striving as an immigrant in Boston, seeks to reclaim the losses from a painful childhood and the bloody betrayal by his one true love.

The world is burning, and Corinne will do anything to put out the flames. After her brother died aboard an oil boat on the Mississippi River in 2013, Corrine awakened to the realities of climate change and its perpetrators. Now, a year later, she finds herself trapped in a lonely cycle of mourning both her brother and the very planet she stands on. She's convinced that in order to save her future, she has to make sure that her brother's life meant something. But in the act of honoring her brother's spirit, she resurrects family ghosts she knows little about--ghosts her grandmother Cora knows intimately.

After World War II, Needham family members migrated north to Philadelphia from South Carolina, leaving behind the tragic injustice surrounding the violent death of their patriarch, King. His devoted widow, Selma, remains on the old home place. Over the years, she raises King's children, including his great-grandson, Rayne, on whom falls the responsibility to bring the family together to save the family land and mend the rift between him and his mother.

Jonah Winters has it all. An Ivy Leaguer born to expatriate parents, he is never in want for money and calls both New York City and Paris his home. Aware that his fortunes are rare for a Black man like himself, he attempts to give back by teaching English at a New York City public school only to be profoundly disillusioned by his apathetic students. When a friend offers Jonah a chance to escape down to South America, he accepts, ready to leave the struggling African American community to solve their own problems.

Life: Four Quarters Plus Overtime is a book created specifically with the African American community in mind. The book will examine the periods of development associated with the human life span with brief overview of the social, emotional, congenital, perceptual, and moral development specific to each life stage.