African American Families

Simone Garcia-Hampton is starting over at a new school, and this time things will be different. She's making real friends, making a name for herself as student director of Rent, and making a play for Miles, the guy who makes her melt every time he walks into a room. The last thing she wants is for word to get out that she's HIV-positive, because last time...well, last time things got ugly.

The daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I., Rachel survives a family tragedy only to face new challenges. Sent to live with her strict African-American grandmother in a racially divided Northwest city, she must suppress her grief and reinvent herself in a mostly black community. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, she attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that's not how she sees herself.

One of America's favorite African-American storytellers remembers her childhood in tender, unforgettable new stories. Jackie Torrence, a frequent headliner at the National Storytelling Festival, is known to audiences nationwide as The Story Lady.

From New York Times best-selling author Eric Jerome Dickey comes this sexy novel brimming with the steamy voices of three desperately intertwined lovers. Dickey centers the story on an L.A.-based writer who is obsessed with gorgeous, nubile Nicole - the very same woman who left him at the altar just three years before. Nicole is torn between her ongoing love for him and her passion for the beautiful Ayanna.

Between Freedom and Equality begins with the life of Capt. George Pointer, an enslaved African who purchased his freedom in 1793 while working for George Washington's Potomac Company. It follows the lives of six generations of his descendants as they lived and worked on the banks of the Potomac, in the port of Georgetown, and in a rural corner of the nation's capital. Between Freedom and Equality offers a moving and inspiring look at the challenges that free African Americans have faced in Washington, DC, since the district's founding.

Descended from Arkansas sharecroppers, BJ, Larry, and Willie Chambers moved to Detroit seeking economic opportunity, and built a successful drug empire by applying strict business principles to their trade; their business grossed an estimated $55 million annually until the brothers were sent to prison in 1989.

Awaiting the return of her husband and young son from a road trip, Obiajulu Ejiofor receives shattering news. There’s been a fatal car crash, and one of them is dead. In Where the Children Take Us, Obiajulu’s daughter, Zain E. Asher, tells the story of her mother’s harrowing fight to raise four children as a widowed immigrant in South London. There is tragedy in this tale, but it is not a tragedy. Drawing on tough-love parenting strategies, Obiajulu teaches her sons and daughters to overcome the daily pressures of poverty, crime and prejudice—and much more.

In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley - daughter of actress Lena Horne - delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African American family from Civil War to civil rights. Beginning with her great-great-grandfather, Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in postwar Atlanta, Buckley follows her family's two branches: one that stayed in the South and the other that settled in Brooklyn.

As a boy, George Elliott Clarke knew that a great deal was expected from him and his two brothers. The descendants of a highly accomplished, Virginia-descended family on his father, Bill’s, side, George felt called to live up to the family name. In contrast, his mother, Gerry’s, family were warm, down-to-earth country folk. Such contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing - Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. George interrogates these dualities in Where Beauty Survived and shows us how they shaped him as a poet and thinker.

Rhea's neighborhood is fading away—the mom-and-pop shops of her childhood forced out to make space for an artisanal kombucha brewery here, a hot yoga studio there. And everywhere, the feeling that this place is no longer meant for her. Because while their little corner of South L.A. isn't perfect, to Rhea and her two best friends, it's something even more important—it's home. And it's worth protecting. But as more white people flock to their latest edgy, urban paradise, more of Rhea's friends and family are pushed out. Until Rhea decides it's time to push back.

With ten years into a successful marriage and a thriving business, Destiny Harris was living the life most only dreamed of. There was only one addition that would bring everything full circle, but a harsh reality turned her world upside down. Betrayal and lies replaced the truth she believed to be the foundation of her happy life. MyKyng Masters was a man of substance and structure. Even at a very young age, he had a firm grasp on everyone and everything around him. With an already complicated life, the last thing he needed was a reminder that no one can maintain complete control.

Running into a long-ago friend sets memories from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything - until it wasn't. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant - a part of a future that belonged to them.

When she was twenty-six and broke, Skye didn’t think twice before selling her eggs and happily pocketing the cash. Now approaching forty, Skye still moves through life entirely—and unrepentantly—on her own terms, living out of a suitcase and avoiding all manner of serious relationships. Maybe her junior high classmates weren’t wrong when they voted her “Most Likely to Be Single” instead of “Most Ride-or-Die Homie,” but at least she’s always been free to do as she pleases.

Rio Duncan is one of the youngest children of the Duncan clan. With no solid position in the family business like his other siblings, he has been feeling out of place and decides to disappear. Rio leaves his Duncan identity behind and goes on a search for friends and family who can relate to him. His destination is Baltimore, and he is sure to find what he is looking for in the city with a community like no other.

In this novel of family and redemption, a mother struggles to save her 18-year-old daughter from the devastating consequences of mental illness by forcing her to deal with her bipolar disorder. New York Times best-selling author Bebe Moore Campbell draws on her own powerful emotions and African-American roots, showcasing her best writing yet.

The son of Maya Angelou, Guy Johnson is a critically acclaimed author and poet in his own right. Echoes of a Distant Summer is the story of Jackson St. Clair Tremain, a San Francisco civil servant who thought he had left his old life far behind. In 1982, Jackson is summoned to Mexico to confer with his dying grandfather, the brutal hustler King Tremain. When King dies, Jackson inherits $50 million - and the unwanted attentions of a malevolent bayou crime lord named Pug DuMont.

From number one New York Times best-selling author Nic Stone comes a middle-grade road-trip story through American race relations past and present, perfect for fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Jason Reynolds.

In the finale, everyone is battling their own demons. Messiah may have done something that could end her relationship with her daughter and husband. Has she gone too far, or like usual Messiah, did she know what she was doing? Staten is stuck on trying to handle loving Liberty, even after she ended things, be a father to he and Chanel’s daughter, and be there for a pregnant Maliah as well. Can he juggle it all, while trying to be there for his big brother too?

When we think of slavery, most of us think of the American South. We think of back-breaking fieldwork on plantations. We don't think of slavery in the North, nor do we think of the grueling labor of urban and domestic slaves. Rachel May's rich new book explores the far reach of slavery, from New England to the Caribbean, the role it played in the growth of mercantile America, and the bonds between the agrarian South and the industrial North in the antebellum era - all through the discovery of a remarkable quilt.

June Hanson: Calix Moore was like nothing I’d ever experienced in this life. He stormed in with no regard for what it might do to my heart, only his own. I wanted to open up and give him a chance, same as I had the first night we met—the night we threw all caution to the wind and spent twelve passionate hours behind closed doors. But when the sky brightened, and I looked next to me, I knew I could never allow him to see me again. Except fate had other plans and now he’s standing in front of me, at my place of business, with a knowing smirk pulling at his lips.