Kimberly Jones

Gilly Segal

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

"An absolute page turner, I'm Not Dying with You Tonight is a compelling and powerful novel that is sure to make an impact. "--Angie Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give Over the course of one night, two girls with two very different backgrounds must rely on each other to get through the violent race riot that has enveloped their city. Lena has her killer style, her awesome boyfriend, and a plan. She knows she's going to make it big. Campbell, on the other hand, is just trying to keep her head down and get through the year at her new school. When both girls attend the Friday-night football game, what neither expects is for everything to descend into sudden mass chaos. Chaos born from violence and hate. Chaos that unexpectedly throws them together. They aren't friends. They hardly understand the other's point of view. But none of that matters when the city is up in flames, and they only have each other to rely on if they're going to survive the night. Additional Praise for I'm Not Dying with You Tonight: "A vital addition to the YA race relations canon."--Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin "An astounding achievement. This novel is an incendiary experience, one that does not shy away from difficult questions about privilege and violence. But Jones and Segal don't hold our hands to provide us easy answers; this is a book meant to be devoured in a single sitting and discussed for years to come."--Mark Oshiro, author of Anger is a Gift "I'm Not Dying With You Tonight is a powerful examination of privilege, and how friends are often found in surprising places. Jones and Segal have penned a page-turning debut, as timely as it is addictive."--David Arnold, New York Times bestselling author of Mosquitoland and Kids of Appetite

I'm Not Dying with You Tonight

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Wil Haygood

Texas

One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World

"At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book ... without a doubt, not only the very best film book ... but it is also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read." --Shondaland This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies--from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther--using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown. Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation--which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster--Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves--including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

Colorization

e06574ce-6475-4f5c-8857-a118cdb53599-1

Massachusetts

A Novel

A powerful work of Afro-magic realism that interrogates the legacy of slavery and roots of poverty, witnesses the beauty and power in survival, and asks whether belief, magic, and intention can forge new realities



Blue's daughter, Tsitra, is dying a horrific death. Thousands of miles away, Blue feels time slowing and hears voices, followed by an 18-month stillness. More than a century before, Blue's grandparents, Amanda and Palmer, attend a salon party in New Orleans. It's a veritable array of who's-who within pre-Civil War social circles. Conversations get heated quickly as Ismay, the hostess who hails from French royalty, antagonizes Palmer, a landowner whose parents had been sold into American slavery and who's there to seek revenge, and Amanda, a shapeshifter and puzzlemaker who had been enslaved until this very gathering. At this party, Amanda learns of a plot that will doom a line of her--and Palmer's--family to poverty. She devises her own counter-plot to undo the damage.



Meanwhile, Blue comes out of her stillness, broke and devoid of inspiration. In profound grief and consumed by guilt, Blue travels to The Ranch where the voices grow louder and she has visions of two women from the distant past. As time collapses and Blue and Amanda meet in the space of possibility, Blue feels the spark of a power and creative energy she has only glimpsed. A novel of invention but grounded in the real, The Blue Is Where God Lives is a dual-timeline, time-bending novel of undeniable beauty, magic, and possibility.

The Blue Is Where God Lives

e5353317-9289-4c72-8828-675e1f7d9337-1

Charles Johnson

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Ohio

"Set against the racial turbulence of the Civil Rights era, Dreamer is the first work of fiction to explore King's life. Yet the story, told by Matthew Bishop, one of King's devoted followers, is also a tale of doubles, warring brothers, envy, and inequality." "The novel introduces us to Chaym Smith, a man whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. In the course of training Chaym to shield King from danger, Matthew comes to realize the philosophical magnitude of our greatest civil rights leader and the ambiguities within the Movement itself, and he - and we - are irreversibly changed. What makes one man great and the other just a mirror for greatness? What does it mean to be of African descent in America? What does it take to change the face of a country forever?"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Dreamer

09487b60-8ad3-417d-89bb-6433df5b49e9-1

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

Illinois

An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices

Fresh and electrifying--stories, poems, and essays by African and diaspora writers, edited by author Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond.

Relations punctures the human illusion of separation. New and established storytellers reshape the narratives that divide and subjugate, revealing the truth of our shared humanity despite differences in language, identity, class, gender, and beyond. This vital anthology is Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond's striking vision of a meeting place of perspectives, centered in the African and diaspora experience.

In a post-Black Panther world, it is an urgent and welcome embrace of the diversity of Blackness. A refreshing collection of genre-spanning literature, it offers a vibrant meditation on being--inviting connection across real and imagined borders, and celebration of the most profound relations.

Relations ARC

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New Jersey

In Life and Leadership

It Worked for Me

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Jason Reynolds

Brendan Kiely

New York

When sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing, classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who happens to be the older brother of his best friend. Told through Rashad and Quinn's alternating viewpoints.

All American Boys

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Danyel Smith

Oklahoma

Told from the alternating points of view of two sisters, "More Like Wrestling" is a story about love--its potential for salvation and its limitations--as well as the dangers of apathy and the ultimate necessity for forgiveness.

More Like Wrestling

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Rosemarie Robotham

Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers

A celebration of modern black family life, featuring fiction, memoir, and poetry, by African American authors both new and renowned.

Mending the World

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Damon Young

Florida

A Memoir in Essays

From the cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and culture at work today, a provocative and humorous memoir-in-essays that explores the ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be Black (and male) in America For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as “How should I react here, as a professional black person?” and “Will this white person’s potato salad kill me?” are forever relevant. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young’s efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It’s a condition that’s sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the “being straight” thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to “Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies.” And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white. From one of our most respected cultural observers, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity.

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

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Gwen Strauss

Calvin Alexander Ramsey

Iowa

Ruth and the Green Book is the story of one black family's trip from Chicago to Alabama by car in the late 1940s. Along the way they encounter prejudice, but they also discover The Green Book, a real guide to accommodations which was published for decades to aid African-American travelers as they faced prejudice on the roads across the country.

Ruth and the Green Book

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Serena Kappes

Rated 4.5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Blacked out name on inside front cover

Maryland

Sports Heroes and Legends

Details the life of Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, the first person to break Babe Ruth's career record of 714 home runs.

Hank Aaron

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Original tales of living, loving and learning told by a perfectly ordinary, quite commonly sensible, and absolutely are inspiring colored woman. #africanamerican #shortstories #folktales #NorthCarolina #heritage #africanamericanheritage #

Original Tales of Living, Loving, Longing and Learning, As Told by a Perfectly Ordinary, Quite Commonly Sensible and Absolutely Awe-Inspiring Colored Woman

Sometimes black history doesn't march, Sometimes black history doesn't shout, Sometimes black history just comes wearily down a dirt road, dragging a cotton sack and wearning a head rag....

Just Plain Folks

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Rosalyn McMillan

Louisiana

A story of love, family and the search for the right someone to share it all with. Spice Witherspoon, a prosperous Detroit restaurateur, has two grown-up daughters. Mink has always been a joy, but Sterling has always been Trouble.

One Better

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#hardcover #historicalfiction #love #friendship  #africanamerican 

Virginia

In her funny, moving, and ambitious debut, Elyse Singleton introduces us to two inseparable and hard-minded idealists. Young Lilian endures the tribulations of Nadir, Mississippi, on the purity of her faith in people and her growing belief in herself. Her best friend, Myraleen, gets by on her sharp tongue and her unwillingness to give in-and perhaps because Lilian is always with her. In this lifelong story, Lilian and Myraleen struggle through dramatically changing times: From the stark realities of life in rural Mississippi, through the different sort of racism they find in workaday Philadelphia and France during World War II. For these women, the road to maturity in the messy American century is long and ragged. Along the way, Myraleen falls for a Tuskeegee flier and Lilian for a German prisoner of war. And each time they reassert their oldest ideals, everything they believe in is tested again--most of all what love requires in such a world.

This Side of the Sky

36312196-61ad-411f-9b80-9ed245ad2b9d-1

Richard Wright

Malcolm Wright

**NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER** A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel about race and police violence by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city’s sewer system. This is the devastating premise of this scorching novel, a masterpiece that Richard Wright was unable to publish in his lifetime. Written between his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), at the height of his creative powers, it would eventually see publication only in drastically condensed and truncated form in the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author's estate, the full text of this incendiary novel about race and violence in America, the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”), is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

The Man Who Lived Underground: a Novel

fb2d2fcb-b74e-4581-b82a-b63af783bf43-1

Michigan

Erotic Black Fiction

Brown sugar

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

After the death of his father, the flamboyant and controversial Judge Oliver Garland, his son Talcott must unravel the truth about his father's life, a quest that brings him face to face with old scandals and family secrets.

The Emperor of Ocean Park

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Maya Angelou

A couple small bends along dust jacket but otherwise in near perfect new condition! This book was an extra copy so just selling the second one

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A moving memoir about the legendary author’s relationship with her own mother. Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick! The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them. Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights. Praise for Mom & Me & Mom “Mom & Me & Mom is delivered with Angelou’s trademark good humor and fierce optimism. If any resentments linger between these lines, if lives are partially revealed without all the bitter details exposed, well, that is part of Angelou’s forgiving design. As an account of reconciliation, this little book is just revealing enough, and pretty irresistible.”—The Washington Post “Moving . . . a remarkable portrait of two courageous souls.”—People “[The] latest, and most potent, of her serial autobiographies . . . [a] tough-minded, tenderhearted addition to Angelou’s spectacular canon.”—Elle “Mesmerizing . . . Angelou has a way with words that can still dazzle us, and with her mother as a subject, Angelou has a near-perfect muse and mystery woman.”—Essence

Mom and Me and Mom

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Kwame Alexander

A middle-grade novel in verse follows the experiences of twin basketball stars Josh and Jordan, who struggle with challenges on and off the court while their father ignores his declining health. 20,000 first printing.

The Crossover

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Venise Berry

Pennsylvania

Conflicting desires for independence and security mark the actions and relationships of Lisa, Danielle, and Sundi, three Washington, D.C., women whose rapport sees them through difficult demands of love, commitment, family, career, and friendship. A first novel. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

So Good

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Jesmyn Ward

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey through Mississippi's past and present"--

Sing, Unburied, Sing

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Tommie Smith

Derrick Barnes

Raising My Fist for Justice

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Young People's Literature A groundbreaking and timely graphic memoir from one of the most iconic figures in American sports—and a tribute to his fight for civil rights. On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans. Both men were forced to leave the Olympics, received death threats, and faced ostracism and continuing economic hardships. In his first-ever memoir for young readers, Tommie Smith looks back on his childhood growing up in rural Texas through to his stellar athletic career, culminating in his historic victory and Olympic podium protest. Cowritten with Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Honor recipient Derrick Barnes and illustrated with bold and muscular artwork from Emmy Award–winning illustrator Dawud Anyabwile, Victory. Stand! paints a stirring portrait of an iconic moment in Olympic history that still resonates today.

Victory. Stand!

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Stacey Abrams

Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

"This is a narrative that describes the urgency that compels me and millions more to push for a different American story than the one being told today. It's a story that is one part danger, one part action, and all true. It's a story about how and why we fight for our democracy and win." Celebrated national leader and bestselling author Stacey Abrams offers a blueprint to end voter suppression, empower our citizens, and take back our country. A recognized expert on fair voting and civic engagement, Abrams chronicles a chilling account of how the right to vote and the principle of democracy have been and continue to be under attack. Abrams would have been the first African American woman governor, but experienced these effects firsthand, despite running the most innovative race in modern politics as the Democratic nominee in Georgia. Abrams didn’t win, but she has not conceded. The book compellingly argues for the importance of robust voter protections, an elevation of identity politics, engagement in the census, and a return to moral international leadership. Our Time Is Now draws on extensive research from national organizations and renowned scholars, as well as anecdotes from her life and others’ who have fought throughout our country’s history for the power to be heard. The stakes could not be higher. Here are concrete solutions and inspiration to stand up for who we are—now.

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Kimberly Jones; Gilly Segal