Alice Walker

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Kentucky

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.

The Color Purple

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Zora Neale Hurston

Deborah G. Plant

Ibram X. Kendi

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Illinois

In the first middle grade offering from Zora Neale Hurston and Ibram X. Kendi, young readers are introduced to the remarkable and true-life story of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Atlantic human trade, in an adaptation of the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed Barracoon. This is the life story of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America to be enslaved, eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis was then the only person alive to tell the story of his capture and bondage--fifty years after the Atlantic human trade was outlawed in the United States. Cudjo shared his firsthand account with legendary folklorist, anthropologist, and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Adapted with care and delivered with age-appropriate historical context by award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi, Cudjo's incredible story is now available for young readers and emerging scholars. With powerful illustrations by Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, this poignant work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

Barracoon: Adapted for Young Readers

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The Story of the Last Black Cargo

New York Times Bestseller A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-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 fifty 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 founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

Barracoon

Washington

Returning frequently to Suwelo's visits to Mr. Hal and his stories about Fanny, this tale transcends time and examines such contradictions as black vs. white, man vs. woman, sexual freedom vs. sexual slavery, past vs. present, etc.

The Temple of My Familiar

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In a story that moves through America, England, and Africa, men, women, and animals share a spiritual world and learn the intricacies of their connecting lives

Texas

In this, her first collection of nonfiction, the author speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.

In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

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Womanist Prose

Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofThe Color Purple, Alice Walker's collection of essays ranging in topics from personal to political. "Thoughtful, intelligent, resonant musings." ??--??Kirkus Reviews



In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist. Among the thirty-six pieces are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Virginia

By the Light of My Father's Smile is Alice Walker's first novel in six years--a stunning, original, and important book by "one of the best American writers of today" (The Washington Post). A family from the United States goes to the remote Sierras in Mexico--the writer-to-be, Susannah; her sister, Magdalena; her father and mother. And there, amid an endangered band of mixed-race Blacks and Indians called the Mundo, they begin an encounter that will change them more than they could ever dream. Moving back and forth in time, and among unforgettable characters and their stories, Walker crosses conventional borders of all kinds as she explores in this magical novel the ways in which a woman's denied sexuality leads to the loss of the much prized and necessary original self; and how she regains that self, even as her family's past of lies and love is transformed. By the Light of My Father's Smile presents, as Alice Walker puts it, "a celebration of sexuality, its absolute usefulness in the accessing of one's mature spirituality, and the father's role in assuring joy or sorrow in this arena for his female children." It explores the richness and coherence of alternative culture, experience of sexuality as a celebration of life, of trust in Nature and the Spirit, even as it affirms the belief, as Walker says, "that it is the triumphant heart, not the conquered heart, that forgives. And that love is both timeless and beyond time."

By the Light of My Father's Smile

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For the Millions of Readers who loved The Color Purple, Alice Walker's award-winning novel, Meridian is a poignant and powerful story of the American South in the 1960s and of one woman who risks her life for the people she loves. Meridian Hill, a courageous young activist, creates peace and understanding by dedicating herself heart and soul to her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, Meridian fights a lonely battle to reaffirm her own humanity -- and that of all her people. Book jacket.

Meridian

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Meridian is a poignant and powerful story of the American South in the 1960s and of one woman who risks her life for the people she loves. Meridian Hill, a courageous young activist, creates peace and understanding by dedicating herself heart and soul to her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, Meridian fights a lonely battle to reaffirm her own humanity, and that of all her people.

Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

The New York Times bestselling book that both galvanizes progressives for action and is a balm--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author "A light in darkness, Alice Walker awakens us to our own power as only she can. . . . Once again, Walker has exceeded our expectations."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution When the United States recently exploded with unprecedented demonstrations challenging racial violence and hatred, Alice Walker's New York Times bestselling We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For was one of the books to which people turned for inspiration and solace. Called "stunningly insightful" and "a book that will inspire hope" by Publishers Weekly, this work by the author of The Color Purple is a clarion call to activism--spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge, that offer a moment of care and solace. Walker encourages readers to take faith in the fact that, despite our daunting predicaments, we are uniquely prepared to create positive change. Drawing on Walker's spiritual grounding and her progressive political convictions, the book offers a cornucopia of the Pulitzer Prize winner's writings and speeches on advocacy, struggle, and hope. Each chapter concludes with a recommended meditation to teach patience, compassion, and forgiveness. Walker's clear vision and calm meditative voice--truly "a light in darkness"--has struck a deep chord among a large and devoted readership. In her new introduction, Walker reflects on the contemporary political and spiritual crises in the post-Trump era United States, making this classic book relevant for the current moment.

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

good condition ex library copy

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Indiana

The Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey. In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her ?nest achievements: the story of a woman's spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love. Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love. Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author's hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker's most surprising achievement.

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

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A Novel

A well-published, numerous-times-divorced woman leaves her lover to embark on a personal journey that begins on the Colorado River and traverses through her past and into her future, while her lover begins his own parallel voyage. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

New York

The stunning New York Times bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple. A powerful novel about brutal misogyny . . . both horrifying and readable, angry and warmhearted, political and human . . . a novel that's strengthened, not strangled, by its political mission.--Newsweek.

Possessing the Secret of Joy

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Severely traumatized after suffering genital mutilation in her native Africa, Tashi Johnson spends much of her adult life in North America seeking help through psychoanalysis, desperate to regain the ability to feel. 150,000 first printing. $150,000 ad/promo.

#paperback #Pulitzer #women #ShortStories #1981 #empowerment #feminist #love #AliceWalker 

Iowa

Stories 

A natural evolution from the earlier, much-acclaimed collection In Love & Trouble, these fourteen provocative and often humorous stories show women oppressed but not defeated. “[Walker] shrinks from no moral or emotional complexity, and she writes consummately skillful short stories” (Alice Adams, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle).


You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

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Michigan

A collection of essays, talks, and journal entries mostly about her life and writing by the author of The Color Purple. For mature readers.

Living by the Word

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Hawaii

The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000

From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker's fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women's activist, and intellectual.

For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple. She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world.

In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women's Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker's personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.

Gathering Blossoms under Fire

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Rated a very respectable 3.9 out of 5 on Goodreads.  

National bestseller by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple. 

A Ballantine Reader’s Circle book; look for the reading group, discussion guide at the back of the book ￼

Maryland

Stories

Fictional stories based on Walker's life, "The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart" is a wise and moving treasure about love and life by the author of "The Color Purple" and "By the Light of My Father's Smile." Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

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The Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award-winning author of The Color Purple presents a new collection of short fiction based on her own life, including "To My Young Husband," an autobiographical piece that describes life amid the turbulence of the Deep South at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. 100,000 first printing.

California

New Poems

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author ofThe Color Purplegives us her first new collection of poetry in more than a decade, poems that reaffirm her as “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems inAbsolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us up to feeling and understanding with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to live life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. In “The Same as Gold,” Walker writes of the essence of grief, and of our inherent powers of love and acceptance. In “Everyone Who Works for Me,” Walker considers, with humor and grace, the frenzy that permeates modern life—a frenzy that prevents us from seeing the beauty in everything we do until we step back and take the time to look at and comprehend ourselves and those around us. In “The Love of Bodies,” Walker elegantly expresses the gratitude and tenderness we are capable of feeling for loved ones, living and dead, and the inescapable emotional connections that bind us together. About Walker’s poetry, America has said, “In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind,” and the same could be said about this astonishing new collection. Despite the hunger we cannot possess more than this: Peace in a garden of our own. —fromAbsolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Connecticut

Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third -- and final -- chance to free himself from spiritual and social enslavement.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

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From the New York Times best-selling author of The Color Purple: a "moving, tender" novel of a Deep South tenant farmer's quest for a new life (Publishers Weekly).



Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he's ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his "second life," proves a dismal failure that sends him back where he came from to confront his now grown-up son's disastrous relationships with his own family, including Grange's granddaughter, Ruth Copeland, a child that Grange grows to love. Love becomes the substance of his third and final life. He spends it in devotion to Ruth, teaching and protecting her--though the cost of doing so is almost more than he can bear.



From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, this is an "honest sensitive tale . . . leavened by those moments of humor and warmth that have enabled men and women to endure so much tragedy" (Chicago Daily News).

A new addition to the HMHhardcover classics, the best-known and critically-acclaimed novel from Alice Walker"

The Color Purple - The Temple of My Familiar

John Updike

Val Coleman

Rosellen Brown

Junius Edwards

Anthony Grooms

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman

Lee Martin

Natalie Petesch

Michael Thelwell

James Baldwin

Lerone Bennett

Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown

R. V. Cassill

Henry Dumas

Diane Oliver

Z. Z. Packer

James W. Thompson

Eudora Welty

Joan Williams

An Anthology

During the civil rights era, masses of people marched in the streets, boycotted stores, and registered to vote. Others challenged racism in ways more solitary but no less life changing. These twenty-three stories give a voice to the nameless, ordinary citizens without whom the movement would have failed. From bloody melees at public lunch counters to anxious musings at the family dinner table, the diverse experiences depicted in this anthology make the civil rights movement as real and immediate as the best histories and memoirs. Each story focuses on a particular, sometimes private, moment in the historic struggle for social justice in America. Events have a permanent effect on characters, like the white girl in ""Spring Is Now"" who must sort through her feelings about the only black boy in her school, or the black preacher in ""The Convert"" who tells a friend, ""This thing of being a man...The Supreme Court can't make you a man. The NAACP can't do it. God Almighty can do a lot, but even He can't do it. Ain't nobody can do it but you."" If a character survives - and some do not - the event can become a turning point, a vision for a better world. The sections into which the stories are grouped parallel the news headlines of the day: School Desegregation (1954 on), Sit-ins (1960 on), Marches and Demonstrations (1963 on), and Acts of Violence. In the last section, Retrospective, characters look back on their personal involvement with the movement. Twenty writers - eleven black and nine white - are represented in the collection. Ten stories were written during the 1960s. That the others were written long after the movement's heyday suggests the potency of that time as a continuing source of creative inspiration.

Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement

Tanya Holland

Maria C. Hunt

Kelley Fanto Deetz

Recipes from a Culinary Journey West [a Cookbook]

80+ comfort-filled recipes that trace the roots of modern California soul food to the Great Migration--from the acclaimed chef and author of Brown Sugar Kitchen.
 
"The new California Cuisine is California Soul."--Questlove
 
"California Soul is a book that will live on my kitchen counter with drips of California olive oil and splats of buttermilk on every page."--Bobby Flay

ONE OF THE TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle
ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Saveur, Food & Wine

Through more than 80 seasonally inspired recipes, Tanya Holland's California Soul showcases modern soul food from the acclaimed chef of Brown Sugar Kitchen and host of Tanya's Kitchen Table. Tanya's inventive cuisine--rooted in a Black Southern cultural repertoire with a twenty-first-century sensibility using local, sustainable, chef-driven, seasonal ingredients--is showcased in recipes for every season, such as Collard Green Tabbouleh, Zucchini-Scallion Waffles with Toasted Pecan Romesco, Grilled Shrimp and Corn with Avocado White BBQ Sauce, Fried Chicken Paillards with Arugula and Pea Shoots Salad, Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake, and Honey Lavender Chess Pie. 

The recipes--influenced by the historical migration of African American families, including Tanya's own--reveal the key ingredients, techniques, and traditions that African Americans brought with them as they left the South for California, creating a beloved version of soul food. Beyond recipes, Tanya spotlights fifteen contemporary Black Californian foodmakers--farmers, coffee roasters, and other talented artisans--whose work help defines California soul food, with stunning portraiture and stories. Filtered through the rich history of African American migration that brought her own family from the Deep South to the West Coast, Tanya's recipes are as comforting and delicious as they are steeped in history.

Tanya Holland's California Soul

Elizabeth Alexander

Alvin Aubert

Gerald Barrax

Remica Bingham

Cyrus Cassells

Estate of Lucille Clifton

Wanda Coleman

Toi Derricotte

Rita Dove

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Cornelius Eady

Thomas Sayers Ellis

Joanne Gabbin

Nikki Giovanni

Kendra Yvette Hamilton

Terrance Hayes

Sean Hill

Langston Hughes

Jackson

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Douglas Kearney

Yusef Komunyakaa

Mark McMorris

E. Miller

Kamilah Aisha Moon

Indigo Moor

Lenard Moore

Thylias Moss

Harryette Mullen

Gregory Pardlo

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Carl Phillips

Stephanie Pruitt

Claudia Rankine

Tim Seibles

Evie Shockley

Patricia Smith

Jean Toomer

Natasha Trethewey

Frank X. Walker

Margaret Walker

Afaa Weaver

Al Young

Kwame Alexander

Tara Betts

Arna Bontemps

Shane Book

Gwendolyn Brooks

Sterling A. Brown

Melvin Dixon

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson

James A. Emanuel

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Ross Gay

C. S. Giscombe

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Myronn Hardy

Michael S. Harper

Janice N. Harrington

Robert Hayden

George Moses Horton

Ravi Howard

Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Helene Johnson

James Weldon Johnson

Patricia Spears Jones

June Jordan

Ruth Ellen Kocher

Audre. Lorde

Shara McCallum

George Marion McClellan

Claude McKay

Marilyn Nelson

G. E. Patterson

Ishmael Reed

Ed Roberson

Mona Lisa Saloy

Reginald Shepherd

Anne Spencer

Amber Flora Thomas

Melvin B. Tolson

Askia M. Touré

Wendy S. Walters

Anthony Walton

Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

This book presents the natural world seen through the eyes of black poets. ""Black Nature"" is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry - anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers, such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson, as well as newer talents, such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. ""Black Nature"" brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

Black Nature

Browse by categories

Alice Walker

The Color Purple

Zora Neale Hurston

Barracoon

Alice Walker

The Temple of My Familiar

Alice Walker

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Alice Walker

By the Light of My Father's Smile

Alice Walker

Meridian

Alice Walker

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

Alice Walker

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

Alice Walker

Possessing the Secret of Joy

Alice Walker

You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

Alice Walker

Living by the Word

Alice Walker

Gathering Blossoms under Fire

Alice Walker

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

Alice Walker

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

Alice Walker

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker

The Color Purple - The Temple of My Familiar

John Updike

Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement

Tanya Holland

Tanya Holland's California Soul

Elizabeth Alexander

Black Nature

Alice Walker

Gathering Blossoms under Fire

Howard Zinn

Hope Beneath Our Feet

Noam Chomsky

The Indispensable Zinn

Melody E. Chavis

Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan

Alice Walker

Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart