Literary Criticism - American - African American & Black

In a q&a after a reading I gave at George Mason University in the spring of 2023, I paraphrased a conversation I had with my brother earlier that year. We were on the stoop of his home in Bed-Stuy, talking about technology, about AI...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - A sweeping, genre-bending "masterpiece" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity--from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé ONE OF THE...

A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets...

This book brings together chapters authored by leading African American Studies/Black Studies scholars in the USA and the UK. It focuses on the roots of the discipline, reaching back to early brilliant Black intellectuals, discusses the historical and epistemological development of formal Black Studies,...

In Afrofuturism and World Order, Reynaldo Anderson delves into the evolution of Black speculative thought and Afrofuturism from the early twentieth century to the present day. By locating Afrofuturism within an African geography of reason, he situates the past, present, and future of people...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There--and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America--Black people repurposed...

Beautiful and Ugly Too is a firsthand account of life in the Crescent City told through poetry and essays. A third-generation New Orleanian, author Chuck Perkins was born and raised in the Pigeon Town neighborhood. This, his first collection of poetry, aims to provide...

2024 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal Winner - LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist in LGBTQ+ Adult Nonfiction "We're starting to see...diverse voices on the shelf, a wider variety of experiences on the page, and many different reasons...

Easy Rawlins is on the verge of losing everything--until he gets an offer from the FBI that he has no choice but to accept. For most Black Americans, the 1960s were times of hope. For former P.I. Easy Rawlins, Los Angeles's mean streets were...

Spanning over 250 years of history, Black Ink traces black literature in America from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates in this "breathtaking anthology celebrating the power of the written word to forge change" (O, The Oprah Magazine). Throughout American history black people are the...

A critical collection of conversations with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones and other Black women writers that changed the scope of Black literature in the 20th century and beyond.Author: Claudia TatePublisher: Haymarket BooksPublished: 01/10/2023Pages: 312Binding Type: PaperbackWeight: 0.80lbsSize: 8.50h x 5.50w x 1.10dISBN:...

The first novel by "master of mystery" (The New York Times) Walter Mosley, featuring Easy Rawlins, the most iconic African American detective in all of fiction. Named one of the "best 100 mystery novels of all time" by the Mystery Writers of America, this...

"James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. . . . He was a giant." -- Maya Angelou This collectible edition celebrates...

A recently discovered collection of folktales celebrating African American oral tradition, community, and faith..."splendidly vivid and true."--New York TimesEvery Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that Zora Neale Hurston collected on her travels through the Gulf States in...

"I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin's prose. It liberated me as a writer."--Toni Morrison This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, probing the shortcomings of the American protest novel and the harmful representations of Black identity in film and fiction Originally published...

Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as "inaccessible," "irrelevant," or "intimidating." She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to...

In this New York Times bestseller, streetwise and boy-crazy teenager Tracy Ellison of Flyy Girl fame makes her grand return--now on the brink of superstardom as a screenwriter and actress--in a captivating novel exploring love, friendship, and the price of fame. At twenty-eight, Tracy...

From Cornelius Eady, one of America's most engaging voices, comes an exciting collection of poetry that at once delineates the arc of the poet's universe and highlights the range of his considerable talents. Cornelius Eady's poems show him in full control of his considerable...

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly...

Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood...