Biography

A punch-drunk memoir in which everyone's favorite Questlove, member of The Roots and the "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" band leader, tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the...

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...

Born in 1915, John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining 20th-century transformation, the dismantling of segregation. He has influenced with determination and dignity the nation's racial conscience, earning the Presidential Medal of Freedom...

A timely reexamination of the pioneering artist, activist, and scientist, George Washington Carver. World Without End examines the ongoing impact of the groundbreaking African American scientist and artist George Washington Carver. The book reframes...

Today's Birmingham--led by Mayor Randall Woodfin--is a phoenix rising from the ashes of systemic racism and white flight. This first Southern city to pluck the feathers off Jim Crow, where peaceful protesters endured attacks by police dogs, where...

"The Barn is the most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read...Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than...

"bell hooks's brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence." --Gloria SteinemWith her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writer's journey in Wounds of Passion...

For bell hooks, the best cultural criticism sees no need to separate politics from the pleasure of reading. Yearning collects together some of hooks's classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the '80s. Addressing topics like pedagogy,...

From multi-award winner Whoopi Goldberg comes a new and unique memoir of her family and their influence on her early life. If it weren't for Emma Johnson, Caryn Johnson would have never become Whoopi Goldberg. Emma gave her children the loving care and...

The women have something to say. Are you listening? In this powerful and needed collection, editor Angela P. Dodson brings together the voices of more than thirty-five accomplished women writers on the topic of violence and injustice against Black men...

Essence Magazine 2023 Must Read Journalist, attorney, and star of Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York reshapes the cultural landscape of achievement by showing why Black unity is crucial to individual and collective success. Eboni K. Williams knew...

One of Oprah Daily's Best Fall Nonfiction Books of 2022An empowering, unabashedly bold memoir by the Atlantic journalist and former ESPN SportsCenter coanchor about overcoming a legacy of pain and forging a new path, no matter how uphill life's battles...

"Amended follows Will Creagh, a young African-American man from Birmingham, Alabama, throughout his childhood and into his college years. The book is centered around the question: "What does it mean for your livelihood to rest upon a Constitutional...

First published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a masterpiece of American literature, a foundational text of sociology, and a deeply personal answer to the question "What is it like to be a Black American?" Breathtaking, searing, and brilliant,...

Cemeteries have stories to tell, voices to unearth-and lessons from the past that we can draw upon to better shape the future. If These Stones Could Talk brings fresh light to a forgotten corner of American history that begins in a small cemetery in...