Biography

A heartfelt, and riveting biography of the short life of a talented young African-American man who escapes the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets--and of one's own nature--when he returns home.  When...

Strait-laced, pre-civil rights America wasn't ready for Eartha Kitt. Waiting for others to be ready was never her style. in America's Mistress John L. Williams captures the person behind the myth in this engaging biography but also race relations in...

A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau's" Searching for Zion" takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman's quest for a place to call "home" and an investigation into a people's search for the Promised Land, this...

Kidnapped into slavery in 1841, Solomon Northup spent 12 years in captivity. This autobiographical memoir represents an exceptionally detailed and accurate description of slave life and plantation society.The story that inspired the major motion picture,...

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...

Discover the reigns of twelve African queens and warriors from across the continent in this immersive and pioneering history. Njinga Mbande. Nana Yaa Asantewaa. Makobo Modjadji VI. Ranavalona the First. These queens and warriors ruled vast swathes of...

From award-winning author and creative writing professor at Tulane University comes an intimate and powerful memoir exploring inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters. On her second birthday in 1967,...

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,...