Biography

What makes a happy person, a happy life? Dawson, who learned how to read when he was 98, tells how as he describes his own remarkable odyssey across the span of the 20th century. In this remarkable book, 103-year-old George Dawson, a slave's grandson who...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A remarkable story about the power of friendship. Chosen by Essence to be among the forty most influential African Americans, the three doctors grew up in the streets of Newark, facing city life's temptations, pitfalls, even...

From the iconic and charismatic star of "Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam" comes this brave and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica by performer, activist, and writer Chin.

In the tradition of "Dreams of My Father" and "The Color of Water" comes a powerful, beautifully written memoir about coming of age as a black girl in an exclusive white suburb in integrated, post-civil rights-era California in the 1970s and 1980s...

Poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones, vividly recounts his crusading role in African American literature. A driving force behind the Black Arts Movement, the prolific Baraka retells his...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Maya Angelou writes like a song, and like the truth."--The New York Times Book Review "Everything about Maya Angelou is transcendental. She has something to tell you now. Listen."--Robert Fulghum, The Washington Post Book...

As a child, Bebe Moore spent her school years in Philadelphia, in a world of women. Surrounded by clouds of Emeraude and Chanel, supported by the strength of her mother, grandmother, aunts, and teachers, she learned by example to mind her p's and q's, to...

This is the travel journal of an African American visiting his mother's homeland of Ghana. The book offers a range of emotions from the author including the highs of meeting relatives he'd only heard about and the lows of visiting a slave dungeon for the...

Playwright August Wilson is best known for his American Century Cycle, a sequence of ten plays--including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson--that chronicle the lives of Black Americans in each decade of the twentieth century. But...

From Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and a writer who "has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades" (Bryan Stevenson), comes a spirited and riveting memoir of growing up in an interracial family in 1960s...

Meditation is an effective way to manage anxiety and depression, insomnia, stress, and even some acute illnesses. If you want to become more aware and purposeful about your actions, mindfulness coach and Metta teacher, Oneika Mays can help you heal,...

"An invaluable life of a pioneering artist, only now beginning to be fully understood."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The first full-length biography of Alice Coltrane, the jazz musician and spiritual leader whose forward-thinking music was...