"I'm never quite at ease in a Ran Walker story. And that's a good thing. He's a master of the 100-word form." GRANT FAULKNER, Executive Director of NaNoWriMo and Co-Founder of 100 Word Story"He's just that talented. To paraphrase Ethridge Knight: Making...

In her highly anticipated debut novel, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores the perils--and undeniable beauty--of insatiable longing.Growing up in a rapidly changing Harlem, eight-year-old Malaya hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings;...

Thousands of black cowpunchers drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War, but only Nat Love wrote about his experiences. Born to slaves in Davidson County, Tennessee, the newly freed Love struck out for Kansas after the war. He was fifteen...

Acclaimed author of Island Queen Vanessa Riley brings readers a vivid, sweeping novel of the Haitian Revolution based on the true-life stories of two extraordinary women: the first Empress of Haiti, Marie-Claire Bonheur, and Gran Toya, a West...

Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WW2, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. This is the story of her heroic personal resistance to Nazi Germany. Prior to World War II, Josephine...

Intimate poems that explore feminine shame and violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author of The January Children In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to...

Spanning from the nation's earliest years through the New Deal to the Covid pandemic, a groundbreaking work that interrogates how pivotal decisions have established and continued discriminatory practices in the United States, even as the rise of...

A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionA finalist for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel Introducing an extraordinary and original writer whose first novel explores the intersections of grief and rage, personal strength and...

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Back in the day when KRS-One intoned--The Bridge is over!--he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives...

From the award-winning author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water comes a brilliant, provocative, up-to-the-minute novel about a young white man's education and miseducation in contemporary America.Harry Sylvester Bird grows up in Edward,...

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, thousands of African-American men volunteered to fight for a country that granted them only limited civil rights. Many from New York City joined the 15th N.Y. Infantry, a National Guard regiment later...