Cultural Literature

From the author of an acclaimed biography of Josephine Bonaparte: a stunning history of the interdependence of sugar, slavery, and colonial settlement in the New World--from the 17th century to the present.In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the...

From a very early age, there was little question what Samuelsson was going to be when he grew up. This story chronicles his remarkable journey from Ethiopia to Sweden to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Europe to an acclaimed New...

Hill shares his experience teaching a hip-hop centered English literature course in a Philadelphia high school where rap music, breakdancing, graffiti culture, and other aspects of hip-hop were incorporated into the curriculum. Annotation: Hill shares...

Convicted of the rape of a white woman in Mississippi, Willie McGee was executed in 1951, and the mysteries surrounding his case live on in this provocative tale about justice in the deep South. A gripping saga of race and retribution in the Deep South...

Tony Medina is a poet, professor, activist, and the author of 10 books, including the titles DeShawn Days, Love for Langston, and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam. Samiya A. Bashir is a poet, writer, and editor, and has appeared in Poetry for the...

The Black Power movement represented a key turning point in American politics. Disenchanted by the hollow progress of federal desegregation during the 1960s, many black citizens and leaders across the United States demanded meaningful self-determination...

Newark's volatile past is infamous. The city has become synonymous with the Black Power movement and urban crisis. Its history reveals a vibrant and contentious political culture punctuated by traditional civic pride and an understudied tradition of...

" I mean to live and die by my own mind," Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die...

The first complete and balanced history of the Black Panther Party--powerful and provocativeUntil The Shadow of the Panther there have been no serious book-length attempts to examine the Panthers' history and to evaluate their significance. . . . A...

Introduced by Maya Angelou, the inspiring sermon-poems of James Weldon Johnson James Weldon Johnson was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most revered African Americans of all time, whose life demonstrated the full spectrum of...

A controversial and widely heralded look at the race-related pain and anger felt by the most respected, best educated, and wealthiest members of the black community.