Cultural Literature

In this rich, transparent, and witty memoir, the Co-Founder of WangaWoman LLC, current President & CEO of Essence Ventures, and ambassador of authenticity navigates the lifelong battle between her intuition and inner saboteur delivering "instigational"...

An authoritative exploration of how Black Americans have shaped baseball from its emergence after the Civil War to the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier, up to today's game--by award-winning author Gerald Early in...

The first full retrospective of Whitten's dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s-2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race and societyJack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. Over nearly six decades, he dared to...

The Life of a TrailblazerMatilda Arabella Evans was born four years after the abolition of slavery and raised on a family farm in eastern Aiken County. She was the first African American woman in South Carolina to obtain a medical license and fervently...

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author presents "a celebration of all things country music" (Ken Burns) as she reflects on her search for the first family of Black country music. Country music had brought Alice Randall and her...

A dialogue on hope and persistence between a movement mentor and author, educator, and organizer, James R. Tracy.Malik Rahim served as the chair of the New Orleans Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Since that time he has never stopped organizing. In...

An intimate, inspiring memoir by educator and labor union leader Karen Lewis, a formidable fighter, a staunch defender of teachers and students, and a beloved Chicagoan. In 2012, Karen Lewis led the Chicago Teachers Union to a historic strike,...

A powerful, incisive reckoning with the impacts of school desegregation that traces four generations of the author's family to show how the implementation of integration decimated Black school systems and did much of the Black community a disservice On...

Why don't our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they're actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America's classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to...

A poignant, unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literature--everywhere, if you know how to see it. In Black Elegies, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines the form of the elegy and its unique capacity to convey the...

National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis's own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in...

Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope. Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and...