Cultural Literature

From an award-winning artist who was featured in Humans of New York comes a bold personal narrative about overcoming family trauma, addiction, poverty--and forging a creative life in the greatest city in the world. Born in Brooklyn in 1963, Patrick...

Taking an important step toward a more inclusive and truthful understanding of Cape Cod's past, this book uncovers and reflects upon Cape Cod's role in the institution of slavery. Through this work of historical, creative nonfiction that also includes a...

In this biography, chronological chapters follow Zora Neale Hurston's family, upbringing, education, influences, and major works, placing these experiences within the context of American history. This biography of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most...

New insights into the work of an acclaimed science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), a pioneer of science fiction and foremother of Afrofuturism, is among the most influential science fiction writers of all time. Her work blurs the boundaries...

Since 2020, debates on anti-Black racism and other social determinants of Black mental health have intensified in Canadian society. However, despite the efforts made, the feeling that social disparities and interpersonal, institutional and systemic...

Canada and the Blackface Atlantic traces the origins of theatre, dance, and concert singing in Canada and their connection to British and American song and dance traditions. When theatrical acts first appeared in the late eighteenth century, chattel...

A long overdue volume which re-establishes Vivian Browne as an important and dynamic American artist with an expressive hand and expansive world view.Vivian Browne's (1929-1993) varied career spanned more than three decades, from her early portraits and...

A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleThe critically acclaimed author...

Revealing the central role of Black activists in spurring interracial solidarity in the US labor movement. Most accounts of interracial solidarity focus on white union activists. In Freedom Train, Cedric de Leon, a former organizer and elected leader in...

In supreme night, the troubles of double consciousness and anti-Black violence recede into the temporary haven of night. In poet Keith Donnell Jr.'s imagination, the cover of darkness, both familiar and mysterious, is transcendent. Here, oppressed...

A mysterious name initiates a journey to discover one family's past, and reveals more than was expected It began with a name. Sancho. Gleaned from the memory of his oldest living relative, that name set author Keith Rushing on a quest to recover his...

A determined journalist's account of rising to Pulitzer Prize-winning heightsUnder the Sun: A Black Journalist's Journey is Harold Jackson's powerful memoir that chronicles his path from a Birmingham, Alabama, housing project in the 1950s and '60s to...

2021: As the centennial of one of the nation's worst race massacres approached, citizens of Tulsa faced the prospect with hope and dread. Hope that the anniversary would show Tulsa had changed since that day in 1921, when a white mob left the city's...

"Toni Morrison once said, 'The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction.' In The Moment, Bakari Sellers brilliantly and precisely cuts through the noise of the calculated, well-financed, and relentless campaign by conservative media,...

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain's beloved yet polarizing literary figure Mark Twain's Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self-aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn...

The remarkable life story of Ella Jenkins, "The First Lady of Children's Music." Ella Jenkins was one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. Her songs "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song" and "Who Fed the Chickens?" are...