Cultural Literature

"Ford's overlap of past and present, narrative and commentary is masterful, and makes this volume all the more valuable to those readers wise enough to allow the past to inform the future. Of Blood and Sweat is a myth-busting work of genius that will...

From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker's fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the only authoritative edition of all three autobiographies by the escaped slave who became a great American leader.   Here in this Library of America volume are collected Frederick Douglass's three autobiographical...

NAACP 2017 Image Award Finalist2018 Michigan Notable Books honoreeThe author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit--a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that...

"Revelatory . . . one of the most briskly revealing pieces of jazz biography that I've read." --Richard Brody, The New Yorker When Billie Holiday first stepped into a recording studio in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the...

A thoughtful, insider view of The Five Percenters-a deeply complex and misunderstood community whose ideas and symbols influenced the rise of hip-hop. Misrepresented in the media as a black parallel to the Hell's Angels, portrayed as everything from a...

"A love letter to our people--full of fury and passion.-- José Olivarez, award-winning poet and author of Citizen Illegal If you could take Rodolfo Gonzales epic poem 'I Am Joaquin' and explain it through compelling, personal narrative in twenty-first...

La'Wana Harris has opened this coach's eyes to the power of coaching practices to create new paths for diversity and inclusion work--whether or not you are formally trained as a coach. Please read this book and help create workplaces with honest...

In the spirit of Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, writer and activist Kevin Powell's memoir--"illuminating...an education for us all" (USA TODAY)--vividly recounts the horrific poverty of his youth...

WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD "A rich and urgently necessary book" (New York Times Book Review), A Moonless, Starless Sky is a masterful, humane work of journalism by Alexis Okeowo--a vivid narrative of Africans who are courageously resisting...

An extraordinary 750-piece puzzle that portrays an intricate, geometric-patterned quilt in mesmerizing shades of teal, lavender, pink, and royal blue stitched by Essie Bendolph Pettway, a member of the historic Gee's Bend quilting community, and...

In October 2006, a group of housing activists called Take Back the Land seized control of a plot of public land in Miami, Florida and built an encampment that would become known as the Umoja Village Shantytown, a living reminder of the lack of low-cost...