Cultural Literature

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set...

One of the most important books and television series ever to appear, "Roots" opened up the minds of Americans to one of the darkest and most painful parts of its past. This anniversary edition reminds the generation that originally read it that there...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama "guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race"...

This new entry in the innovative Story line of chapter-book biographies focuses on John Lewis, a leader in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and a revered Congressman today. The son of an Alabama sharecropper, John Lewis experienced the injustice of...

The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race--collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation--are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire...

Winner of the 2014 Anna Julia Cooper-CLR James Book Award presented by the National Council of Black Studies In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to...

Randall Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence--with a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. It's "the nuclear...

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre, an eye-opening and galvanizing look at the current state of anti-racist activism across America. In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About...

On the heels of Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize, as the world begins to recognize the creative side of Hip-Hop, comes a writing guide from a musician and The greatest MC of all time, Rakim. The musician and Hip Hop legend--hailed as "the greatest MC of...

The #1 New York Times bestseller The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory history essential to our understanding of race,...

For those who wish to decolonize their minds, particularly Black women, comes a thoughtful guide to ancestral veneration, with a focus on the importance of reclaiming African Spiritual practices as an act of liberation. In today's world, there's a...

A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author's grandson. When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was...