Cultural Literature

Stories of a PeopleThroughout history, African Americans passed along folk tales to ease burdens and make sense of experiences. Tracing back to West Africa, this storytelling tradition provided laughter, instruction and resilience. Animal stories often...

The first collection of essays published on trailblazing nineteenth-century Black feminist, activist, journal, and educator, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893) was a trailblazing Black feminist, activist, journalist, and educator whose...

A "tour de force" (Harry Belafonte) now finally in paperback An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized the fraught conflict between conscience and politics - between morality and power - in addressing race. In 1963 Attorney...

This groundbreaking resource moves us from theory to action with a practical plan for reparations. A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project...

The remarkable legacy of Carl Murphy, the acclaimed publisher of the AFRO-American newspaper, will remind you to always find your solace and strength in God. Fifty of Murphy's prayers, along with other proverbs and words of wisdom, have been lovingly...

Contemporary Black artist Trenton Doyle Hancock responds to the provocative images of twentieth-century Jewish painter Philip Guston A defining figure of the New York School, Philip Guston (1913-1980) frequently alluded to racism, antisemitism, and...

2014 NAACP Image Award Winner: Outstanding Literary Work - Biography / Auto Biography 2013 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians Choice Top 25 Academic Titles for 2013 The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks...

The first biography of Ericka Huggins, a queer Black woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party. In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Simmons's evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with...

A compact introduction to Cauleen Smith's experimental, imaginative films incorporating science fiction, Afrofuturism and contemporary Chicago cultureSince making her first feature while a student at UCLA, Los Angeles-based artist Cauleen Smith (born...

This work examines African American children's poetry through a variety of lenses: jazz poetics, the blues, nonsense verse, gender and working-class studies. African American children's poetry reveals legacies of segregation, the Great Migration north,...

In this insightful new volume, Jack Chambers explores Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington's music thematically, collating motifs, memes, and predilections that caught Ellington's attention and inspired his restless muse. In presenting Ellington's work in...