Cultural Literature

First published in 1990, Michele Wallace's Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace's considerations of the black experience in America include recollections of her early life in Harlem; a look at the...

The classic work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice, now with a new foreword by Michelle AlexanderIn Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue...

Telling the stories of African American domestic workers, this book resurrects a little-known history of domestic worker activism in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new perspectives on race, labor, feminism, and organizing. In this groundbreaking history...

With Speech Is My Hammer, Max Hunter draws on memoir and his own biography to call his readers to reimagine the meaning and power in literacy. Defining literacy as a "spectrum of skills, abilities, attainments, and performances," Hunter focuses on...

A "rich hybrid of memoir and history" (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion "Bennett...transport[s] us back to...

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race. Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective--the tropes,...