Cultural Literature

In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray (1916-2013) took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the "pathology" of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black...

Alabama Crimson Tide: 1967 and the Undercurrents of Integration - The First Five - Before the Season ChangedBy: Andrew PernellMr.Pernell was born in the basement of the segregated Bessemer General Hospital in Bessemer, Alabama, on January 19, 1948. Mr...

A dazzling memoir of an African childhood from Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian novelist, playwright, and poet Wole Soyinka. Aké The Years of Childhood gives us the story of Soyinka's boyhood before and during World War II in a Yoruba village in western...

"Today there are approximately 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. Approximately 545,000 are black." What happened to the African American Church that was a pillar in society-is it gone forever? Dr. Brown says no. It doesn't have to be...

In the tumultuous years before the Civil War, a young white woman from a Quaker background came to embody commitment to the cause of antislavery and equal rights for black people. Abby Kelley became the abolitionist movement's chief money-raiser and...

AN EDGAR ALLAN POE AWARD FINALIST The author of the New York Times bestselling The Six now turns her formidable biographical skills to the greatest crime writer in the world, Agatha Christie. It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her...

Henry James wrote, "We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." In this spirit comes After This We Go Dark, the definitive collection of poems from...

The incarceration rate in the United States is the highest of any developed nation, with a prison population of approximately 2.3 million in 2016. Over 700,000 prisoners are released each year, and most face significant educational, economic, and social...

Foreword by Kim Kardashian WestThe true-life story of the woman whose life sentence for non-violent drug trafficking was commuted by President Donald Trump thanks to the efforts of Kim Kardashian West--an inspiring memoir of faith, hope, mercy, and...

This "ambitious [and] delightful" (The New York Times) work of literary nonfiction interweaves the science and history of the powerful refrigerant (and dangerous greenhouse gas) Freon with a haunting meditation on how to live meaningfully and morally in...

Praised as "a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy" (Aaron Robertson, ?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson's Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an...

Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence...