Literary Criticism

An engaging examination of Black Girl Magic and its significance in American literatureIn Light and Legacies, author Janaka Bowman Lewis examines Black girlhood in American literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The representation of...

A fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and cultureThe first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates Harper's poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The...

In the wake of the second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, inequalities and disparities were brought to light across the publishing industry. The need for more diverse, representative young adult literature gained new traction, resulting in an...

Edited by the author of The Sellout, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Hokum is a liberating, eccentric, savagely comic anthology of the funniest writing by black Americans. This book is less a comprehensive collection than it is a mix-tape narrative...

Revisiting an almost-forgotten American interracial literary culture that advanced racial pluralism in the decades before the 1960s In Impermanent Blackness, Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing--authors,...

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political...

Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer's...

A new Penguin Classics series that recovers and rediscovers the work of African American poets from the 19th and 20th centuries, curated by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy A Penguin Classic As scholars of African American literature and cultural...

The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee Written when she was...

The most substantial collection of critical essays on Morrison to appear since her death in mid-2019, this book contains previously unpublished essays which both acknowledge the universal significance of her writing even as they map new directions...