Literary Criticism

By the time of her death, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of...

Colm T?ib?n's personal account of encountering James Baldwin's work, published in Baldwin's centenary year. Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm T?ib?n first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university...

"I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin's prose. It liberated me as a writer."--Toni Morrison   This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, probing the shortcomings of the American protest novel and the harmful...

This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, revealing and critiquing the realities of Black life in mid-century US   Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays "The Harlem Ghetto," "Journey to...

Toni Morrison's readers and critics typically focus more on the "what" than the "how" of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison's expressed narrative intention of...

"Even though writing is a solitary act, when I sit with words that I trust will be read by someone, I know that I can never be truly alone." --bell hooks, "women who write too much"In this timeless essay collection on the writing life, award-winning...

In an awesome meeting of minds, cultural theorists Stuart Hall and bell hooks met for a series of wide-ranging conversations on what Hall sums up as "life, love, death, sex." From the trivial to the profound, across boundaries of age, sexualities and...

"I Woke Up Black" by Marvin Michael O'Bryant is a story inspired by real-life experiences. It follows the life of Marvin, who has witnessed decades of depression, poverty, and a lack of motivation in a nation struggling with love and respect. Despite...

In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction-the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial...

In this follow-up volume in the Black Fire--This Time series, over seventy-five poets and writers come together on the ongoing theme of "Black is Beautiful, Black is Powerful, Black is Home." Works ranging from poetry, fiction, essays, and drama cover a...

In this follow-up volume in the Black Fire--This Time series, over seventy-five poets and writers come together on the ongoing theme of "Black is Beautiful, Black is Powerful, Black is Home." Works ranging from poetry, fiction, essays, and drama cover a...

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history,...

From the origins of the Negro spiritual and the birth of the Harlem Renaissance to the emergence of a national black theatre movement, The Theatre of Black Americans offers a penetrating look at a black art form that has exploded into an American...