#1
Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Housden

Format: Hardcover, 144pp.
ISBN: 0609609017
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Pub. Date: June  2001
Edition Desc: 1 ED

This is a dangerous book. Great poetry calls into question not less than everything. It dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind. It opens us to pain and joy and delight. It amazes, startles, pierces, and transforms us. It can lead to communion and grace.

Through the voices of ten inspiring poets and his own reflections, the author of Sacred America shows how poetry illuminates the eternal feelings and desires that stir the human heart and soul. These poems explore such universal themes as the awakening of wonder, the longing for love, the wisdom of dreams, and the courage required to live an authentic life. In thoughtful commentary on each work, Housden offers glimpses into his personal spiritual journey and invites readers to contemplate the significance of the poet's message in their own lives.

In Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Roger Housden shows how these astonishing poems can inspire you to live what you always knew in your bones but never had the words for.

"The Journey" by Mary Oliver
"Last Night as I Was Sleeping" by Antonio Machado
"Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman
"Zero Circle" by Rumi
"The Time Before Death" by Kabir
"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda
"Last Gods" by Galway Kinnell
"For the Anniversary of My Death" by W. S. Merwin
"Love After Love" by Derek Walcott
"The Dark Night" by St. John of the Cross

The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish by Freda DeKnight
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Format: Hardcover, 390pp.
ISBN: 0874850037
Publisher: Johnson Publishing Company, Incorporated
Pub. Date: November  1975
Edition Desc: Rev. ed

It seems to me that the cookbook genre is in a “reaching back” period. Meaning that the more popular cookbooks from yesteryear are being reprinted in facsimile editions. The Ebony Cookbook is one of them. In my mind, The Ebony Cookbook is essential. The Ebony Cookbook has recipes upon recipes, over 500. Dishes that I thought my grandmother took with her: tomato cobbler; chess pie (how it really should be made, my mother still talks about it); even a sour milk yellow cake (excellent, by the way). It’s all here! I easily place The Ebony Cookbook, along with The Joy Of Cooking, as two cookbooks that should be in every AA kitchen. -Thumper, AALBC.com

#3

by Juanita Bynum

Format: Hardcover, 223pp.
ISBN: 1562291483
Publisher: Pneuma Life Publishing
Pub. Date: March  1998

There has hever been a more needed message to reach people who have suffered with their ability to maintain virtuous relationships. Many sincere, well-meaning Christians secretly wrestle with their sexuality and lust. This personal issue has trapped many of us, but God longs to heal what we've been afraid to reveal. Juanita Bynum pulls the covers off this powerful struggle. This message is your breakthrough to wholeness and holiness. ~The Publisher

Format: Hardcover, 136pp, 59 b&w duotone photographs. 
ISBN: 1578062586 
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi 
Pub. Date: November 2001

"As this volume of photographs presents the faces of acclaimed African American writers, it also highlights the diversity within African American literature and celebrates the many genres it explores." "Over a period of thirty years Lynda Koolish has been photographing African American authors in their homes, at public readings, in universities, and at conferences and festivals. This collection of portraits includes authors of wide range and identity - Caribbean writers who have immigrated to the United States, writers of mixed heritage, writers who proudly proclaim their African roots, playwrights, poets, novelists, critics, scholars, short story writers, oral storytellers, and memoirists." "Koolish's photographs convey a sense of clarity, warmth, and beauty. Along with each portrait she provides a short biographical essay that comprises the artistic vision of the author." "Her gallery of sixty black-and-white photographs presents a grand assembly." Not since Carl Van Vechten's work featuring Harlem Renaissance writers in the 1920s and 1930s has such a book been devoted exclusively to photographic portraits of African American writers.

#5
Pay Yourself First: The African American Guide to Financial Success and Security by by Jesse B. Brown, Hugh B. Price
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Format: Paperback, 208pp.
ISBN: 0471158976
Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
Pub. Date: September  2001
Edition Desc: REVISED & EXPANDED

Achieve your financial freedom with step-by-step instructions from award-winning investment manager Jesse B. Brown. Discover the easy-to-follow, down-to-earth secret to living your dreams, whether it's buying a new home, buying a new car, sending your children to college, retiring rich, or going on that once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

Jesse Brown has already shown thousands and thousands of African Americans how to successfully manage their money -- and make even while they're doing it. Now you can begin your own journey to wealth. From free money for family emergencies to the fundamentals of saving and investing, Jesse Brown will give you the help you need to secure the things you want and be a winner.

#6
Brown Sugar: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction edited by Carol Taylor 
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Format: Paperback, 272pp.
ISBN: 0452282241
Publisher: Dutton/Plume
Pub. Date: December  2000

#7
A Day Late and a Dollar Short
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Much-heralded and long awaited, Terry McMillan's tour-de-force novel introduces the Price family-matriarch Viola, her sometimes-husband Cecil, and their four adult kids, each of whom sees life-and one another-through thick and thin, and entirely on their own terms. With her hallmark exuberance and cast of characters so sassy, resilient, and full of life that they breathe, dream, and shout right off the page, the author of the phenomenal best-sellers Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back has given us a novel that takes us ever-further into the hearts, minds, and souls of America-and gives us six more friends we never want to leave.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem by Ntozake Shange

Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 64pp.
ISBN: 0684843269
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Pub. Date: August  1997

From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

#9
Friends and Lovers by Eric Jerome Dickey
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Format: Mass Market Paperback, 384pp.
ISBN: 0451188039
Publisher: N A L
Pub. Date: August  1998

When Debra meets Leonard, she has just gotten off the sex-before-marriage merry-go-round. If he wants to ride, he'll have to produce the gold ring. A successful comedian with complications of his own, Leonard isn't laughing when he faces that moment in every man's life when he has to decide what matters most - and whether he's ready for the love of a good woman. A book that doesn't diss sisters or brothers, Friends and Lovers tells a story that is real, honest, and brimming with emotion. This is a wise and witty look at the human condition from a writer who doesn't make gender an issue, meerly a difference to celebrate.

#10
The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav

Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 256pp.
ISBN: 067169507X
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Pub. Date: November  1989

Gary Zukav believes that your intentions determine your actions and their consequences. Now I don't do anything without being clear about my intentions. —Oprah Winfrey

With the same extraordinary skill that he used to demystify scientific abstraction and the new physics, Gary Zukay, the award-winning author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, here takes us on a brilliant and penetrating exploration of the new phase of evolution we have now entered.

With lucidity and elegance, Zukav explains that we are evolving from a species that pursues power based upon the perceptions of the five senses -- external power -- into a species that pursues authentic power -- power that is based upon the perceptions and values of the spirit. He shows how the pursuit of external power has produced our survival-of-the-fittest understanding of evolution, generated conflict between lovers, communities, and superpowers, and brought us to the edge of destruction.

Using his scientist's eye and philosopher's heart, Zukav shows how infusing the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust makes them come alive with meaning and purpose. He illustrates how the emerging values of the spirit are changing marriages into spiritual partnerships, psychology into spiritual psychology, and transforming our everyday lives. The Seat of the Soul describes the remarkable journey to the spirit that each of us is on.