The African American Literary Award Show Award Winning Books

First presented in 2004, the African American Literary Award Show is an entertainment event production and marketing company with a focus on writers and authors. It produces an annual Literary Awards Show to recognize, honor, celebrate and promote the outstanding achievements and contributions that African-American authors and writers make to the publishing, arts and entertainment industries.

AALBC.com’s Founder, Troy Johnson was honored by the African American Literary Awards Show in 2012.


13 Books Honored in 2014


Hold Me In Contempt
by Wendy Williams

Publication Date: Apr 15, 2014
List Price: $14.99
Format: Paperback, 336 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780062268419
Imprint: Amistad
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corp

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Book Description: 
Kimberly Kind is trying to get beyond her roots. A successful, beautiful, and smart lawyer, she’s finally finding direction in her life and getting off the streets. But a terrible accident threatens to throw her carefully laid plans off course. Now Kim’s hiding a huge secret … one that could jeopardize everything.Enter King. A perfect mix of Justin Timberlake and David Beckham, the man oozes sex and has more swagger than anyone Kim’s ever met. Their chemistry is off the charts. And after passion-filled nights, the intensity of their emotions takes both of them by surprise.Love was not supposed to be an option. Now it’s the only thing holding them together. When their pasts come back with a vengeance, can love possibly be enough?




Anybody’s Daughter
by Pamela Samuels Young

Publication Date: Oct 27, 2013
List Price: $16.99
Format: Paperback, 374 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780989293501
Imprint: Goldman House Publishing
Publisher: Goldman House Publishing
Parent Company: Goldman House Publishing

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Book Description: 
Is Anybody’s Daughter Ever Safe? Thirteen-year-old Brianna Walker is ecstatic. She’s about to sneak off to meet her first real boyfriend, a boyfriend she met on Facebook. But Brianna is in for a horrifying surprise because her boyfriend doesn’t exist. Instead, she’s hurled her into the shocking world of human sex trafficking. Brianna’s Uncle Dre, a man with his own criminal past, is not content to rely on police to bring his niece home. He scours the dark corners of Los Angeles determined to end this nightmare. The woman he loves, attorney Angela Evans, knows the dangers faced by sexually exploited children because she represents them. Angela lends both her moral support and professional resources, but Dre ultimately comes up with a daring plan that puts many lives in danger, including his own. But will he find Brianna before it’s too late?


The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love: The 11 Secrets of Feminine Power
by Abiola Abrams

Publication Date: Jun 25, 2014
List Price: $18.80
Format: Paperback, 408 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780966070781
Imprint: Love University Press
Publisher: Love University Press
Parent Company: Love University Press

Read a Description of The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love: The 11 Secrets of Feminine Power


Book Description: 

It’s Time to Step Into Your Greatness!


The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love is your passport to become the woman you were born to be. If you’ve been looking for a sign, this is it. Love-Body-Spirit coach, advice columnist, and motivational speaker Abiola Abrams reveals 11 self-worth secrets with assignments to awaken your feminine energy, reclaiming the word bombshell to mean a woman who deliciously embodies her mind, body, spirit - and joy. Abiola’s transformational coaching is buoyed by her Guyanese family lessons and overcoming personal challenges from disordered eating to a failed marriage. If you have everything going for you, except what you really want, this journey is for you.

Self-love is sacred. Being empowered is your ’femergetic’ birthright. Consider this is your playbook to activate your Big, Brave, Brazen, Bombshell Breakthrough Life!

Sacred Bombshell readers will learn:

  • Why nothing matters more than you feeling good
  • When to activate your sacred blisspower and blissipline
  • How to use your super powers to overcome any challenge
  • The Bombshell Breakthrough Blueprint
  • When activating intuition makes you powerful beyond measure
  • How to make beauty a spiritual practice
  • Why being full of yourself conquers your Inner Bully, and so much more…

Book Format: This self-love handbook features empowering life lessons, helpful tools, inspiring dialogues, healing modalities, and life-changing exercises with detailed steps on how to connect to your real strength and activate your most fulfilled life. You learn to "own your bombshell" when you tune into your feminine power. Each chapter will teach you how to implement a Bombshell Secret for your healing, growth, evolution, and outrageous pleasure.






Things I Should Have Told My Daughter
by Pearl Cleage

Publication Date: Apr 12, 2012
List Price: $23.99
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781451664690
Imprint: Atria Books
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: KKR & Co. Inc.

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Read a Description of Things I Should Have Told My Daughter


Book Description: 

In addition to being one of the most popular living playwrights in America, Pearl Cleage is a bestselling author with an Oprah Book Club pick and multiple awards to her credit, but there was a time when such stellar success seemed like a dream. In this revelatory and deeply personal work, Cleage takes readers back to the 1970’s and ’80’s, retracing her struggles to hone her craft amid personal and professional tumult.

Though born and raised in Detroit, it was in Atlanta that Cleage encountered the forces that would most shape her experience. At the time, married to Michael Lomax, now head of the United Negro College Fund, she worked with Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first African-American mayor. Things I Should Have Told My Daughter charts not only the political fights but also the pull she began to feel on her own passions—a pull that led her away from Lomax as she grappled with ideas of feminism and self-fulfillment. This fascinating memoir follows her journey from a columnist for a local weekly to a playwright and Hollywood scriptwriter whose circle came to include luminaries Richard Pryor, Avery Brooks, Phylicia Rashad, Shirley Franklin, and Jesse Jackson.

In the tradition of giants such as Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, and Maya Angelou, Cleage’s self-portrait raises women’s confessional writing to the level of fine literature.






Catfish
by Nina Foxx

Publication Date: Mar 12, 2014
List Price: $10.00
Format: Paperback, 166 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9780991532223
Imprint: Brown Girls Books
Publisher: Brown Girls Books
Parent Company: Brown Girls Books

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Book Description: 

Best Friends Dana and Damika share everything about each other, because that’s what best friends do, right? But when it comes to relationships, the high schoolers are keeping secrets in cyberspace. After Boy Crazy Dana meets the "perfect" guy, she figures the only way to get close is to tell little white lies. As their relationship flourishes, an inappropriate photo sent for his eyes only…ends up going viral, and threatens Dana’s reputation and her future. Tech nerd Damika is able to reinvent herself online and she’s created a cyber life that no one knows about but her. When she meets Rosheon, she’s thrilled at their budding relationship, until she discovers there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye because just as she can reinvent herself….so can others. As the lies become unmanageable, can Dana and Damika dig themselves out of a web of a mess before it’s too late? In this page-turning novel, Nina Foxx dives into a world where nothing is as it seems and danger takes on new meaning in cyberspace.


The Man from Essence: Creating a Magazine for Black Women
by Edward Lewis

Publication Date: Jun 10, 2014
List Price: $25.00
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781476703480
Imprint: Atria Books
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: KKR & Co. Inc.

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Read a Description of The Man from Essence: Creating a Magazine for Black Women


Book Description: 

Essence magazine is the most popular, well respected, and largest circulated black women’s magazine in history. Largely unknown is the remarkable story of what it took to earn that distinction.

The Man from Essence depicts with candor and insight how Edward Lewis, CEO and publisher of Essence, started a magazine with three black men who would transform the lives of millions of black American women and alter the American marketplace. Throughout Essence’s colorful and storied history, Ed Lewis remained the cool and constant presence, a quiet-talking corporate captain and business strategist who prevailed against the odds and the naysayers. He would emerge to become the last man standing—the only partner to survive the battles that raged before the magazine was sold to Time, Inc. in the largest buyout of a black-owned publication by the world’s largest publishing company.

By the time Lewis did the deal with Time, a little magazine that limped from the starting gate in 1970 with a national circulation of 50,000 had grown into a powerhouse with a circulation of more than a million and a pass along readership of eight million.

The story of Essence is ultimately the story of American business, black style. From constant battles with a racist advertising community to hostile takeover attempts, warring partners packing heat, mass firings, and mass defections—all of which revealed inherent challenges in running a black business—the saga is as riveting as any thriller steeped in high drama, hijinks, and juicy dishing.

In this engaging business memoir, Ed Lewis tells the inspiring story of how his own rise from humble South Bronx beginnings to media titan was shaped by the black women and men in his life. This in turn helped shape a magazine that has changed the face of American media.






Easier Said Than Done
by Nikki Woods

Publication Date: Apr 04, 2014
List Price: $12.00
Format: Paperback, 304 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780991532247
Imprint: Brown Girls Books
Publisher: Brown Girls Books
Parent Company: Brown Girls Books

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Book Description: 

Easier Said Than Done is a touching new novel of love and risk, featuring a sassy and skillfully created cast of characters that are so full of life, they breathe, dream, and shout right off the page. Kingston Phillips, a beautiful entertainment executive in the fast-paced city of Chicago, has finally grasped the brass ring. But just as her friends and colleagues are buzzing with her success, Kingston must return to Jamaica for her grandmother’s funeral.

While there, childhood tragedies, heartbreak, and family jealousies come back to haunt her, threatening to shatter her dreams. Not only does Kingston come face to face with the college sweetheart who left her heartbroken, but her grandmother names her executor of her will and forces her to make a life-altering decision.

Does Kingston continue to reap her success in Chicago or stay in Jamaica to fulfill her grandmother’s dream-possibly risking another broken heart? Can a modern woman find the balance between a successful career and the responsibilities of family and love while enduring the bumps along the way? Or is life really … Easier Said Than Done?






Fortune & Fame
by ReShonda Tate Billingsley and Victoria Christopher Murray

Publication Date: Feb 25, 2014
List Price: $15.00
Format: Paperback, 304 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781476747170
Imprint: Touchstone
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: KKR & Co. Inc.

Read a Description of Fortune & Fame


Book Description: 

Church first ladies Jasmine Cox, Larson Bush, and Rachel Jackson Adams are back and battling it out again—this time on reality TV—in the latest collaboration between national bestselling and award-winning authors Victoria Christopher Murray and ReShonda Tate Billingsley. Jasmine Cox, Larson Bush, and Rachel Jackson Adams have been through a lot together—from fighting for their husbands to become the head of the American Baptist Coalition to getting mixed up in a terrible murder. Now the frenemies have found themselves the stars of First Ladies, a much anticipated new reality television show.

Jasmine balks at the idea of airing her dirty laundry on national TV, but Rachel sees it as the perfect opportunity to take her brand to the next level. And if Rachel is in, so is Jasmine. All the cast members are women of God—how much drama can there be?

Rachel and Jasmine know their own pasts are murky, but they’ll seem like choir girls when the secrets and sins of the others come to light. The two will once again have to form an unholy alliance to go up against these so-called Godly women who see the show as their chance to take them down—at any cost.






The Words I Didn’t Say (Delphine Publications Presents)
by Tamika Newhouse

Publication Date: Jul 01, 2014
List Price: $15.00
Format: Paperback, 280 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780996084499
Imprint: Delphine Publications
Publisher: Delphine Publications
Parent Company: Delphine Publications

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Book Description: 

Janet had been there and done that when it came to love. After a broken heart love was no longer an option for her. No strings, meaningless sex, and random dates were now her top choices. Besides keeping men at a distance and away from her heart was safe right? You can t get hurt if you don’t let anybody in. But what happens when you suddenly meet someone who just gets you? The moment she met Denim she knew it was something different, something she couldn’t control. And from day one she fought that four letter word, love. Denim had loved and lost and vowed to never feel for anyone ever again and that had worked for years. A successful music producer but a womanizer by nature the day he met Janet his quest to be unattached was challenged. Janet and Denim both fight what was evident, that they both wanted and needed each other. Vowing to just be in the moment and not commit to one another tension grows as their emotions can t be controlled. Random sex want do, the endless dates with unfamiliar faces is getting old, and everyone is compared to the one that matters, each other. But when Janet fears confessing her deep feelings for Denim will push him away; things change. Denim although loves Janet is unwilling to commit and it is his the lack of effort to change on his end that ultimately changes them. Words go unspoken as this romantic, sexy, dramatic novel unfolds leaving two souls lost within each other. And when a broken heart can’t be mended it seems that their love will be lost forever without a real chance at happiness. A love story not based on a fairy tale but solely on the fact that sometimes we run from the very thing that will make us happy.


Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Young Readers Edition
by Misty Copeland

Publication Date: Dec 05, 2017
List Price: $7.99
Format: Paperback, 192 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9781481479806
Imprint: Aladdin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: KKR & Co. Inc.

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Book Description: 

Determination meets dance in this middle grade adaptation of the New York Times bestselling memoir by the first female African-American principal dancer in American Ballet Theatre history, Misty Copeland.

As the first female African-American principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, Misty Copeland has been breaking down all kinds of barriers in the world of dance. But when she first started dancing—at the late age of thirteen—no one would have guessed the shy, underprivileged girl would one day make history in her field.

Her road to excellence was not easy—a chaotic home life, with several siblings and a single mother, was a stark contrast to the control and comfort she found on stage. And when her home life and incredible dance promise begin to clash, Misty had to learn to stand up for herself and navigate complex relationships with her family and the dance world, while pursuing her ballet dreams.

Life in Motion is a story for all the kids who dare to be different, dream bigger, and aspire to break stereotypes in whatever they do.


A Letter for My Mother
by Nina Foxx

Publication Date: Apr 08, 2014
List Price: $15.00
Format: Paperback, 240 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781593095321
Imprint: Strebor Books
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: KKR & Co. Inc.

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Book Description: 

Thirty-three female writers share their essays and letters—hilarious, heart wrenching, and everything in between—in this wise and poignant collection about mother-daughter relationships.

Whether they’re from the US, Caribbean, India, or the UK, all of the contributors to A Letter for My Mother share one thing in common: thoughts that have been left unsaid to their mothers and mother figures—until now. In this moving book, thirty-three women reveal the stories, reflections, confessions, and revelations they’ve kept to themselves for years and have finally put into words. Written through tears and pain, as well as joy and laughter, each offering presents the mother-daughter bond in a different light.

Heartfelt and deeply meaningful, A Letter for My Mother will inspire you to admire and cherish that special relationship that shapes every woman.




The Fix
by K’wan

Publication Date: Feb 25, 2014
List Price: $14.95
Format: Paperback, 288 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781601625854
Imprint: Urban Books
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Parent Company: Kensington Publishing Corp.

Read a Description of The Fix


Book Description: 
Persia Chandler doesn’t know the meaning of the world struggle. After the arrest of her notorious father, she is whisked away from Harlem, the only place she has ever called home, to be raised in an affluent neighborhood in Long Island City. Her mother and stepfather shower her with the best that life has to offer. During her senior year in high school, she convinces her parents to let her transfer from Catholic school to attend public school. That is the start of her problems, but it’s hardly the end. In her new school, Persia is reunited with the friends she was forced to move away from, and starts to drift further and further from the life her mother and stepfather have built for her. To the sheltered Persia, the Harlem underworld is like one big adventure. Things promise to get even more interesting when she starts dating a dealer named Chucky. He introduces her to his world of sex, money, and drugs, dragging Persia along with him on a long and bitter ride into the bowels of addiction.




Black Lotus
by K’wan

Publication Date: May 27, 2014
List Price: $12.95
Format: Paperback, 128 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781617752667
Imprint: Infamous Books
Publisher: Akashic Books
Parent Company: Akashic Books

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Book Description: 

Crooked cops, professional assassins, and high-level conspiracies with millions of dollars at stake drive this heart-thumping thriller set in New York City. Det. James Wolf (aka Lone Wolf), one of the NYPD’s most successful narcotics officers, never plays by the rules. His unorthodox and often dangerous practices and proclivity for working alone have mostly gone unpunished—until now. When a well-respected priest is slaughtered and hung at the altar “like a side of beef in a butcher’s freezer,” Wolf’s mentor, Captain Marx, calls him in to investigate off the record in exchange for the expunging of his messy professional record. Confused as to why the captain would call in a narcotics detective to work a homicide case, Wolf soon finds that there’s much more to the mystery than his superior has let on. K’wan (Welfare Wifeys) does a masterful job of keeping readers on their toes right up to the very last page.