The African American Literary Award Show

Its 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 youve 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. Abiolas 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.

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 1970s and 80s, 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, Atlantas 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 passionsa 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, Cleages self-portrait raises womens confessional writing to the level of fine literature.

Essence magazine is the most popular, well respected, and largest circulated black womens 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 Essences 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 standingthe 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 worlds 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 defectionsall of which revealed inherent challenges in running a black businessthe 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 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 grandmothers 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 grandmothers 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?

Church first ladies Jasmine Cox, Larson Bush, and Rachel Jackson Adams are back and battling it out againthis time on reality TVin 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 togetherfrom 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 Godhow much drama can there be?

Rachel and Jasmine know their own pasts are murky, but theyll 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 downat any cost.

Thirty-three female writers share their essays and lettershilarious, heart wrenching, and everything in betweenin this wise and poignant collection about mother-daughter relationships.

Whether theyre 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 figuresuntil now. In this moving book, thirty-three women reveal the stories, reflections, confessions, and revelations theyve 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.

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 NYPDs most successful narcotics officers, never plays by the rules. His unorthodox and often dangerous practices and proclivity for working alone have mostly gone unpunisheduntil now. When a well-respected priest is slaughtered and hung at the altar like a side of beef in a butchers freezer, Wolfs 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 theres much more to the mystery than his superior has let on. Kwan (Welfare Wifeys) does a masterful job of keeping readers on their toes right up to the very last page.