American Book Award Winners of African Descent

A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler.

Finalist for the Stone Book Award, sponsored by the Museum of African American History.

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.

This book revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.

Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.

An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth

New York Times Book Review Editors Choice - Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal

A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews

In 1838, a group of Americas most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.

The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the churchs money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape, but the other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarnss reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.

Swarnss journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shining a light on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.

From the award-winning creator of Newark private eye Tamara Hayle, the third installment in a spell-binding cozy mystery series featuring a multicultural cast and starring Odessa Jones, a recent widow with a brand new catering business, a full-time real estate gig, and the gift of second sight. When a young realtor is suddenly killed in a hit-and-run, Odessa must wade through a legion of lies to find the hidden killer…with a little help from her spirited aunt, loyal co-workers, mischievous cat Juniper, and her own psychic skills.

With pandemic-fearing city dwellers fleeing to the New Jersey suburbs, Risko Realty—and Odessa Jones—are having their best year ever. Finally on solid financial footing, Odessa is debt-free and looking forward to the future. But she doesn’t need second sight to sense her new young co-worker, Anna Lee, is on edge—and straight-up terrified—in spite of her hot sales record and sunny, outgoing attitude. And when Anna is killed in a hit-and-run, Odessa sees immediately that it was no accident…

It’s soon clear that Anna was being stalked. But even with the help of family, friends—and Odessa’s feisty cat, Juniper—Odessa is coming up with more questions than clues. Why was Anna avoiding influential real-estate mogul Emily Delbarton? Why is Delbarton’s decidedly creepy brother so fixated on Anna? Did Anna make enemies through her previous job at the town’s exclusive gentlemen’s club? And can Odessa rule out her own ex-fiancé—who’s back in her life with an astounding connection to Anna—and wanting a second chance? Finding the answers will come at an increasingly deadly cost—one Odessa’s talents must somehow trap a killer to repay…

“There’s also something oddly comforting about a Black woman in fiction who isn’t weighed down by societal pathology and who can appreciate a good glass of Merlot and reruns of ‘Downton Abbey’ as much as the next woman. In between heavier mystery fare, this unicorn of a Black cozy is a welcome palate cleanser.” —The Los Angeles Times on A Glimmer of Death

A stirring graphic novel of the Haitian Revolution

The end of slavery started in what was then San Domingo. In 1791, the enslaved people of the most prized French sugar plantation colony revolted against their masters. For over twelve years, against a backdrop of the French Revolution, they fought an epic black liberation struggle for control of the island. Theirs was the first and only successful slave revolution. It was the creation of Haiti as a nation, the first independent black republic outside of Africa, and an international inspiration to the persecuted and enslaved. This is the impassioned and beautifully drawn story of the Haitian Revolution and its incredible leader: Toussaint Louverture.

The text of this graphic novel is a play by C. L. R. James that opened in London in 1936 with Paul Robeson in the title role. For the first time, black actors appeared on the British stage in a work by a black playwright. The script had been lost for almost seventy years when a draft copy was discovered among Jamess archives. Now this extraordinary drama has been reimagined by artists Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee.