Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominees and Winning Books

NPR Best Books of 2022

The Christian Science Monitor 10 Best Books of June

Most Anticipated Books of 2022: The Millions, Electric Literature, Brittle Paper, Open Country Magazine, Ms. Magazine

Winner of the 2020 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, Ethiopian American author Meron Hadero s gorgeously wrought stories in A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times offer poignant, compelling narratives of those whose lives have been marked by border crossings and the risk of displacement.

Set across the U.S. and abroad, Meron Hadero s stories feature immigrants, refugees, and those on the brink of dispossession, all struggling to begin again, all fighting to belong. Moving through diverse geographies and styles, this captivating collection follows characters on the journey toward home, which they dream of, create and redefine, lose and find and make their own. Beyond migration, these stories examine themes of race, gender, class, friendship and betrayal, the despair of loss and the enduring resilience of hope.

Winner of the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, "The Street Sweep" is about an enterprising young man on the verge of losing his home in Addis Ababa who pursues an improbable opportunity to turn his life around. Appearing in Best American Short Stories, "The Suitcase" follows a woman visiting her country of origin for the first time and finds that an ordinary object opens up an unexpected, complex bridge between worlds. Shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize, "The Wall" portrays the intergenerational friendship between two refugees living in Iowa who have connections to Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A Best American Short Stories notable, "Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin Newton" is a coming-of-age tale about an Ethiopian immigrant in Brooklyn encountering nuances of race in his new country.

Kaleidoscopic, powerful, and illuminative, the stories in A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times expand our understanding of the essential and universal need for connection and the vital refuge of home and announce a major new talent in Meron Hadero.

"Exquisite Sentences infused with attitude throw gut punches that land with enough power to bring on tears."

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A Lambda Literary Award Finalist

In this razor-sharp and dangerously hilarious novel that "hooks readers from the beginning" (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men s prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.

Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.

In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.

Written with the same astonishing verve of Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce s Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.

A Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction

One of NPR s Books We Love in 2022 • Named a Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus, Chicago Public Library, and Publishers Weekly

A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar.

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn t lynching the law?

In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.

Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.

If you truly want to understand why police and vigilantes who kill Black people are rarely held to account, you must read this extraordinary book.… By far the most sobering and most illuminating work I have ever read on the long history of state-sanctioned racial violence in the US. Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels

An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022 In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.

In We Kin, Gay thinks about the garden (es­pecially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come in) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in Share Your Bucket, he explores skateboard­ing s reclamation of public spaces; he considers the costs of masculinity in Grief Suite ; and in Through My Tears I Saw, he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.

In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love?

Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.

Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against and between women of color.

Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood s relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor s inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. Concentrate, she writes. We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make.

"Alluring, shadowy Edinburgh with its hints of sophisticated academic magic will draw you in, but it s Ropa - a hard knocks ghostalker on her paranormal grind to pay the rent - who grabs hold. The moment you meet her, you ll follow wherever she goes." - Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six

T.L. Huchu returns with Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, the gripping next installment in the Alex-Award-winning Edinburgh Nights series.

In this thrilling story, Ropa Moyo, a passionate explorer of Edinburgh s secret societies, finds herself embarking on a new adventure. Instead of getting paid for her magical talents, she reluctantly accepts an unpaid internship. However, an opportunity arises when her friend Priya offers her a job at Our Lady of Mysterious Maladies, a specialized hospital where a perplexing illness is defying conventional remedies. If Ropa can solve the case, she may not only earn valuable experience but also impress her mentor, Sir Callander.

As Ropa delves into her investigation, she uncovers a hidden fortune, encounters an avenging spirit, and unravels a long-buried secret from Scotland s past. Lives hang in the balance, and time is running out. Will Ropa be able to connect the dots and save the day?

The Edinburgh Nights series consists of:

1. Library of the Dead
2. Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments

Oprah announced Nightcrawling as the selection, on June 7, 2022, on CBS Mornings

Mottley joined the hosts in the studio to discuss the latest Oprah s Book Club selection and the surprising way she found out her novel was being chosen (see video below). It brings me great joy to introduce readers to new authors, and this young poet Leila Mottley wrote a soul-searching portrait of survival and hope, said Oprah Winfrey. I was absolutely floored when Ms. Winfrey popped up in what I thought was going to be a regular meeting, said Leila Mottley. It was the surprise of a lifetime! I am beyond grateful to be able to share my debut novel with the passionate readers of Oprah s Book Club.

Nightcrawling tells the story of Kiara and her brother, Marcus, who are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent which has more than doubled and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.

More About Nightcrawling

Nightcrawling is a scorching, incredibly readable book that takes seriously the task of readerly provocation on every page. Get ready. Or don t. It doesn t matter. Leila Mottley is here. Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

Leila Mottley s commanding debut, inspired by the life events of one woman s struggle for body and soul against crushing exploitation, is fierce and devastating, rendered with electrifying urgency by this colossal young talent. Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison.

But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent--which has more than doubled--and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.

Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.

Finding La Negrita is a captivating retelling of the Black Madonna narrative, a story deeply intertwined with Costa Rica s national and spiritual identity since the 1700s. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere skillfully presents a vivid and intimate portrayal of slavery in Costa Rica, offering a unique perspective that diverges from the plantation bondage experienced in other parts of the Americas.

The story introduces us to Dakarai, a renowned African sculptor who is forced into slavery and separated from his newborn daughter, Jendayi. Bereft of her mother, who died during childbirth on a Middle Passage ship, Dakarai and Jendayi must navigate their grief and strive to build a life in the New World. Finding La Negrita traverses time and space to capture the poignant reunion of Dakarai and Jendayi. As they come together, they face the challenges of a single father raising a determined young girl in an era where the line between freedom and enslavement is precarious.

In the margins of society, unbeknownst to each other, Dakarai and Jendayi embark on the pursuit of forbidden loves that defy the constraints imposed by colonial society. Yet, as they explore these dangerous paths, they are forced to reckon with the costs and consequences they may bring upon themselves and each other.

A searing and compassionate new novel about a young Black nurse s shocking discovery and the burning quest for justice in post-segregation Alabama, from the AALBC and New York Times bestselling author of Wench.

Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she hopes to help women shape their destinies, to make their own choices for their lives and bodies.

But when her first week on the job takes her along a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, Civil is shocked to learn that her new patients, Erica and India, are children just eleven and thirteen years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black, and for those handling the family s welfare benefits, that s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica, and their family into her heart. Until one day she arrives at their door to learn the unthinkable has happened, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.

Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace, and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten. That must not be forgotten.

Because history repeats what we don t remember.

Inspired by true events and brimming with hope, Take My Hand is a stirring exploration of accountability and redemption.

Praise For Take My Hand…

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a brilliant writer in a class all by herself. I love her voice and how she makes the past feel immediate and relevant, because it is.
Terry McMillan, #1 AALBC and New York Times bestselling author

Dolen Perkins Valdez takes a moment in our history that has been hidden inside the folds of time and she brings those heinous acts back into the light. This is a riveting story of one woman s fight against a system that believes it has the right to determine who should give birth in this country and who should not. Civil Townsend s plight as she seeks justice is heartbreaking, but also inspiring, reminding us that one woman can stand and make a difference. Beautifully written in typical Dolen Perkins Valdez s style, I didn t put this book down until I closed the last page and even then, I wanted more.
Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling author of The Personal Librarian

Delicate and poetic, Dolen manages to fuse beauty and tragedy in her work, which makes her a masterful storyteller and gifted writer. In this story, Dolen speaks eloquently for those who, in being denied the right of having a choice and agency over their bodies, have lost their voice. This haunting tale, captured through the lens of an unforgettable narrator and a cast of memorable characters, will stay with you for a very, very long time.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of bestselling novels Patsy and Here Comes the Sun

The author of the brazenly hilarious, tell-it-like-it-is first novel (Oprah Daily) Queenie returns with another witty and insightful novel about the power of family even when they seem like strangers.

If you could choose your family you wouldn t choose the Penningtons.

Dimple Pennington knows of her half siblings, but she doesn t really know them. Five people who don t have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad s gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about.

She s thirty, and her life isn t really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, Dimple s life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small but loyal following, she s never felt more alone in her life. That is, until a dramatic event brings her half siblings Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie, and Prynce crashing back into her life. And when they re all forced to reconnect with Cyril Pennington, the absent father they never really knew, things get even more complicated.

From an author with a flair for storytelling that appears effortlessly authentic (Time), People Person is a vibrant and charming celebration of discovering family as an adult.

Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.

In rendering Souria s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.

Powerful stories that explore the legacy of colonialism, and issues of race, immigration, sexual discrimination, and class in the lives of Jamaican women across London, Panama, France, Jamaica, Florida, and more.

The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother who is also a touring comedienne at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school s International Day. Meanwhile, in the third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her.

Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves to grow where they find themselves planted in a world in which the tension between what s said and unsaid can bend the soul.

Claude McKay (1889-1948), a prominent Black writer and intellectual of his time, made significant contributions to Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. His life and writing were profoundly influenced by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, which were shaped by his upbringing in colonial Jamaica and his experiences as a writer in Harlem and London. McKay was dedicated to challenging both racism and capitalist exploitation, and he emerged as a critical observer of the Black experience across the African diaspora, ultimately aligning himself with Bolshevism.

In this illuminating work, Winston James offers a comprehensive account of McKay s political and intellectual journey, spanning from his early years in Jamaica to his formative years as a writer and activist. McKay left Jamaica in 1912 to study in the United States, and James chronicles his time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, where he confronted the harsh realities of American racism. Upon arriving in Harlem, McKay immersed himself in the vibrant cultural and political movements of the time, engaging with influential figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. Eventually, McKay relocated to London, deepening his commitment to revolutionary socialism and undergoing a transformative shift from Fabian socialism to Bolshevism.

With a wealth of sources at his disposal, James delivers a nuanced and detailed chronicle of McKay s life, tracing his political evolution and providing insightful historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped his worldview.

Ralph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as "antagonistic cooperation." Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In Antagonistic Cooperation, Robert G. O Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics.

From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, O Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. He argues that these artists drew on the improvisatory nature of jazz and the techniques of collage not as a way to depict a fractured or broken sense of Blackness but rather to see the Black self as beautifully layered and complex. They developed a shared set of methods and motives driven by the belief that art must involve a sense of community. O Meally s readings of these artists and their work emphasize how they have not only contributed to understanding of Black history and culture but also provided hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.

"An important part of American history told with a clear-eyed and forceful brilliance." National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson

"We Refuse to Forget reminds readers, on damn near every page, that we are collectively experiencing a brilliance we ve seldom seen or imagined We Refuse to Forget is a new standard in book-making." Kiese Laymon, author of the bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir

A landmark work of untold American history that reshapes our understanding of identity, race, and belonging

In We Refuse to Forget, award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle tells the extraordinary story of the Creek Nation, a Native tribe that two centuries ago both owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. Thanks to the efforts of Creek leaders like Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief, the U.S. government recognized Creek citizenship in 1866 for its Black members. Yet this equality was shredded in the 1970s when tribal leaders revoked the citizenship of Black Creeks, even those who could trace their history back generations even to Cow Tom himself.

Why did this happen? How was the U.S. government involved? And what are Cow Tom s descendants and other Black Creeks doing to regain their citizenship? These are some of the questions that Gayle explores in this provocative examination of racial and ethnic identity. By delving into the history and interviewing Black Creeks who are fighting to have their citizenship reinstated, he lays bare the racism and greed at the heart of this story. We Refuse to Forget is an eye-opening account that challenges our preconceptions of identity as it shines new light on the long shadows of white supremacy and marginalization that continue to hamper progress for Black Americans.

This is, no doubt, an origin story for the ages. Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist

At nine years old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad s Lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of the crack epidemic just hours from the nation s capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means surviving by slinging crack on street corners and finding oneself on the right side of pistols. For thirty years, Watkins is forced to safeguard every moment of joy he experiences or risk losing himself entirely. Now, for the first time, Watkins harnesses these moments to tell the story of how he matured into the D. Watkins we know today beloved author, college professor, editor-at-large of Salon.com, and devoted husband and father.

Black Boy Smile lays bare Watkins s relationship with his father and his brotherhood with the boys around him. He shares candid recollections of early assaults on his body and mind and reveals how he coped using stoic silence disguised as manhood. His harrowing pursuit of redemption, written in his signature street style, pinpoints how generational hardship, left raw and unnurtured, breeds toxic masculinity. Watkins discovers a love for books, is admitted to two graduate programs, meets with his future wife, an attorney and finds true freedom in fatherhood.

Equally moving and liberating, Black Boy Smile is D. Watkins s love letter to Black boys in concrete cities, a daring testimony that brings to life the contradictions, fears, and hopes of boys hurdling headfirst into adulthood. Black Boy Smile is a story proving that when we acknowledge the fallacies of our past, we can uncover the path toward self-discovery. Black Boy Smile is the story of a Black boy who healed.

An unforgettable coming-of-age memoir awaits in Harrison Mooney s powerful debut, a story that explores the complexities of transracial adoption and the internalized antiblackness within the white evangelical Christian movement.

Mooney s memoir, inspired by Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man and resonating with the spirit of Ta-Nehisi Coates s Between the World and Me, offers a riveting journey of self-discovery and sheds light on the trauma experienced by transracial adoptees.

As a Black boy with ADHD adopted into a white fundamentalist Christian family and immersed in a world of conflicting messages, Mooney s upbringing in Canada s Bible Belt was marked by the desire to belong and be seen in a radical and racist right-wing environment. However, through reconnecting with his birth mother and gaining a deeper understanding of the trauma and systemic violence faced by Black families, Harrison begins to forge his own path and develop a newfound connection with himself.

Mooney s memoir is a poignant exploration of identity, belonging, and the pursuit of self-acceptance. It delves into the intertwined issues of race, religion, and personal growth with a keen eye for insight, a captivating storytelling style, and a touch of wry humor.

Don t miss this remarkable memoir that unveils the realities of transracial adoption and exposes the trauma embedded within religious fundamentalism.

Finalist for the 2023 Southern Book Prize

A Black mother finds herself confronting the boundaries of her beliefs about science, medicine, motherhood, and faith as she seeks the truth about her son. Taylor Harris wakes up one morning to find her lively twenty-two-month-old son, Tophs, listless and weak, prompting her to rush him to the doctor. Despite her own anxiety disorder, she follows her maternal instincts and seeks medical help. The doctors confirm that something is wrong with Tophs, setting Taylor on a journey that will forever change her life.

As the doctors provide answers to some of her questions about her son s troubling symptoms, more questions arise, and Taylor embarks on a relentless pursuit of a diagnosis. Navigating a healthcare system that often fails Black mothers and children becomes a challenging task, requiring her to invest countless hours and endure both frustration and discrimination. Amidst her tireless efforts, Taylor also faces her own health revelations during an appointment with a geneticist.

This Boy We Made is a poignant and beautifully written exploration of the profound bond between a mother and her child. Through the hardships and unexpected twists that unfold, Taylor gains valuable insights into the meaning of life and the strength required to navigate through unforeseen circumstances.

Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection

A New York Times Notable Book

In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss.

The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S. Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man.

Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled? Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with and sometimes contradicting Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to a long song that seeks to address itself only to freedom.

Best Barbarian asks the reader to stay close as it plunges into catastrophe and finds surprising moments of joy and intimacy. This fearless, musical, and oracular collection announces Roger Reeves as an essential voice in American poetry.

We Are Not Wearing Helmets is a collection of political love poems rendered through the eyes of Cheryl Boyce‑Taylor, an immigrant living in New York City. For many women of color, aging in America means experiencing a lack of proper medical treatment, inhumane living conditions, poor nutrition, and often isolation. Many seniors feel thrown away, useless, and vulnerable. These poems challenge the injustices of ageism, racism, and oppression with rage, forgiveness, honor, and endurance. During these rough political times, they are salve and balm.

Born in Trinidad and having grown up in Queens, Boyce‑Taylor creates a framework for her own experience out of the life experiences and work of beloved Black women in history. She salutes the women who have lifted her, including Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ntozake Shange, and Winnie Mandela, as well as her mother, Eugenia Boyce, and her beloved daughter‑in‑law, Deisha Head Taylor.

The poems in this collection are unapologetic, fierce, and confrontational while remaining caring and intimate. They stand strong in the face of adversity and boldly demand what is owed while still honoring and cherishing what is loved.

A genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration another revelatory visual expedition from the National Book Award winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure.

Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother s bed only days before the house was slated to be razed. Kevin Young, The New Yorker

Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of race and migration, placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.

In what she calls a film for the hands and an origin myth for the future, Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: Black pages, black space, black time the Big Black Bang. From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us an exalted Black privacy. What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. I am trying / to make the gods / happy, she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.

Null Landing explores the intricacies of black queer life and delves into the concept of "nullness," a state of being without properties or legal force, amounting to nothing. Through these poems, the author establishes connections with elements of nature such as bacterium, birds, bodies of water, and mineral deposits, as well as with black creatives across various artistic disciplines.

The collection combines geologic fieldnotes and experimental performance scores to create a poetics of incalculability. It challenges conventional measures and speculates on value, confronting colonial language and disciplinary boundaries. With a focus on the geopolitical encounter, these poems orchestrate black spatial practice, data aggregation, and performative utterance. They explore themes of archaeometallurgy, ornithology, and quantum mechanics, guiding the poet and reader through remote sites of poetic exchange known as null islands.

The poems engage in meandering annotation and citation as a way to delve into vast architectures of information and the nuanced continuum of meaning. An aerial grid is used to recalibrate and warp, accommodating contested origin points and scattered human narratives, creating a constellation of coordinates. NULL LANDING dwells in the spaces between virtual and actual topographies, learning from GIS enthusiasts, single-celled organisms, mineral deposits, and black creatives from various fields. It examines the technologies through which places, individuals, and raw materials are extracted and abstracted for mapping, subduing, and capital accumulation, while also reclaiming disavowed geospatial knowledges.

These sentences they will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut. So begins Renee Gladman s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

"Onyebuchi sets fire to the boundary between fiction and reality, and brings a crumbling city and an all too plausible future to vibrant life. Riveting, disturbing, and rendered in masterful detail." Leigh Bardugo

In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi brings us a sweeping sci-fi epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven

Goliath explores the city of New Haven as a primal biblical epic flung into the future. What happens to the people who get pushed out?

A David and Jonathan story that throws readers into the history and sins of the Connecticut metropolis, this ambitious, sprawling novel weaves together disparate narratives a space-dweller looking at New Haven as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of civil servants attempting to renew the promises of Earth s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history.

From Hurston/Wright Legacy Award-winning author Rita Woods, The Last Dreamwalker tells the story of two women, separated by nearly two centuries yet inextricably linked by the Gullah Geechee Islands off the coast of South Carolina and their connection to a mysterious and extraordinary gift passed from generation to generation.

In the wake of her mother s passing, Layla Hurley unexpectedly reconnects with her mother s sisters, women she hasn t been allowed to speak to, or of, in years.

Her aunts reveal to Layla that a Gullah-Geechee island off the shore of South Carolina now belongs to her. As Layla digs deeper into her mother s past and the mysterious island s history, she discovers that the terrifying nightmares that have plagued her throughout her life and tainted her relationship with her mother and all of her family, is actually a power passed down through generations of her Gullah ancestors. She is a Dreamwalker, able to inhabit the dreams of others and to manipulate them.

As Layla uncovers increasingly dark secrets about her family s past, she finds herself thrust into the center of a potentially deadly, decades-old feud fought in the dark corridor of dreams.

The Last Dreamwalker is a gripping, contemporary read about power and agency; family and legacy; and the ways trauma, secrets, and magic take shape across generations.

I loved this fantastical tale of powerful, unapologetic women taking their agency and paving the path that they deserved. Keisha Bush, author of No Heaven for Good Boys