4 Books Published by Black Lawrence Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. This collection of essays reveals an impressive new voice, both poignant and observant. McQueen suggests loneliness is also the accomplishment of understanding how far away you can move from other people’s expectations. Her clarity rings brightly throughout these works of self-discovery and cultural re-connection.—Wendy Walters

LaTanya McQueen writes with fierce eloquence about the legacies of family and America’s racial history. Balancing intimate investigation with intricate research, she traces the ways the past is bloodline to the present. Gripping, urgent, at times even shocking, this is a deeply important book, one I will be thinking about for a long time. McQueen is a writer—and a mind—to watch.—Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

LaTanya McQueen’s essays offer a bold examination of the weight history, both personal and societal, places on our present moment. AND IT BEGINS LIKE THIS is a book brave enough to challenge our accepted notions of the past to put black women in their rightful place, in the forefront of the ongoing struggle for dignity and equality. It’s a book that is both moving and absolutely necessary.—Rion Scott.

Winner of the 2018 Chautauqua Janus Prize, celebrating an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder literary conventions, historical narratives, and readers’ imaginations.

Growing up in poverty in the American South, Maya yearns to escape and find something better than anything she’s known. “She is so hungry. It is not food, but everything else, the world … What she needs is not on her street with the one-eyed houses. It is not in the patch of trees she once thought was a forest. It is beyond, somewhere she can’t quite imagine.” Brought to vivid and visceral life through Nicole Cuffy’s aching, lyrical prose, Maya’s childhood fascination with anatomy and her adult pursuit of a career in medicine leads her to discover what it means to lose—and what it means to break free.

At times raw and at others melodic and tender, Atlas of the Body is a deeply resonant meditation on hunger and the costs of realizing a dream.

Praise from Tyehimba Jess

Cynthia Manick’s BLUE HALLELUJAHS bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor’s ’white-toothed love coils on repeat.’ Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick’s reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a ’slow applause under the skin.’ Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side."

Praise from Nikky Finney

What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and ’animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars.’ In BLUE HALLELUJAHS Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words."

Praise from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

The speaker of Cynthia Manick’s haunted debut collection admits ’a love for surgery porn at 1 a.m.’ And one early poem begins, ’Today I am elbow deep / in some animal’s belly // pulling out the heart and stomach / for my mother’s table.’ Throughout, BLUE HALLELUJAHS approaches aspects of a woman’s development-from ’feet first’ Caesarean delivery to a grandmother’s admonition ’to pull flesh / from the throat not the belly’-blade at the ready, moving from slaughter to surgery to a kind of deep southern haruspication. At the center of girlhood we find The Shop with its inventory of inherited hungers. ’Is this what the heart eats?’ Manick renders visceral a longing to avoid extinction, to escape the museum, to live fully embodying one’s identity as a woman who ’knows / how to wield a knife.’"

In Shane McCrae’s Nonfiction, the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first-person and third-person—the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, “in the darkness / I after a while couldn’t be sure / My eyes were open.” These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.