2 Books Published by Lookout Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap—introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gay—reckons with complexities of racial identity, masculinity, recovery, and spirituality, revealing the narrative and psychic evolution of a poet who has found himself in the language.

Wade’s evocative debut swaggers?through time, through family, through love, through the perseverance of growing up in the deep South as a Black son with a white mom. Illustrating?the?strangeness and cacophony of his native New Orleans, he divines sweet relief in small mercies—a rosary strung with Mardi Gras beads, a Sunday football game, Nigel Hall covering Frankie Beverly in Lafayette Square, bare feet in a stream, a mother kneading dough. In intimate, nuanced portraits of loved ones, in requiems and broken sestinas, he pushes past his trauma, troubling the years he spent in addiction or resenting his father.

As he maps out the parts he played in his life’s most formative moments, he can’t help but “retune the heart / strings of hard men,” teaching us how to become more human, often in the face of inhumanity.?Here, he manages to land, not a crushing blow, but a?love tap—the softest way to knuckle another’s cheek.

An anthology of Black resilience and reclamation, with contributions by Pearl Cleage, Aunjanue Ellis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Tayari Jones, Kiese Laymon, Imani Perry, Deesha Philyaw, Khadijah Queen, Alice Walker, and more

Born of a desire to bring together the voices of those most harshly affected by the intersecting pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism, Bigger Than Bravery explores comfort and compromise, challenge and resilience, throughout an unprecedented time—the Great Pause that became the Great Call. Award-winning author and scholar of the Black archive Valerie Boyd curates this anthology of original essays and poems, placed alongside some of the most influential nonfiction published on the subject, inviting readers into a conversation of restorative joy and enduring wisdom.

Karen Good Marable cranks “Whip My Hair” from the car windows during quarantine joyrides with her daughter. Deesha Philyaw ponders loneliness as she sorts Zoom meetings into those that require a bra and those that don’t. Writing in the moment though not of it, Pearl Cleage reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since the AIDS epidemic. And Jason Reynolds harnesses heat and flavor to carry on his father’s legacy. While sorrow and outrage have their say, the stories in these pages are bright with family, music, food, and home, teaching us how to nourish ourselves and our communities.

Looking ahead as much as it looks back, Bigger Than Bravery offers a window into a hopeful, complex present and establishes an essential record of how Black people in America insist on joy as an act of resistance.