148 Books Published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy by Keisha N. Blain Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy

by Keisha N. Blain
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 13, 2024)
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In 1968, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer called for Americans to “wake up” if they wanted to “make democracy a reality.” Today, as Black communities continue to face challenges built on centuries of discrimination, her plea is increasingly urgent. In this exhilarating anthology of original essays, Keisha N. Blain brings together the voices of major progressive Black women politicians, grassroots activists, and intellectuals to offer critical insights on how we can create a more equitable political future.

These women draw on their diverse experiences and expertise to speak to three core themes: claiming civil and human rights, building political and economic power, and combating all forms of hate. We hear from Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, who argues that Black communities must organize to wield increased political power; EMILY’s List president Laphonza Butler, who spells out ways to fight for women’s reproductive rights; and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who delineates practical, thorough steps toward tangible reparations. Additional incisive essays include those by former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner; prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba; disability rights activist Andraéa LaVant; Boston’s first woman and first Black mayor, Kim Michelle Janey; and others at the forefront of the ongoing fight for social justice.

In addressing our most pressing issues and providing key takeaways, Wake Up America serves as a blueprint for the steps we can take right now and in the years to come.


Click for more detail about Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin Imagination: A Manifesto

by Ruha Benjamin
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 06, 2024)
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A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin believes in the liberating power of the imagination. Deadly systems shaped by mass incarceration, ableism, digital surveillance, and eugenics emerged from the human imagination, but they have real-world impacts. To fight these systems and create a world that works for all of us, we will have to imagine things differently. As Benjamin shows, educators, artists, technologists, and more are experimenting with new ways of thinking and tackling seemingly intractable problems.

Drawing from the work of these visionaries—including Black feminists, climate activists, Afrofuturists, and troublemakers of all sorts—Imagination: A Manifesto explores the possibility and practices required to imagine and create more just and habitable worlds.


Click for more detail about Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song by Judith Tick Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song

by Judith Tick
W. W. Norton & Company (Dec 05, 2023)
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Becoming Ella Fitzgerald by Judith Tick

In the first major biography since Ella Fitzgerald’s death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of the twentieth century’s most astonishing voices in Becoming Ella Fitzgerald. This ambitious risk-taker transformed the music industry with her exceptional musical spontaneity.

The biography unravels mysteries surrounding Fitzgerald’s life, including her challenging childhood in Yonkers, New York, her mother’s tragic death, and her time in a girls’ reformatory school. Through archival research and family interviews, Tick sheds new light on these aspects of Fitzgerald’s life, including her experiences with racial discrimination and her struggles with the societal expectations of femininity.

Tick’s narrative offers a fresh perspective on Fitzgerald’s complex career, challenging the traditional separation of vocal jazz from mainstream jazz. The book explores Fitzgerald’s role in the bebop movement, her groundbreaking performances with Chick Webb’s big band, and her contributions to Jazz at the Philharmonic. As a female bandleader, Fitzgerald defied stereotypes and revolutionized the popular repertoire with her interpretations of the Great American Songbook.

This masterful biography paints a vivid picture of Ella Fitzgerald, a woman who set a standard for American excellence, blending Black vocal aesthetics with jazz improvisation, reaching audiences worldwide, and leaving an indelible mark on music history.


Click for more detail about Body Rites: A Holistic Healing and Embodiment Workbook for Black Survivors of Sexual Trauma by shena j. young Body Rites: A Holistic Healing and Embodiment Workbook for Black Survivors of Sexual Trauma

by shena j. young
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 14, 2023)
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Body rites as a holistic healing journey, anchored in the practice of decolonizing healing and reclaiming body sovereignty, reaches back into indigenous roots and land-based healing. It centers remembering as a means of survival.

This workbook is the first of its kind: a resource of rituals divided into four healing journeys for Black women, femmes, and nonbinary survivors of sexual assault. The experiential workbook moves beyond prescriptive self-help models by providing a gentle guide and liaison to explore the impact of sexual trauma on the mind, body, heart, and spirit. It is an invitation to heal holistically, drawing upon psychophysiology, lived body wisdom, trauma-informed embodiment practices, kinship and ancestral connections, and African spiritual practices. Most urgently, this book is a series of intimate conversations with your "self"; and remembrance that healing lives at the core of your intuition.


Click for more detail about Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice by Jennifer Mullan Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice

by Jennifer Mullan
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 07, 2023)
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An essential work that centers colonial and historical trauma in a framework for healing, Decolonizing Therapy illuminates that all therapy is—and always has been— inherently political. To better understand the mental health oppression and institutional violence that exists today, we must become familiar with the root of disembodiment from our histories, homelands, and healing practices. Only then will readers see how colonial, historical, and intergenerational legacies have always played a role in the treatment of mental health.

This book is the emotional companion and guide to decolonization. It is an invitation for Eurocentrically trained clinicians to acknowledge privileged and oppressed parts while relearning what we thought we knew. Ignoring collective global trauma makes delivering effective therapy impossible; not knowing how to interrogate privilege (as a therapist, client, or both) makes healing elusive; and shying away from understanding how we as professionals may be participating in oppression is irresponsible.


Click for more detail about Flying Up the Mountain by Elizabeth-Irene Baitie Flying Up the Mountain

by Elizabeth-Irene Baitie
Norton Young Readers (Oct 03, 2023)
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The companion to Crossing the Stream is a moving story of friendship and a timely reminder of our duty to nature.

Ato and his friends Dzifa and Leslie have been selected to visit Nnoma, the bird sanctuary that Ato’s father helped build before he died. Ato is convinced that his father hid something valuable on the island, meant only for him. When the trio arrives at Nnoma with other children from across West Africa, they are split into teams and given missions to help broaden their knowledge of nature. The winners will become Asafo―ambassadors of Nnoma and defenders of the Earth. But then the adults running Nnoma start behaving erratically and Ato suspects foul play. When the trio uncovers a sinister plot to exploit the sanctuary, Ato and his friends must work together to protect it―and his father’s legacy.

Kirkus praised Crossing the Stream as “a powerful coming-of-age story of self-discovery” in their starred review. Now, Flying Up the Mountain calls upon each of us to do our part in safeguarding our planet.


Click for more detail about Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation

by Tiya Miles
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 19, 2023)
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Wild Girls is a captivating historical work that celebrates women who found strength and independence in the great outdoors. This book highlights figures like Harriet Tubman, who used her knowledge of the land for escape, and Louisa May Alcott, who defied gender norms in New England. It brings new insight into iconic figures like Sacagawea and Pocahontas, and shines a light on lesser-known but equally influential women like Zitkla-S, Dolores Huerta, and Grace Lee Boggs.

The narrative weaves together stories of women from different backgrounds and eras, emphasizing how their connection to nature played a pivotal role in their fight against assimilation, racism, and sexism. These trailblazers, from the Indigenous women’s basketball team at Fort Shaw to activists and writers, used outdoor spaces for joy, protest, and resistance.

Lyrically written and rich with archival discoveries, Wild Girls not only recounts the histories of these remarkable women and the landscapes they cherished but also advocates for contemporary young women’s equal access to the outdoors, regardless of race or class.


Click for more detail about In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays by Farah Jasmine Griffin In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays

by Farah Jasmine Griffin
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 28, 2023)
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In Search of a Beautiful Freedom brings together the best work from Farah Jasmine Griffin’s rich forays on music, Black feminism, literature, the crises of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, and the Black artists she esteems. She moves from evoking the haunting strength of Odetta and the rise of soprano popular singers in the 1970s to the forging of a Black women’s literary renaissance and the politics of Malcolm X through the lens of Black feminism. She reflects on pivotal moments in recent American history—including the banning of Toni Morrison’s Beloved—and celebrates the intellectuals, artists, and personal relationships that have shaped her identity and her work.

Featuring new and unpublished essays along with ones first appearing in outlets such as the New York Times and NPR, In Search of a Beautiful Freedom is a captivating collection that celebrates the work of "one of the few great intellectuals in our time" (Cornel West).


Click for more detail about Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems by Rita Dove Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 28, 2023)
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Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry

A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe).

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives.

Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness.

At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”


Click for more detail about Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair

by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey
Norton Young Readers (Mar 07, 2023)
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Lincoln and Hudson Dupré are brothers with what grown-ups call "active imaginations." Link and Hud hunt for yetis in the Himalayas and battle orcs on epic quests. Unfortunately, their imaginary adventures wreak havoc in their real world. Dr. and Mrs. Dupré have tried every babysitter in the neighborhood and are at their wits’ end.

Enter Ms. Joyce. Strict and old-fashioned, she proves to be a formidable adversary. The boys don’t like her or her rules and decide she’s got to go. Through a series of escalating events—told as high-action comic panel sequences—the brothers conspire to undermine Ms. Joyce and get her fired. When they go so big that even Ms. Joyce can’t fix it, suddenly she’s out. Finally, success! Or is it?

With warm and authentic humor, Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey have blended prose and graphic novel-style illustrations to craft a unique and subversive new series full of brotherly mischief and mayhem.


Click for more detail about Children of Stardust by Edudzi Adodo Children of Stardust

by Edudzi Adodo
Norton Young Readers (Oct 04, 2022)
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This exhilarating and playful middle grade novel rockets through space on an epic quest to protect the galaxy.

Zero Adedji dreams of joining one of the Saba guilds—groups of intergalactic travelers who explore space, retrieve lost treasures, and hunt down criminals. Instead, he must scrape by as a guide to travelers stranded on his home planet of Anansi 12. Then he meets Wanderblatch, a strange creature with an even stranger object: a golden pyramid that houses a legendary Kobasticker called the Jupiter. When the Jupiter chooses Zero as its next host, he is recruited by a top Saba guild so he can harness his newfound powers.

But the stakes are rising, and Zero and his friends Camih and Ladi are tasked with recovering an artifact known as the Mask of the Shaman King, which can grant wishes at a terrible price. And they’re not the only ones on the hunt—Space Mafia head Rozan Leombre is desperate to use the Mask to break his family’s curse. The trio must use their wits, courage, and friendship to achieve their quest and protect the galaxy.

Action-packed, wildly imaginative, and laugh-out-loud funny, Children of Stardust is a fast-paced space adventure that launches a brand-new and unique voice in children’s literature.


Click for more detail about By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners

by Margaret A. Burnham
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 27, 2022)
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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


Click for more detail about Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice by Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice

by Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile
Norton Young Readers (Sep 27, 2022)
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A groundbreaking and timely graphic memoir from one of the most iconic figures in American sports—and a tribute to his fight for civil rights.

On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans. Both men were forced to leave the Olympics, received death threats, and faced ostracism and continuing economic hardships.

In his first-ever memoir for young readers, Tommie Smith looks back on his childhood growing up in rural Texas through to his stellar athletic career, culminating in his historic victory and Olympic podium protest. Cowritten with Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Honor recipient Derrick Barnes and illustrated with bold and muscular artwork from Emmy Award–winning illustrator Dawud Anyabwile, Victory. Stand! paints a stirring portrait of an iconic moment in Olympic history that still resonates today.


Click for more detail about Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution

by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 20, 2022)
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Our true origins are not only human, or even terrestrial, but in fact cosmic. Drawing on recent scientific breakthroughs and cross-pollination among geology, biology, astrophysics, and cosmology, Origins illuminates the soul-stirring leaps in our understanding of the cosmos.

This revised and updated edition features such startling discoveries as the now more than 5,000 detected exoplanets that promise to reveal exciting possibilities for life in the cosmos, and data from a new generation of ground-based and spaceborne observatories that have fundamentally changed what we know about the expanding universe—and maybe even the laws of physics themselves.

From the first image of a galaxy’s birth to tantalizing evidence of water not only on Mars but also on the asteroid Ceres, as well as on moons of Jupiter and Saturn, coauthors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith conduct an exhilarating tour of the cosmos with clarity and exuberance.


Click for more detail about Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings

by Randall Kenan
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 09, 2022)
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A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction.

“Rich in identity,” as he described himself, Randall Kenan wrote widely and profoundly about what it meant to be Black, gay, and Southern. He confessed himself “elusive”—yet revealed himself in astonishing prose—memories of his three mothers (especially Mama, his great-aunt); recollections of his boyhood fear of snakes and his rapture in books; his sensual evocations of tobacco picking and hogkilling, butterbeans and scuppernongs, of the eastern North Carolina lowlands where he grew up. Here too is his intellectual coming-of-age: his passion for science fiction; his informed and ecstatic appreciations of James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Gordon Parks, and Eartha Kitt; his grappling with the politics and meaning of race (a fiction) and home (an inescapable, visceral reality).

This powerful collection is a testament to a polymathic mind, a wise soul, and a sublimely gifted writer from whom readers will always wish to have more to read.

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Click for more detail about Best Barbarian: Poems by Roger Reeves Best Barbarian: Poems

by Roger Reeves
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 22, 2022)
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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.


Click for more detail about Somewhere in the Bayou by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey Somewhere in the Bayou

by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey
Norton Young Readers (Mar 01, 2022)
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When four swamp creatures looking to cross a river come upon a log that would allow for precisely that, they can’t believe their luck. But a questionable tail adjacent to that log gives them second thoughts. Opossum believes it’s a sneaky tail and that they must pass it quietly. Squirrel thinks it’s a scary tail that can be cowed by intimidation. Rabbit decides it’s a mean tail that deserves a taste of its own medicine. As the critters exhaust approaches one by one, Mouse, the smallest of the lot, observes their folly and adjusts accordingly. But is it the mouse or the tail that will defy expectations?

Pairing their iconic illustration style with a wry irreverence, the Pumphrey brothers have crafted a delightful tale that reminds us to think before we act.


Click for more detail about New York, My Village by Uwem Akpan New York, My Village

by Uwem Akpan
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 02, 2021)
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Ekong Udousoro is a Nigerian editor undertaking a reckoning with the brutal recent history of his homeland by curating a collection of stories about the Biafran War. He is thrilled when a publishing fellowship gives him the opportunity to continue his work in Manhattan while learning the ins and outs of publishing.

But while his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to the industry’s colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly, boorish and hostile neighbors, and—beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism—a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food. Haunted by the devasting darkness of civil war and searingly observant about the myriad ways that tribalism defines life everywhere from the villages of Africa to the villages within New York City, New York, My Village is nevertheless full of heart, hilarity, and hope.


Click for more detail about Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood by Brittney Cooper Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood

by Brittney Cooper
Norton Young Readers (Oct 05, 2021)
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A Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Book of 2021

Hip-hop and feminism combine in this empowering guide with attitude, from best-selling author Brittney Cooper and founding members of the Crunk Feminist Collective.

Loud and rowdy girls, quiet and nerdy girls, girls who rock naturals, girls who wear weave, outspoken and opinionated girls, girls still finding their voice, queer girls, trans girls, and gender nonbinary young people who want to make the world better: Feminist AF uses the insights of feminism to address issues relevant to today’s young womxn.

What do you do when you feel like your natural hair is ugly, or when classmates keep touching it? How do you handle your self-confidence if your family or culture prizes fair-skinned womxn over darker-skinned ones? How do you balance your identities if you’re an immigrant or the child of immigrants? How do you dress and present yourself in ways that feel good when society condemns anything outside of the norm? Covering colorism and politics, romance and pleasure, code-switching, and sexual violence, Feminist AF is the empowering guide to living your feminism out loud.


Click for more detail about Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature by Farah Jasmine Griffin Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

by Farah Jasmine Griffin
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 14, 2021)
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Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase read until you understand, a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life.

Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students.

Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s Winter in America.

Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Crossing the Stream by Elizabeth-Irene Baitie Crossing the Stream

by Elizabeth-Irene Baitie
Norton Young Readers (Jun 08, 2021)
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A Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Book of 2021

Ato hasn’t visited his grandmother’s house since he was seven. He’s heard the rumors that she’s a witch, and his mother has told him he must never sit on the old couch on her porch. Now here he is, on that exact couch, with a strange-looking drink his grandmother has given him, wondering if the rumors are true. What’s more, there’s a freshly dug hole in her yard that Ato suspects may be a grave meant for him.

Meanwhile at school, Ato and his friends have entered a competition to win entry to Nnoma, the island bird sanctuary that Ato’s father helped create. But something is poisoning the community garden where their project is housed, and Ato sets out to track down the culprit. In doing so, he brings his estranged mother and grandmother back together, and begins healing the wounds left on the family by his father’s death years before.

And that hole in the yard? It is a grave, but not for the purpose Ato feared, and its use brings a tender, celebratory ending to this deeply felt and universal story of healing and love from one of Ghana’s most admired children’s book authors.


Click for more detail about The Old Boat by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey The Old Boat

by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey
Norton Young Readers (Mar 02, 2021)
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The creators of The Old Truck set sail with an old boat and an evocative, intricately crafted exploration of home and family.

Off a small island, a boy and his grandmother set sail in their beloved fishing boat. They ride the waves, dreaming, catching fish, and seeing the wonders of the ocean. But soon the boy is sailing the boat himself, venturing further from shore as the waters grow dirty and polluted. When a storm washes him ashore and wrecks the old boat, he sees home in a new light. He decides to turn the tides of his fortune, cleaning the island’s waters and creating a new life with a family to call his own. With an eye-catching design and masterfully detailed illustrations, The Old Boat is an exquisite story about caring for the places we call home.


Click for more detail about Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

by Claudio Saunt
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 23, 2021)
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In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.


Click for more detail about Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde and Roxane Gay (Editor) Selected Works of Audre Lorde

by Audre Lorde and Roxane Gay (Editor)
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 01, 2020)
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A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s "intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Among the essays included here are:

"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"
"The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
"I Am Your Sister"

Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of Light

The poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:

"Martha"
"A Litany for Survival"
"Sister Outsider"
"Making Love to Concrete"


Click for more detail about If I Had Two Wings: Stories by Randall Kenan If I Had Two Wings: Stories

by Randall Kenan
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 04, 2020)
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In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans.

Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.


Click for more detail about Race in America by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer Race in America

by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer
W. W. Norton & Company (Jul 01, 2020)
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Equip your students to engage with the most urgent issues of our time.

With a groundbreaking intersectional approach framed around social spheres, Race in America gives students the tools to think critically about race, racism, and white privilege. In this thoroughly updated Second Edition, students will find relevant examples drawn from the headlines and their own experiences. New features in the text and online help students see the “big picture”—and how they can participate in the fight for racial equality.


Click for more detail about Seeing the Body: Poems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths Seeing the Body: Poems

by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 09, 2020)
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Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss.

In radiant poems—set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics—Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss.

A photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body’s internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.


Click for more detail about Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

by Claudio Saunt
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 24, 2020)
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Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Shortlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize

Named a Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2020

A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands.

In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington’s small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government’s auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Unworthy Republic reveals how expulsion became national policy and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children.

Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt’s deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many U.S. citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation’s values. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States.

In telling this gripping story, Saunt shows how the politics and economics of white supremacy lay at the heart of the expulsion of Native Americans; how corruption, greed, and administrative indifference and incompetence contributed to the debacle of its implementation; and how the consequences still resonate today.


Click for more detail about The Absurd Man: Poems by Major Jackson The Absurd Man: Poems

by Major Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 11, 2020)
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Inspired by the philosophy of Albert Camus, Major Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as "absurd hero." With intense musicality and buoyant lyricism, The Absurd Man follows the titular speaker as he confronts the struggle for meaning in a technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, finding refuge in intellectual and sensuous passions. At once melancholic and jubilant, Jackson considers the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination.

From "The Absurd Man at Fourteen"

He punched her again, a woman called the house,
some yelling then us out the door leaving
the kitchen phone cord swinging.


Click for more detail about Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

by Saidiya Hartman
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 14, 2020)
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Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.


Click for more detail about The Old Truck by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey The Old Truck

by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey
Norton Young Readers (Jan 07, 2020)
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When is an old truck something more? On a small, bustling farm, a resilient and steadfast pickup works tirelessly alongside the family that lives there, and becomes a part of the dreams and ambitions of the family’s young daughter.

After long days and years of hard work leave the old truck rusting in the weeds, it’s time for the girl to roll up her sleeves. Soon she is running her own busy farm, and in the midst of all the repairing and restoring, it may be time to bring her faithful childhood companion back to life.

With an eye-catching retro design and cleverly nuanced illustrations, The Old Truck celebrates the rewards of determination and the value of imagination.


Click for more detail about Felon: Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts Felon: Poems

by Reginald Dwayne Betts
W. W. Norton & Company (Oct 15, 2019)
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Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.

The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.

Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a felon.

"A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems-canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace-and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility-from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon.""


Click for more detail about The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 24, 2019)
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With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid in Kidane and his wife Aster’s household. Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilize his strongest men before the Italians invade. His initial kindness to Hirut shifts into a flinty cruelty when she resists his advances, and Hirut finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. Meanwhile, Mussolini’s technologically advanced army prepares for an easy victory. Hundreds of thousands of Italians—Jewish photographer Ettore among them—march on Ethiopia seeking adventure.

As the war begins in earnest, Hirut, Aster, and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms against the Italians. But how could she have predicted her own personal war as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers, who will force her to pose before Ettore’s camera?

What follows is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, with Hirut as the fierce, original, and brilliant voice at its heart. In incandescent, lyrical prose, Maaza Mengiste breathes life into complicated characters on both sides of the battle line, shaping a heartrending, indelible exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.


Click for more detail about The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Liveright (Aug 20, 2019)
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As seen on the Netflix series ExplainedFrom the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarized world are riddled with contradiction.Who do you think you are? That’s a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods.Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn’t primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation?of self-rule?is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage.From Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who miraculously became an eminent European philosopher before retiring back to Africa, to Italo Svevo, the literary marvel who changed citizenship without leaving home, to Appiah’s own father, Joseph, an anticolonial firebrand who was ready to give his life for a nation that did not yet exist, Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with vibrant narratives to expose the myths behind our collective identities.These “mistaken identities,” Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities?from chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities aren’t something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns.Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about who?and what?“we” are.


Click for more detail about Travelers: A Novel by Helon Habila Travelers: A Novel

by Helon Habila
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 18, 2019)
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A startlingly imaginative exploration of the African diaspora in Europe, by one of our most acclaimed international writers.Award-winning author Helon Habila has been described as "a courageous tale teller with an uncompromising vision…a major talent" (Rawi Hage). His new novel Travelers is a life-changing encounter with those who have been uprooted by war or aspiration, fear or hope.A Nigerian graduate student who has made his home in America knows what it means to strike out for new shores. When his wife proposes that he accompany her to Berlin, where she has been awarded a prestigious arts fellowship, he has his reservations: “I knew every departure is a death, every return a rebirth. Most changes happen unplanned, and they always leave a scar.”In Berlin, Habila’s central character finds himself thrown into contact with a community of African immigrants and refugees whose lives previously seemed distant from his own, but to which he is increasingly drawn. The walls between his privileged, secure existence and the stories of these other Africans on the move soon crumble, and his sense of identity begins to dissolve as he finds that he can no longer separate himself from others’ horrors, or from Africa.A lean, expansive, heart-rending exploration of loss and of connection, Travelers inscribes unforgettable signposts?both unsettling and luminous?marking the universal journey in pursuit of love and home.


Click for more detail about Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century by Lorene Cary Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century

by Lorene Cary
W. W. Norton & Company (May 07, 2019)
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Ladysitting is #1 on O Magazine’s10 Titles to Pick Up Now

From cherished memories of weekends she spent as a child with her indulgent Nana to the reality of the year she spent "ladysitting" her now frail grandmother, Lorene Cary journeys through stories of their time together and five generations of their African American family. Brilliantly weaving a narrative of her complicated yet transformative relationship with Nana—a fierce, stubborn, and independent woman, who managed a business until she was 100—Cary looks at Nana’s impulse to control people and fate, from the early death of her mother and oppression in the Jim Crow South to living on her own in her New Jersey home.

Cary knew there might be some reckonings to come. Nana was a force: Her obstinacy could come out in unanticipated ways—secretly getting a driver’s license to show up her husband, carrying on a longtime feud with Cary’s father. But Nana could also be devoted: to Nana’s father, to black causes, and—Cary had thought—to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Facing the inevitable end raises tensions, with Cary drawing on her spirituality and Nana consoling herself with late-night sweets and the loyalty of caregivers. When Nana doubts Cary’s dedication, Cary must go deeper into understanding this complicated woman.

In Ladysitting, Cary captures the ruptures, love, and, perhaps, forgiveness that can occur in a family as she bears witness to her grandmother’s 101 vibrant years of life.


Click for more detail about Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry

by Neil deGrasse Tyson
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 05, 2019)
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America’s most celebrated astrophysicist invites young readers to explore the mysteries of the universe.Neil deGrasse Tyson has become one of the most recognizable and respected figures in science, beloved to curious kids. In this adaptation of his #1 New York Times bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Tyson has?for the first time?served up the universe in a handy, portable package designed specifically for young readers.From the difference between a star and a supernova to what matter and dark matter really are, Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry will turn busy kids into budding experts on the fundamental rules and unknowns of our universe. Dozens of color photos, infographics, and extra explanations make accessible even the trickiest concepts, including questions around the nature of space and time. Along the way, Tyson’s characteristic wit ensures a journey packed with fun.Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry introduces young readers to an exciting field and the principles of scientific inquiry, fostering the “cosmic perspective” that outer space inspires in all of us. 40 color illustrations


Click for more detail about Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil deGrasse Tyson Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

by Neil deGrasse Tyson
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 11, 2018)
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An exploration of the age-old complicity between skywatchers and warfighters, from the best-selling author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.In this fascinating foray into the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call it a "curiously complicit" alliance. "The universe is both the ultimate frontier and the highest of high grounds," they write. "Shared by both space scientists and space warriors, it’s a laboratory for one and a battlefield for the other. The explorer wants to understand it; the soldier wants to dominate it. But without the right technology?which is more or less the same technology for both parties?nobody can get to it, operate in it, scrutinize it, dominate it, or use it to their advantage and someone else’s disadvantage."Spanning early celestial navigation to satellite-enabled warfare, Accessory to War is a richly researched and provocative examination of the intersection of science, technology, industry, and power that will introduce Tyson’s millions of fans to yet another dimension of how the universe has shaped our lives and our world.


Click for more detail about Collected Poems (paperback): 1974-2004 by Rita Dove Collected Poems (paperback): 1974-2004

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 14, 2017)
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Three decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume.Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” —Poetry magazine.

In the video below Dove reads the poem “Canary” which is contained in this collection


Click for more detail about The Annotated African American Folktales (The Annotated Books) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Annotated African American Folktales (The Annotated Books)

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Liveright (Nov 14, 2017)
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These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature.Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before,The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Following in the traditionof such classics asArthurHuff Fauset’s“Negro Folk Tales from the South”(1927),ZoraNeale Hurston’s Mules and Men(1935), andVirginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985),acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a placealongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly.Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like “The Talking Skull” and “Witches Who Ride,” as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman. Beginning with the figure of Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisation?a spider who plots and weaves in scandalous ways?The Annotated African American Folktales then goes on to draw Caribbean and Creole tales into the orbit of the folkloric canon. It retrievesstories not seen sincethe Harlem Renaissanceandbrings backarchival tales of“Negro folklore” that Booker T. Washington proclaimedhademanated from a “grapevine” that existed evenbefore the American Revolution,stories brought over by slaves who had survived the Middle Passage. Furthermore, Gates and Tatar’s volume not only defines a new canon but reveals how these folktales were hijacked and misappropriated in previous incarnations, egregiously by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern newspaperman, as well as by Walt Disney, who cannibalized and capitalized on Harris’s volumes by creating cartoon characters drawn from this African American lore.Presenting these tales with illuminating annotations and hundreds of revelatory illustrations,The Annotated African American Folktalesreminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive.The Annotated African American Folktales includes:Introductory essays, nearly 150 African American stories, and 20 seminal African tales as historical backgroundThe familiar Brer Rabbit classics, as well as news-making vernacular tales from the 1890s’ Southern WorkmanAn entire section of Caribbean and Latin American folktales that finally become incorporated into the canonApproximately 200 full-color, museum-quality images color throughout; 160 illustrations


Click for more detail about Chester B. Himes: A Biography by Lawrence P. Jackson Chester B. Himes: A Biography

by Lawrence P. Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company (Jul 25, 2017)
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Chester B. Himes has been called "one of the towering figures of the black literary tradition" (Henry Louis Gates Jr.), "the best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "a quirky American genius" (Walter Mosely). He was the twentieth century’s most prolific black writer, captured the spirit of his times expertly, and left a distinctive mark on American literature. Yet today he stands largely forgotten.

In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes’s full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships—sometimes uneasy—with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright.

Jackson’s scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes’s improbable life—his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson’s biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States.


Click for more detail about Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

by Camille T. Dungy
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 13, 2017)
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A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

An award-winning African American poet debuts in prose with a stunningly graceful and honest exploration of race, motherhood, and history.As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then toddler, intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child, but as black women. With a poet’s eye, she celebrates her daughter’s acquisition of language and discoveries of the natural and human world around her. At the same time history shadows her steps everywhere she goes: from the San Francisco of settlers’ and investors’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana; from snow-white Maine to a festive, yet threatening, bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods.With exceptional candor and grace, Dungy explores our inner and outer worlds?the intimate and vulnerable experiences of raising a child, living with illness, conversing with strangers, and counting on others’ goodwill. Across the nation, she finds fear and trauma, and also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, Guidebook to Relative Strangers is an essential guide for a troubled land.


Click for more detail about Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

by Neil deGrasse Tyson
W. W. Norton & Company (May 02, 2017)
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The #1 New York Times Bestseller: The essential universe, from our most celebrated and beloved astrophysicist.What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.


Click for more detail about Roll Deep: Poems by Major Jackson Roll Deep: Poems

by Major Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 28, 2017)
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A whimsical and “devastatingly effective” (Washington Post) collection that captures the spirit of travel and pays homage to heritage.

In his fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Jackson appropriates the vernacular notion of “rolling deep” to capture the spirit of aesthetic travel that defines these forceful new poems and brazenly announces his steady accretion of literary and artistic influences, both formal and experimental―his “crew.” The confident and radiant poems in Roll Deep address a range of topics, most prominently human intimacy and war. And like his best work to date, these poems create new experiences with language owed to Jackson’s willingness to once again seek a rhythmic sound that expresses the unique realities of the twenty-first century with humor and understanding. Whether set in Nairobi, Madrid, or Greece, the poems are sensuously evocative and unapologetically with-it, in their effort to build community across borders of language and style.

From Urban Renewal, “The Dadaab Suite”:

I have come to Dadaab
like an actor on a press release, unprepared for the drained faces
of famine-fleeing refugees, my craft’s glamour
dimmed by hundreds of infant graves, children
whose lolling heads’ final drop landed on their mothers’
backs like soft stones. What beauty can I spell
in this swelter of dust?


Click for more detail about Here Comes the Sun: A Novel by Nicole Dennis-Benn Here Comes the Sun: A Novel

by Nicole Dennis-Benn
Liveright (Jul 19, 2016)
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In this radiant, highly anticipated debut, a cast of unforgettable women battle for independence while a maelstrom of change threatens their Jamaican village. Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis- Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate. When plans for a new hotel threaten their village, Margot sees not only an opportunity for her own financial independence but also perhaps a chance to admit a shocking secret: her forbidden love for another woman. As they face the impending destruction of their community, each woman?fighting to balance the burdens she shoulders with the freedom she craves?must confront long-hidden scars. From a much-heralded new writer, Here Comes the Sun offers a dramatic glimpse into a vibrant, passionate world most outsiders see simply as paradise.


Click for more detail about The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire by Karl Jacoby The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire

by Karl Jacoby
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 14, 2016)
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A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur.To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in southern Texas during the waning years of King Cotton.After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border and his ambivalent appearance, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time: traveling in first-class train berths, staying in upscale hotels, and eating in the finest restaurants.Eliseo’s success in crossing the color line, however, brought heightened scrutiny in its wake as he became the intimate of political and business leaders on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Ellis, unlike many passers, maintained a connection to his family and to black politics that also raised awkward questions about his racial status. Yet such was Ellis’s skill in manipulating his era’s racial codes, most of the whites he encountered continued to insist that he must be Hispanic even as Ellis became embroiled in scandals that hinted the man known as Guillermo Eliseo was not quite who he claimed to be.The Strange Career of William Ellis reads like a novel but offers fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race. At a moment when the United States is deepening its connections with Latin America and recognizing that race is more than simply black or white, Ellis’s story could not be more timely or important. 1 map; 8 pages of illustrations


Click for more detail about Collected Poems: 1974–2004 by Rita Dove Collected Poems: 1974–2004

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 2016)
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Three decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume.Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” —Poetry magazine.

In the video below Dove reads the poem “Canary” which is contained in this collection


Click for more detail about The Illegal: A Novel by Lawrence Hill The Illegal: A Novel

by Lawrence Hill
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 25, 2016)
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Internationally best-selling author Lawrence Hill returns with an extraordinary, resonant novel about a man on the run.Lawrence Hill spellbound readers with Someone Knows My Name (made into the television mini-series, The Book of Negroes), hailed as “transporting” (Entertainment Weekly) and “completely engrossing” (Washington Post). The Illegal is the gripping story of Keita Ali, a refugee?like the many in today’s headlines?compelled to leave his homeland.All Keita has ever wanted to do is to run. Running means respect and wealth at home. His native Zantoroland, a fictionalized country whose tyrants are eerily familiar, turns out the fastest marathoners on earth. But after his journalist father is killed for his outspoken political views, Keita must flee to the wealthy nation of Freedom State?a country engaged in a crackdown on all undocumented people.There, Keita becomes a part of the new underground. He learns what it means to live as an illegal: surfacing to earn cash prizes by running local races and assessing whether the people he meets will be kind or turn him in. As the authorities seek to arrest Keita, he strives to elude capture and ransom his sister, who has been kidnapped.Set in an imagined country bearing a striking resemblance to our own, this tension-filled novel casts its eye on race, human potential, and what it means to belong.


Click for more detail about Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

by Danielle Allen
Liveright (May 04, 2015)
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Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians

“A tour de force… . No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.”?Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation’s founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy). 35 illustrations


Click for more detail about Saint Monkey: A Novel by Jacinda Townsend Saint Monkey: A Novel

by Jacinda Townsend
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 02, 2015)
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"[A] compelling debut…Townsend’s writing [is] full of fresh turns of phrase and keen insights." ?Anaya Mathis, New York Times Book Review Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she’ll never get out of Kentucky?but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles. Her best friend, Caroline, daydreams about Hollywood stardom, but both girls feel destined to languish in a slow-moving stopover town in Montgomery County. That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem?an offer she can’t resist, not even for Caroline. And in New York City the music never stops. Audrey flirts with love and takes the stage at the Apollo, with its fast-dancing crowds and blinding lights. But fortunes can turn fast in the city?young talent means tough competition, and for Audrey failure is always one step away. Meanwhile, Caroline sinks into the quiet anguish of a Black woman in a backwards country, where her ambitions and desires only slip further out of reach.Jacinda Townsend’s remarkable first novel is a coming-of-age story made at once gripping and poignant by the wild energy of the Jazz Era and the stark realities of segregation. Marrying musical prose with lyric vernacular, Saint Monkey delivers a stirring portrait of American storytelling and marks the appearance of an auspicious new voice in literary fiction.


Click for more detail about The Book Of Negroes: A Novel (Movie Tie-In Edition)  (Movie Tie-In Editions) by Lawrence Hill The Book Of Negroes: A Novel (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions)

by Lawrence Hill
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 12, 2015)
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Lawrence Hill’s award-winning novel is a major television miniseries airing on BET Networks.The Book of Negroes (based on the novel Someone Knows My Name) will be BET’s first miniseries. The star-studded production includes lead actress Aunjanue Ellis (Ray, The Help), Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire, A Few Good Men), Oscar and Emmy winner Louis Gossett Jr. (A Raisin in the Sun, Boardwalk Empire), and features Lyriq Bent (Rookie Blue), Jane Alexander (The Cider House Rules), and Ben Chaplin (The Thin Red Line). Director and co-writer Clement Virgo is a feature film and television director (The Wire) who also serves as producer with executive producer Damon D’Oliveira (What We Have).In this “transporting” (Entertainment Weekly) and “heart-stopping” (Washington Post) work, Aminata Diallo, one of the strongest women characters in contemporary fiction, is kidnapped from Africa as a child and sold as a slave in South Carolina. Fleeing to Canada after the Revolutionary War, she escapes to attempt a new life in freedom.


Click for more detail about Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

by Danielle Allen
Liveright (Jun 23, 2014)
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Winner of the Zcalo Book Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians

“Danielle Allen lays bare the Declaration’s history and significance, returning it to its true and rightful owners?you and me.”?Junot Daz In just 1,337 words, the Declaration of Independence altered the course of history. Written in 1776, it is the most profound document in the history of government since the Magna Carta, signed nearly 800 years ago in 1215. Yet despite its paramount importance, the Declaration, curiously, is rarely read from start to finish?much less understood. Troubled by the fact that so few Americans actually know what it says, Danielle Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship, set out to explore the arguments of the Declaration, reading it with both adult night students and University of Chicago undergraduates. Keenly aware that the Declaration is riddled with contradictions?liberating some while subjugating slaves and Native Americans?Allen and her students nonetheless came to see that the Declaration makes a coherent and riveting argument about equality. They found not a historical text that required memorization, but an animating force that could and did transform the course of their everyday lives.In an "uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text," Our Declaration now brings these insights to the general reader, illuminating the "three great themes of the Declaration: equality, liberty, and the abiding power of language" (David M. Kennedy). Vividly evoking the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen describes the challenges faced by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston?the "Committee of Five" who had to write a document that reflected the aspirations of a restive population and forge an unprecedented social contract. Although the focus is usually on Jefferson, Allen restores credit not only to John Adams and Richard Henry Lee but also to clerk Timothy Matlack and printer Mary Katherine Goddard.Allen also restores the astonishing text of the Declaration itself. Its list of self-evident truths does not end, as so many think, with our individual right to the "pursuit of happiness" but with the collective right of the people to reform government so that it will "effect their Safety and Happiness." The sentence laying out the self-evident truths leads us from the individual to the community?from our individual rights to what we can achieve only together, as a community constituted by bonds of equality. Challenging so much of our conventional political wisdom, Our Declaration boldly makes the case that we cannot have freedom as individuals without equality among us as a people.With its cogent analysis and passionate advocacy, Our Declaration thrillingly affirms the continuing relevance of America’s founding text, ultimately revealing what democracy actually means and what it asks of us. 35 illlustrations


Click for more detail about West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

by Claudio Saunt
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 16, 2014)
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In that pivotal year, the Spanish established the first European colony in San Francisco and set off a cataclysm for the region’s native residents. The Russians pushed into Alaska in search of valuable sea otters, devastating local Aleut communities. And the British extended their fur trade from Hudson Bay deep into the continent, sparking an environmental revolution that transformed America’s boreal forests.

While imperial officials in distant Europe maneuvered to control lands they knew almost nothing about, America’s indigenous peoples sought their own advantage. Creek Indians navigated the Caribbean to explore trade with Cuba. The Osages expanded their dominion west of the Mississippi River, overwhelming the small Spanish outposts in the area. And the Sioux advanced across the Dakotas. One traditional Sioux history states that they first seized the Black Hills, the territory they now consider their sacred homeland, in 1776. "Two nations were born that year," Saunt writes. The native one would win its final military victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn one hundred years later.

From the Aleutian Islands to the Gulf Coast and across the oceans to Europe’s imperial capitals, Saunt’s masterfully researched narrative reveals an interconnected web of history that spans not just the forgotten parts of North America but the entire globe.

Richly illustrated, with maps that reenvision a familiar landscape, West of the Revolution explores a turbulent continent in a year of many revolutions.


Click for more detail about The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 2 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Valerie Smith, William L. Andrews, Kimberly Benston, Brent Hayes Edwards, Frances Smith Foster, Deborah E. McDowell, Robert G. O'Meally, Hortense J. Spillers, and Cheryl A. Wall (Editors) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 2

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Valerie Smith, William L. Andrews, Kimberly Benston, Brent Hayes Edwards, Frances Smith Foster, Deborah E. McDowell, Robert G. O’Meally, Hortense J. Spillers, and Cheryl A. Wall (Editors)
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 31, 2014)
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An exciting revision of the best-selling anthology for African American literary survey courses.

The much-anticipated Third Edition brings together the work of 140 writers from 1746 to the present writing in all genres, as well as performers of vernacular forms—from spirituals and sermons to jazz and hip hop. Fresh scholarship, new visuals and media, and new selections—with an emphasis on contemporary writers—combine to make The Norton Anthology of African American Literature an even better teaching tool for instructors and an unmatched value for students.


Click for more detail about The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (3rd Edition) Set by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Valerie Smith, William L. Andrews, Kimberly Benston, Brent Hayes Edwards, Frances Smith Foster, Deborah E. McDowell, Robert G. O’Meally, Hortense J. Spillers, and Cheryl A. Wall The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (3rd Edition) Set

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Valerie Smith, William L. Andrews, Kimberly Benston, Brent Hayes Edwards, Frances Smith Foster, Deborah E. McDowell, Robert G. O’Meally, Hortense J. Spillers, and Cheryl A. Wall
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 25, 2014)
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An exciting revision (two volume set) of the best-selling anthology for African American literary survey courses. The much-anticipated Third Edition brings together the work of 140 writers from 1746 to the present writing in all genres, as well as performers of vernacular forms?from spirituals and sermons to jazz and hip hop. Fresh scholarship, new visuals and media, and new selections?with an emphasis on contemporary writers?combine to make The Norton Anthology of African American Literature an even better teaching tool for instructors and an unmatched value for students.


Click for more detail about The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights by William P. Jones The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights

by William P. Jones
W. W. Norton & Company (Jul 29, 2013)
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A brilliant history that goes beyond the dazzling “I Have a Dream” speech to explore the real significance of the massive march and the movement it inspired. It was the final speech of a long day, August 28, 1963, when hundreds of thousands gathered on the Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In a resounding cadence, Martin Luther King Jr. lifted the crowd when he told of his dream that all Americans would join together to realize the founding ideal of equality. The power of the speech created an enduring symbol of the march and the larger civil rights movement. King’s speech still inspires us fifty years later, but its very power has also narrowed our understanding of the march. In this insightful history, William P. Jones restores the march to its full significance. The opening speech of the day was delivered by the leader of the march, the great trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, who first called for a march on Washington in 1941 to press for equal opportunity in employment and the armed forces. To the crowd that stretched more than a mile before him, Randolph called for an end to segregation and a living wage for every American. Equal access to accommodations and services would mean little to people, white and black, who could not afford them. Randolph’s egalitarian vision of economic and social citizenship is the strong thread running through the full history of the March on Washington Movement. It was a movement of sustained grassroots organizing, linked locally to women’s groups, unions, and churches across the country. Jones’s fresh, compelling history delivers a new understanding of this emblematic event and the broader civil rights movement it propelled. 8 pages of photographs


Click for more detail about The Cineaste: Poems by A. Van Jordan The Cineaste: Poems

by A. Van Jordan
W. W. Norton & Company (Apr 01, 2013)
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A remarkable montage of poems that explore film, poetry, and the elusiveness of reverie. A. Van Jordan, an acclaimed American poet and the author of three previous volumes, “demonstrates poetry’s power to be at once intimate and wide-ranging” (Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World). In this penetrating new work he takes us with him to the movies, where history reverberates and characters are larger than life. The Cineaste is an entrancing montage of poems, wherein film serves as the setting for contemplative trances, memoir, and pure fantasy. At its center is a sonnet sequence that imagines the struggle of pioneer filmmaker Oscar Micheaux against D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which Micheaux saw not only as racist but also as the start of a powerful new art form. “Sharpen the focus in your lens, and you / Sharpen your view of the world; you can see / How people inhabit space in their lives, / How the skin of Negroes and whites both play / With light.” Scenes and characters from films such as Metropolis, Stranger than Paradise, Last Year at Marienbad, The Red Shoes, and The Great Train Robbery also come to luminous life in this vibrant new collection. The Cineaste is an extended riff on Jordan’s life as a moviegoer and a brilliant exploration of film, poetry, race, and the elusiveness of reverie. from “Last Year at Marienbad”

A place, though visible, is like a ghost
of memories. Even memories one forgets
linger in the space in which they occurred.
Here within the expanse of vaulted ceilings,
doorways leading to more doors, hallways

leading to more halls, the faintest recollections absorb over time; no act will wholly evanesce.


Click for more detail about The Collected Poems of Ai by Ai Ogawa The Collected Poems of Ai

by Ai Ogawa
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 04, 2013)
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“Ai is a truthteller picking her way through the burning rocks of racial and sexual lies.”?Joy Harjo Before her untimely death in 2010, Ai, known for her searing dramatic monologues, was hailed as “one of the most singular voices of her generation” (New York Times Book Review). Now for the first time, all eight books by this essential and uniquely American poet have been gathered in one volume.from “The Cockfighter’s Daughter” I found my father, face down, in his homemade chili and had to hit the bowl with a hammer to get it off, then scrape the pinto beans and chunks of ground beef off his face with a knife.


Click for more detail about Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery To Hip-Hop by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery To Hip-Hop

by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 27, 2012)
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Includes a Foreword by Mel Watkins

An exploration and celebration of a controversial tradition that, contrary to popular opinion, is alive and active after more than 150 years. Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen investigate the complex history of black minstrelsy, adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by African American performers who played the grinning blackface fool to entertain black and white audiences. We now consider minstrelsy an embarrassing relic, but once blacks and whites alike saw it as a black art form—and embraced it as such. And, as the authors reveal, black minstrelsy remains deeply relevant to popular black entertainment, particularly in the work of contemporary artists like Dave Chappelle, Flavor Flav, Spike Lee, and Lil Wayne. Darkest America explores the origins, heyday, and present-day manifestations of this tradition, exploding the myth that it was a form of entertainment that whites foisted on blacks, and shining a sure-to-be controversial light on how these incendiary performances can be not only demeaning but also, paradoxically, liberating (12 illustrations).

Book Review

Click for more detail about Space Chronicles: Facing The Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson Space Chronicles: Facing The Ultimate Frontier

by Neil deGrasse Tyson
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 27, 2012)
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A thought-provoking and humorous collection on NASA and the future of space travel. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a rare breed of astrophysicist, one who can speak as easily and brilliantly with popular audiences as with professional scientists. Now that NASA has put human space flight effectively on hold?with a five- or possibly ten-year delay until the next launch of astronauts from U.S. soil?Tyson’s views on the future of space travel and America’s role in that future are especially timely and urgent. This book represents the best of Tyson’s commentary, including a candid new introductory essay on NASA and partisan politics, giving us an eye-opening manifesto on the importance of space exploration for America’s economy, security, and morale. Thanks to Tyson’s fresh voice and trademark humor, his insights are as delightful as they are provocative, on topics that range from the missteps that shaped our recent history of space travel to how aliens, if they existed, might go about finding us.


Click for more detail about Holding Company: Poems by Major Jackson Holding Company: Poems

by Major Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 06, 2012)
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"A devastatingly beautiful collection of strange and wonderful poems." ?Poetry Daily In these poems of broken unions and acute longing, Major Jackson explores art, literature, and music as seductive forces in our lives.


Click for more detail about The Conjure Stories (Norton Critical Editions) by Charles W. Chesnutt The Conjure Stories (Norton Critical Editions)

by Charles W. Chesnutt
W. W. Norton & Company (Dec 01, 2011)
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Fourteen conjure tales by one of America’s most influential African American fiction writers. This Norton Critical Edition of The Conjure Stories arranges the tales chronologically by composition date, allowing readers to discern how Chesnutt experimented with plots and characters and with the idea of the conjure story over time. With one exception, the text of each tale is that of the original publication. (The text of “The Dumb Witness” was established from two typescripts held at the archives of Fisk University.) The stories are accompanied by a thorough and thought-provoking introduction, detailed explanatory annotations, and illustrative materials.

“Contexts” presents a wealth of materials chosen by the editors to enrich the reader’s understanding of these canonical stories, including a map of the landscape of the conjure tales, Chesnutt’s journal entry as he began writing fiction of the South, as well as writings by Chesnutt, William Wells Brown, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others, on the stories’ central motifs?folklore, superstition, voodoo, race, and social identity in the South following the Civil War.

“Criticism” is divided into two parts. “Early Criticism” collects critical notices for The Conjure Woman that suggest the volume’s initial reception, assessments by William Dean Howells and Benjamin Brawley, and a biographical excerpt by the author’s daughter, Helen Chesnutt. “Modern Criticism” demonstrates rich and enduring interest in The Conjure Stories with ten important essays by Robert Hemenway, William L. Andrews, Robert B. Stepto, John Edgar Wideman, Werner Sollors, Houston A. Baker, Eric J. Sundquist, Richard H. Brodhead, Candace J. Waid, and Glenda Carpio.

A Chronology of Chesnutt’s life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.


Click for more detail about The Chitlin’ Circuit: And The Road To Rock &rsquoN&rsquo Roll by Preston Lauterbach The Chitlin’ Circuit: And The Road To Rock &rsquoN&rsquo Roll

by Preston Lauterbach
W. W. Norton & Company (Jul 18, 2011)
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Chosen by The Wall Street Journal as one of the Top Ten Non-Fiction books of 2011
Chosen by The Boston Globe as one of Top Non-Fiction books of 2011
An NPR Best Music Book of 2011
An Onion AV Club Best Book of 2011

The first history of the network of black juke joints that spawned rock ’n’ roll through an unholy alliance between vice and entertainment. A definitive account of the birth of rock ’n’ roll in black America, this book establishes the Chitlin’ Circuit as a major force in American musical history. Combining terrific firsthand reporting with deep historical research, Preston Lauterbach uncovers characters like Chicago Defender columnist Walter Barnes, who pioneered the circuit in the 1930s, and larger-than-life promoters such as Denver Ferguson, the Indianapolis gambling chieftain who consolidated it in the 1940s. Charging from Memphis to Houston and now-obscure points in between, The Chitlin’ Circuit brings us into the sweaty back rooms where such stars as James Brown, B. B. King, and Little Richard got their start. With his unforgettable portraits of unsung heroes including King Kolax, Sax Kari, and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Lauterbach writes of a world of clubs and con men that has managed to avoid much examination despite its wealth of brash characters, intriguing plotlines, and vulgar glory, and gives us an excavation of an underground musical America. 34 black-and-white illustrations

Book Review

Click for more detail about Cane by Jean Toomer Cane

by Jean Toomer
Liveright (Jun 13, 2011)
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Cane was the first book our online book club chose to read in read in back in July of 1998, noone was disappointed

“A breakthrough in prose and poetical writing… This book should be on all readers’ and writers’ desks and in their minds.” —Maya Angelou

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is an innovative literary work — part drama, part poetry, part fiction — powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer’s impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.


Click for more detail about Oil on Water: A Novel by Helon Habila Oil on Water: A Novel

by Helon Habila
W. W. Norton & Company (May 16, 2011)
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“The new generation of twenty-first-century African writers have now come of age. Without a doubt Habila is one of the best.”Emmanuel Dongala In the oil-rich and environmentally devastated Nigerian Delta, the wife of a British oil exec


Click for more detail about The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race And Civility In Everyday Life by Elijah Anderson The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race And Civility In Everyday Life

by Elijah Anderson
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 28, 2011)
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An acclaimed sociologist illuminates the public life of an American city, offering a major reinterpretation of the racial dynamics in America. Following his award-winning work on inner-city violence, Code of the Street, sociologist Elijah Anderson introduces the concept of the “cosmopolitan canopy”—the urban island of civility that exists amidst the ghettos, suburbs, and ethnic enclaves where segregation is the norm. Under the cosmopolitan canopy, diverse peoples come together, and for the most part practice getting along. Anderson’s path-breaking study of this setting provides a new understanding of the complexities of present-day race relations and reveals the unique opportunities here for cross-cultural interaction.

Anderson walks us through Center City Philadelphia, revealing and illustrating through his ethnographic fieldwork how city dwellers often interact across racial, ethnic, and social borders. People engage in a distinctive folk ethnography. Canopies operating in close proximity create a synergy that becomes a cosmopolitan zone. In the vibrant atmosphere of these public spaces, civility is the order of the day. However, incidents can arise that threaten and rend the canopy, including scenes of tension involving borders of race, class, sexual preference, and gender. But when they do—assisted by gloss—the resilience of the canopy most often prevails. In this space all kinds of city dwellers—from gentrifiers to the homeless, cabdrivers to doormen—manage to co-exist in the urban environment, gaining local knowledge as they do, which then helps reinforce and spread tolerance through contact and mutual understanding.

With compelling, meticulous descriptions of public spaces such as 30th Street Station, Reading Terminal Market, and Rittenhouse Square, and quasi-public places like the modern-day workplace, Anderson provides a rich narrative account of how blacks and whites relate and redefine the color line in everyday public life. He reveals how eating, shopping, and people-watching under the canopy can ease racial tensions, but also how the spaces in and between canopies can reinforce boundaries. Weaving colorful observations with keen social insight, Anderson shows how the canopy—and its lessons—contributes to the civility of our increasingly diverse cities.


Click for more detail about No Surrender: Poems by Ai Ogawa No Surrender: Poems

by Ai Ogawa
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 27, 2010)
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A searing new collection from a master of the poetic monologue. A disillusioned Irish nun moves to America, meets Elvis, and rediscovers her faith. An amputee goes on a strange journey during a hurricane. Each of the speakers in Ai’s daring new collection has a uniquely American story to tell, and each is told with the poet’s characteristic dark humor and ambition.’

From "Brotherhood"
Now we’re middle aged,
Bearing the curse, not the luck of the Irish,
On our shoulders like crosses.
We know that loss is just the outcome of living,
The dross that’s left after you turn gold back into iron
And end up in Rio with a mulatta, who’s got a habit,
But he doesn’t care. He’s flying blind
And I am right behind him.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Sonata Mulattica: Poems by Rita Dove Sonata Mulattica: Poems

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 27, 2010)
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Detailing the volatile relationship between the black violinist George Bridgetower and Beethoven, this is a "masterful collection" (Los Angeles Times). The son of a white woman and an “African Prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower (17801860) travels to Vienna to meet “bad-boy” genius Ludwig van Beethoven. The great composer’s subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto, but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale. A New Yorker’s A Year’s Reading; Booklist Editors Choice Award.


Click for more detail about The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

by Kwame Anthony Appiah
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 13, 2010)
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In this landmark work, a leading philosopher demonstrates the revolutionary power of honor in ending human suffering. Long neglected as an engine of reform, honor strikingly emerges at the center of our modern world in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code. Over the last few centuries, new democratic movements have led to the emancipation of women, slaves, and the oppressed. But what drove these modern changes, Appiah argues, was not imposing legislation from above, but harnessing the ancient power of honor from within. In gripping detail, he explores the end of the duel in aristocratic England, the tumultuous struggles over footbinding in nineteenth-century China, and the uprising of ordinary people against Atlantic slavery. Finally, he confronts the horrors of "honor killing" in contemporary Pakistan, where rape victims are murdered by their relatives. He argues that honor, used to justify the practice, can also be the most effective weapon against it. Intertwining philosophy and historical narrative, Appiah has created a remarkably dramatic work, which demonstrates that honor is the driving force in the struggle against man’s inhumanity to man.


Click for more detail about Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History by Fawn M. Brodie Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History

by Fawn M. Brodie
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 06, 2010)
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A seminal biography of Thomas Jefferson and a fascinating exploration of his relationship with Sally Hemings. With a novelist’s skill and a scholar’s meticulous detail, Fawn M. Brodie portrays Thomas Jefferson as he wrestled with the great issues of his time: revolution, religion, power, race, and love?ambivalences that exerted a subtle but powerful influence on his political ideas and his presidency. Far advanced for its time, Brodie’s biography was the first to set forth a convincing case that Thomas Jefferson was the father of children by his slave Sally Hemings. In a new introduction, Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, explores the impact of Brodie’s groundbreaking book and explains why it is still such a powerful account of one of our greatest and most elusive presidents. 16 pages of illustrations


Click for more detail about The History Of White People by Nell Irvin Painter The History Of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 15, 2010)
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A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of notions of white race?not merely a skin color but also a signal of power, prestige, and beauty to be withheld and granted selectively Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of “whiteness” for economic, social, scientific, and political ends.

Our story begins in Greek and Roman antiquity, where the concept of race did not exist, only geography and the opportunity to conquer and enslave others. Not until the eighteenth century did an obsession with whiteness flourish, with the German invention of the notion of Caucasian beauty. This theory made northern Europeans into “Saxons,” “Anglo-Saxons,” and “Teutons,” envisioned as uniquely handsome natural rulers.

Here was a worldview congenial to northern Europeans bent on empire. There followed an explosion of theories of race, now focusing on racial temperament as well as skin color. Spread by such intellectuals as Madame de Stael and Thomas Carlyle, white race theory soon reached North America with a vengeance. Its chief spokesman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, did the most to label Anglo-Saxons?icons of beauty and virtue?as the only true Americans. It was an ideal that excluded not only blacks but also all ethnic groups not of Protestant, northern European background. The Irish and Native Americans were out and, later, so were the Chinese, Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks?all deemed racially alien. Did immigrations threaten the very existence of America? Americans were assumed to be white, but who among poor immigrants could become truly American? A tortured and convoluted series of scientific explorations developed?theories intended to keep Anglo-Saxons at the top: the ever-popular measurement of skulls, the powerful eugenics movement, and highly biased intelligence tests?all designed to keep working people out and down.

As Painter reveals, power?supported by economics, science, and politics?continued to drive exclusionary notions of whiteness until, deep into the twentieth century, political realities enlarged the category of truly American.

A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People forcefully reminds us that the concept of one white race is a recent invention. The meaning, importance, and realty of this all-too-human thesis of race have buckled under the weight of a long and rich unfolding of events. 70 illustrations

Book Review

Click for more detail about Beneath The Lion’s Gaze: A Novel by Maaza Mengiste Beneath The Lion’s Gaze: A Novel

by Maaza Mengiste
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 11, 2010)
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An epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopia’s revolution. This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.


Click for more detail about Michelle Obama: The First Lady In Photographs by Deborah Willis and Emily Bernard Michelle Obama: The First Lady In Photographs

by Deborah Willis and Emily Bernard
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 04, 2009)
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A stunning, visual biography of Michelle Obama that finally puts her phenomenal fame into a cultural and historical context we can all understand. There has never been a First Lady like her before. While there have been a slew of Obama celebrity books, none contain the message of Deborah Willis and Emily Bernard’s eye-opening book. With nearly 200 compelling photographs, these two noted scholars capture Michelle Obama’s dramatic transformation from working mother to First Lady, from her first tentative steps on the campaign trail to her spontaneous hug of the Queen, to her fairy-tale-like “date night” on Broadway. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy has there been a First Lady who has so enchanted America, but in her down-to-earth dealings with all Americans?schoolchildren, military families, and home gardeners alike?and in her diverse fashion taste, from J. Crew to Jason Wu, Michelle Obama is inexplicably all pearls, all business, all mother. The authors show how Michelle Obama represents the culmination of America’s evolving views on women, race, motherhood, and beauty. Much more than a mere catalog of style, Michelle Obama is a remarkable pictorial story of one woman’s hold on our imagination. 150 full-color photographs


Click for more detail about Reforming America, 1815-1860 by Joshua D. Rothman Reforming America, 1815-1860

by Joshua D. Rothman
W. W. Norton & Company (Oct 08, 2009)
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In the decades before the Civil War, movements to reform American lives swept the United States. Reformers strove to stamp out what they perceived as sin and vice, to contain the worst excesses and consequences of capitalism, to improve the conditions of the less fortunate, to broaden the meaning of freedom, and to make American society not just better but perfect. The original essay and the rich collection of documents in this reader explore each of the major reform movements, the underlying motivations of the reformers, the ways the reform movements changed everyday life, and the way the movements reflected the character of the age.


Click for more detail about The Hemingses Of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed The Hemingses Of Monticello: An American Family

by Annette Gordon-Reed
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 08, 2009)
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Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: “[A] commanding and important book.”?Jill Lepore, The New Yorker This epic work?named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times?tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826. 37 illustrations


Click for more detail about More Than Just Race: Being Black And Poor In The Inner City (Issues Of Our Time) by William Julius Wilson More Than Just Race: Being Black And Poor In The Inner City (Issues Of Our Time)

by William Julius Wilson
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 09, 2009)
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A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma. In this provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, the newest book of the Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African American family. Though the discussion of racial inequality is typically ideologically polarized—conservatives emphasize cultural factors like worldviews and behaviors while liberals emphasize institutional forces—Wilson dares to consider both institutional and cultural factors as causes of the persistence of racial inequality. He reaches the controversial conclusion that, while structural and cultural forces are inextricably linked, public policy can change the racial status quo only by reforming the institutions that reinforce it. This book will dramatically affect policy debates and challenge many of the leaders.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Quantum Lyrics: Poems by A. Van Jordan Quantum Lyrics: Poems

by A. Van Jordan
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 04, 2009)
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"Fearless hybridization…. Jordan creates spaces where physics and poetry, comic books and jazz, memory and loss, come together."?American Prospect This ambitious collection explores the intersection of the infinite world of physics with the perplexities of the human condition. Employing both narrative and cinematic structure, Jordan re-creates the lives of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and comic book superheroes?the Green Lantern, the Atom?and also reveals himself in poems of recollection and loss.


Click for more detail about Scottsboro: A Novel by Ellen Feldman Scottsboro: A Novel

by Ellen Feldman
W. W. Norton & Company (Apr 17, 2008)
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A powerful novel about race, class, sex, and a lie that refused to die. Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past. Intertwining historical actors and fictional characters, stirring racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism into an explosive brew, Scottsboro is a novel of a shocking injustice that convulsed the nation and reverberated around the world, destroyed lives, forged careers, and brought out the worst and the best in the men and women who fought for the cause.

Book Review

Click for more detail about God’s Crucible: Islam And The Making Of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis God’s Crucible: Islam And The Making Of Europe, 570-1215

by David Levering Lewis
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 17, 2008)
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"A furiously complex age; a powerful narrative."?New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice Hailed by critics as an essential book, God’s Crucible is a bold, new interpretation of Islamic Spain and the birth of Europe from one of our greatest historians. David Levering Lewis’s narrative, filled with accounts of some of the greatest battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished?a beacon of cooperation and tolerance?while proto-Europe floundered in opposition.At the beginning of the eighth century, the Arabs brought a momentous revolution in power, religion, and culture to Dark Ages Europe. David Levering Lewis’s masterful history begins with the fall of the Persian and Roman empires, followed by the rise of the prophet Muhammad and the creation of Muslim Spain. Five centuries of engagement between the Muslim imperium and an emerging Europe followed, from the Muslim conquest of Visigoth Hispania in 711 to Latin Christendom’s declaration of unconditional warfare on the Caliphate in 1215. Lewis’s narrative, filled with accounts of some of the greatest battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished?a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity?while proto-Europe, defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery. A cautionary tale, God’s Crucible provides a new interpretation of world-altering events whose influence remains as current as today’s headlines. 8 pages of color illustrations; 4 maps


Click for more detail about Someone Knows My Name: A Novel by Lawrence Hill Someone Knows My Name: A Novel

by Lawrence Hill
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 17, 2007)
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"You feel you are turning the pages of history, the pages of truth."?Austin Clarke, author of The Polished Hoe Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom?and of the knowledge she needs to get home. Sold to an indigo trader who recognizes her intelligence, Aminata is torn from her husband and child and thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan, Aminata helps pen the Book of Negroes, a list of blacks rewarded for service to the king with safe passage to Nova Scotia. There Aminata finds a life of hardship and stinging prejudice. When the British abolitionists come looking for "adventurers" to create a new colony in Sierra Leone, Aminata assists in moving 1,200 Nova Scotians to Africa and aiding the abolitionist cause by revealing the realities of slavery to the British public. This captivating story of one woman’s remarkable experience spans six decades and three continents and brings to life a crucial chapter in world history.


Click for more detail about Death By Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson Death By Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

by Neil deGrasse Tyson
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 17, 2007)
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A vibrant collection of essays on the cosmos from the nation’s best-known astrophysicist. “One of today’s best popularizers of science.”?Kirkus Reviews. Loyal readers of the monthly "Universe" essays in Natural History magazine have long recognized Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talent for guiding them through the mysteries of the cosmos with clarity and enthusiasm. Bringing together more than forty of Tyson’s favorite essays, ?Death by Black Hole? explores a myriad of cosmic topics, from what it would be like to be inside a black hole to the movie industry’s feeble efforts to get its night skies right. One of America’s best-known astrophysicists, Tyson is a natural teacher who simplifies the complexities of astrophysics while sharing his infectious fascination for our universe.


Click for more detail about Hoops: Poems by Major Jackson Hoops: Poems

by Major Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 17, 2007)
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Lush reflections on ordinary lives, displaying “formal talents and [Jackson’s] capacity for expanding the lyric potential of narrative” (Rain Taxi). In Hoops, Major Jackson continues to mine the solemn marvels of ordinary lives: a grandfather gardens in a tenement backyard; a teacher unconsciously renames her black students after French painters. The substance of Jackson’s art is the representation of American citizens whose heroic endurance makes them remarkable and transcendent.


Click for more detail about Quantum Lyrics: Poems by A. Van Jordan Quantum Lyrics: Poems

by A. Van Jordan
W. W. Norton & Company (Jul 17, 2007)
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This provocative, ambitious collection explores the intersection of the infinite world of physics with the perplexities of the human condition. Employing both narrative and cinematic structure, A. Van Jordan re-creates the lives of his subjects: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, comic-book superheroes (The Green Lantern, The Atom), along with aspects of himself revealed in poems of recollection and loss. With lyric intensity he suggests that contemporary physicists are also metaphysical poets.


Click for more detail about An Illuminated Life: Bella da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege by Heidi Ardizzone An Illuminated Life: Bella da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege

by Heidi Ardizzone
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 04, 2007)
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The secret life of the sensational woman behind the Morgan masterpieces, who lit up New York society. What would you give up to achieve your dream? When J. P. Morgan hired Belle da Costa Greene in 1905 to organize his rare book and manuscript collection, she had only her personality and a few years of experience to recommend her. Ten years later, she had shaped the famous Pierpont Morgan Library collection and was a proto-celebrity in New York and the art world, renowned for her self-made expertise, her acerbic wit, and her flirtatious relationships. Born to a family of free people of color, Greene changed her name and invented a Portuguese grandmother to enter white society. In her new world, she dined both at the tables of the highest society and with bohemian artists and activists. She also engaged in a decades-long affair with art critic Bernard Berenson. Greene is pure fascination?the buyer of illuminated manuscripts who attracted others to her like moths to a flame.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Measuring Time: A Novel by Helon Habila Measuring Time: A Novel

by Helon Habila
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 17, 2007)
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A thrilling, epic story from a major new international talent. Mamo and LaMamo are twin brothers living in the small Nigerian village of Keti, where their domineering father controls their lives. With high hopes the twins attempt to flee from


Click for more detail about Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It by Spike Lee Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It

by Spike Lee
W. W. Norton & Company (Oct 17, 2006)
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A candid account of one of America’s most provocative filmmakers that belongs on the shelf of any serious movie lover. Spike Lee tells the cinematic story of the preeminent director, whose pioneering films?from Do The Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X to 25th Hour , Bamboozled, and The Inside Man?helped transform the face of late twentieth-century America. With unprecedented access to the Lee family and new interviews with stars and celebrities?including Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Rosie Perez, Adrien Brody, John Turturro, and many others?film critic Kaleem Aftab chronicles Spike Lee’s explosive rise to stardom, exploring such important issues as Black Nationalism, Hollywood stereotyping, and the rise of a powerful black middle class. Lee’s prominence in American culture continues in 2006 with the release of The Inside Man and a forthcoming documentary on Hurricane Katrina. Spike Lee tells us as much about the last two decades of American social history as it does about the life of this fascinating director.


Click for more detail about When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

by Ira Katznelson
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 2006)
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In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson’s incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."


Click for more detail about The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging by Kym Ragusa The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

by Kym Ragusa
W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 2006)
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A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty. Kym Ragusa’s stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa’s working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided?but they were mesmerized by the differences between them.

From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker’s observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti?Ragusa’s sensuous memories are a reader’s delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage.


Click for more detail about Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time Series) by Kwame Anthony Appiah Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time Series)

by Kwame Anthony Appiah
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 23, 2006)
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A moral manifesto that forces us to reconsider a world divided between the West and the Rest, Us and Them.

We have grown accustomed in this anxious, post-9/11 era to constructing a world fissured by warring creeds and cultures. Much of humanity now seems separated by chasms of incomprehension. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s landmark new work challenges the separatist doctrines espoused in books such as Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Reviving the ancient philosophy of "Cosmopolitanism," a school of thought that dates to the Cynics of the fourth century bce, Appiah traces its influence on the ethical legacies of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Kant’s dream of a "league of nations," and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In doing so, Appiah shows how Western intellectuals and leaders, on both the left and the right, have wildly exaggerated the power of difference—and neglected the power of one. One world. One species. Challenging years of received wisdom, Cosmopolitanism is a resounding work of philosophy and global culture.

About the series: Issues of Our Time: "Aware of the competition for the attention of readers, W. W. Norton & Company and I have created the "Issues of Our Time" as a lucid series of highly readable books through which some of today’s most thoughtful intellectuals seek to challenge the general reader to reexamine received truths and grapple with powerful trends that are shaping the world in which we live. The series launches with Anthony Appiah, Alan Dershowitz, and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as the first of an illustrious group who will tackle some of the most plangent and central issues defining our society today through books that deal with such issues as sexual and racial identities, the economics of the developing world, and the concept of citizenship in a truly globalized twenty-first-century world culture. Above all else, these books are designed to be read and enjoyed."—Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University


Click for more detail about Macnolia: Poems by A. Van Jordan Macnolia: Poems

by A. Van Jordan
W. W. Norton & Company (Dec 17, 2005)
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"Jordan is a wizard at capturing vernacular in both conventional forms and his own invention." —Black Issues Book Review In 1936, teenager MacNolia Cox became the first African American finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition. Supposedly prevented from winning, the precocious child who dreamed of becoming a doctor was changed irrevocably. Her story, told in a poignant nonlinear narrative, illustrates the power of a pivotal moment in a life.


Click for more detail about All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown V. Board of Education by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown V. Board of Education

by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 01, 2005)
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In what John Hope Franklin calls an essential work on race and affirmative action, Charles Ogletree, Jr., tells his personal story of growing up a Brown baby against a vivid pageant of historical characters that includes, among others, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Earl Warren, Anita Hill, Alan Bakke, and Clarence Thomas. A measured blend of personal memoir, exacting legal analysis, and brilliant insight, Ogletree’s eyewitness account of the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education offers a unique vantage point from which to view five decades of race relations in America.


Click for more detail about Dread: Poems by Ai Ogawa Dread: Poems

by Ai Ogawa
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 17, 2004)
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A searing collection of poems about America’s loss of innocence from the National Book Award-winning author of Vice. In poems that travel from the horrific flight of a World War II pilot to the World Trade Center attack, from the death of JFK Jr. to the poet’s own bastard birth, Ai conjures purity as a distant memory and the knowledge of evil as an "infinite dark night." "An undoubtedly powerful personae."?Publishers Weekly "Ai’s cleansing soliloquies give voice to pain both personal and communal….[Dread] presents her most masterfully unnerving works to date."?Booklist "Dread has the characteristic moral strength that makes Ai a necessary poet."?The New York Times Book Review


Click for more detail about American Smooth: Poems by Rita Dove American Smooth: Poems

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 01, 2004)
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This exciting new collection pays homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage: from the glorious shimmer of an operatic soprano to Bessie Smith’s mournful wail; from paradise lost to angel-food cake; from hot-shots at the local shooting range to the Negro jazz band in the First World War, whose music conquered Europe before the Allied advance. Like the ball-room dancing couple of the title poem, smiling and making the difficult seem effortless, Rita Dove explores shifting surfaces between perception and imitation.


Click for more detail about Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women

by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 2004)
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"Not since Breaking Ice has an anthology so freed the spirits of African American women."?Ai Showcasing the newest generation of black women writers, including ZZ Packer, Edwidge Danticat, and Shay Youngblood, Shaking the Tree gathers twenty-three voices that came of age in the wake of the civil rights, black arts, gay rights, and feminist movements. Their literature embodies the tragedies and triumphs of contemporary black women in their struggle to negotiate a sense of individual identity beyond the limited scope of gender and race.

Shaking the Tree offers a panorama of both fiction and memoir, revealing perspectives as diverse as they are dynamic: asha bandele recounts how she fell in love with a prisoner charged with murder; Rebecca Walker explores a childhood split between disparate racial and cultural landscapes; ZZ Packer remembers her near-abduction from summer camp at a time when local black children were being found murdered; Danzy Senna and Carolyn Ferrell tell tales about being young and biracial in a society that sees only in black and white.

This anthology is as urgent as it is historical?these voices are the future of American literature.


Click for more detail about Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde

by Alexis De Veaux
W. W. Norton & Company (May 01, 2004)
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Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was the author of The Cancer Journals, and an icon of American womanhood, poetry, African American arts and survival. She created a mythic identity for herself that retains its vitality to this day. Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde’s iconic status, charting her childhood; her marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian poet; and her canonisation as a seminal poet of American literature. Lorde’s restless search for a spiritual home finally brought her to the island of St Croix in 1986. This long-awaited first biography draws on the private archives of the poet’s estate, personal journals, and interviews with members of Lorde’s family, friends and lovers. Assessing the cultural legacy of a woman who personified the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, De Veaux pays homage to one of the most courageous, singular voices of American letters.


Click for more detail about Waiting for An Angel: A Novel by Helon Habila Waiting for An Angel: A Novel

by Helon Habila
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 17, 2004)
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Habila’s fictionalization…reveals the true casualties of oppression better than any news or history.—Library Journal Lomba is a young journalist living under military rule in Lagos, Nigeria, the most dangerous city in the world. His min


Click for more detail about Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer by Bruce W. Talamon and Roger Steffens Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer

by Bruce W. Talamon and Roger Steffens
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 17, 2003)
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A photographic and textual meditation on the life of a legend, reissued in special CD-size format.

Twenty years after Bob Marley’s untimely death he remains a powerful worldwide presence. His music is at the top of the reggae charts, while his memory is indelibly etched in the minds of millions of his followers.

In the last two years of his life Marley underwent a dramatic change, becoming a gentler and more philosophical version of himself. He also met photographer Bruce Talamon, to whom he granted unprecedented access, both on the stage and off. The result is this remarkable visual record, which, paired with Roger Steffens’s sensitive text tracing Marley’s life from his youth in Jamaica to worldwide acceptance, captures (in the words of the late Timothy White’s introduction) "the private warmth, social equanimity, zealous determination…and personal magnetism" of Bob Marley.


Click for more detail about Death And The King’s Horseman: A Play by Wole Soyinka Death And The King’s Horseman: A Play

by Wole Soyinka
W. W. Norton & Company (Apr 17, 2002)
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A Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s classic tale of tragic decisions in a traditional African culture. Based on events that took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946, Wole Soyinka’s powerful play concerns the intertwined lives of Elesin Oba, the king’s chief horseman; his son, Olunde, now studying medicine in England; and Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer. The king has died and Elesin, his chief horseman, is expected by law and custom to commit suicide and accompany his ruler to heaven. The stage is set for a dramatic climax when Pilkings learns of the ritual and decides to intervene and Elesin’s son arrives home.


Click for more detail about Police Brutality: An Anthology by Jill Nelson Police Brutality: An Anthology

by Jill Nelson
W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 2001)
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A landmark work by twelve leading critics and community leaders?essential reading for anyone interested in the history of American race relations. Ignited by the infamous shooting of Amadou Diallo, unarmed and innocent, at the hands of New York City police officers, journalist Jill Nelson was moved to assemble this landmark anthology on the topic of police violence and brutality: an indispensable collection of twelve "groundbreaking" (Ebony) essays by a range of contributors?among them academics, historians, social critics, a congressman, and an ex-New York City police detective. This "important and valuable book" (Emerge) places a centuries-old issue in much-needed historical and intellectual context, and underscores the profound influence police brutality has had in shaping the American identity. "[S]hould be read by anyone concerned about ending brutality, and should be required reading in police academies throughout America!"?Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Harvard Law School "Without hysteria or hyperbole, [Nelson] examines the issue of police abuse in literary form."?Emerge "A memorable and useful contribution to an increasingly volatile national dialogue."?Publishers Weekly "[N]ot only timely, but explores and exposes the sickness of this unbalanced, uncivilized Western pastime thoroughly."?Chuck D of Public Enemy, author of Fight the Power: Rap, Race, and Reality


Click for more detail about Code Of The Street: Decency, Violence, And The Moral Life Of The Inner City by Elijah Anderson Code Of The Street: Decency, Violence, And The Moral Life Of The Inner City

by Elijah Anderson
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 17, 2000)
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Unsparing and important… . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.?Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic’s Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules?based largely on an individual’s ability to command respect?is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson’s incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.


Click for more detail about Vice: New and Selected Poems by Ai Ogawa Vice: New and Selected Poems

by Ai Ogawa
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 17, 2000)
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Collected here are poems from Ai’s previous five books’Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and Greed’along with seventeen new poems. Employing her trademark ferocity, these new dramatic monologues continue to mine this award-winning poet’s "often brilliant" (Chicago Tribune) vision.

An Excerpt from Vice


Rapture
A Fiction

Memory is a highway,
where a car is speeding into the sunset.
The man inside that car has a gun.
He says he’ll shoot himself
and be done with it, be dead,
but in the end, he doesn’t do it.
If he had, the path to the truth
would have led straight from the gate
outside his ex-wife’s house,
not end run around it,
leaving a trail of blood
the prosecution says is proof
that he used his power, his juice
to seduce death
by handing her two sacrifices,
but she promised what she would never deliver.
She left him a pair of loaded dice
and severed their connection
with one well-practiced slice.

Now in his cell,
he reads fan letters.
He doesn’t dwell on the past.
If he did, he’d tell you to always go for broke,
because a man who can’t do the distance is a joke,
is a failure.
"You can quote me on that," he says aloud,
then shocked by the sound of his own voice,
chokes back a cry.
When he looks himself in the eye,
he jsut sees a regular guy.
He sees a parade going by.
On the largest float,
the homecoming queen waves to the crowd.
She’s a statuesque blond.
He’s a football hero.
He’s also a black man,
but that is no obstacle.
It’s a license to do the impossible.
He waves back.
Maybe that isn’t really what happened,
but it’s close and he makes the most of it,
when he can see through the smoke
of his desire and rage.
In a flash
he feels the diamonds of hope,
cutting the smooth glass of his mind
into halfs and quarters,
as he runs backward in time,
a football tucked under his arm,
as he crosses the goal line,
only to find the stands are empty
and he is alone in the field.
Concealed in the ball is a bomb.
All he has to do to explode it is throw.
He listens to the silence inhaling,
then he lets go.
That’s when the crowd appears
and over the loudspeaker
he hears his coach, saying, "Buddy, come on home,"
but home is the scene of the crime,
shown on TV so many times
that the murderer and victims cease to exist,
except in peripheral vision
and in the void between goalposts,
thirty-two bits and pieces of his life.
are all that survive of the knife.

(c) 1999 by Ai. All rights reserved.


Click for more detail about On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems by Rita Dove On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (Apr 17, 2000)
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A dazzling new collection by the former Poet Laureate of the United States. In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos", to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.

Joe
sees his son
flicker. Although
the air is not a glass,
watches as he puts his lips to
the brim-then turns away, bored.
He is not mine, this son
who ripens, quiet
poison on a
shelf.

Other poems range from the playfulness of "The First Book" (Open it/Go ahead, it won’t bite./Well_maybe a little.) to the great power of "Black on a Saturday Night":

the wages of living are sin
and the wages of sin are love
and the wages of love are pain
and the wages of pain are philosophy
and that leads definitely to an attitude
and an attitude will get you
nowhere fast so you might as well
keep dancing dancing till
tomorrow gives up with a shout,
’cause there is only
Saturday night, and we are in it-
black as black can,
black as black does,
not a concept
nor a percentage
but a natural law.

The book culminates in "On the Bus with Rosa Parks," a masterful series which brings the reader right into the heart of the civil rights struggle with poems like "Freedom Ride" (but where you sit is where you’ll be/when the fire hits.) and "The situation is intolerable". Here are unintentional heroes, who, with simple acts of courage, change the course of history. People like Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith who violated city public transportation  segregation laws by refusing to give their seats to white passengers, and of course, Rosa Parks, whose legacy for her historic refusal to move to the back of the bus defines the spirit of the struggle (How she sat there,/the time right inside a place/so wrong it was ready.).

In these electrifying, brilliant poems, Dove shows how we are all on that bus with Rosa Parks. Ordinary people with dreams for the future, with a desire for respect, with no need for celebrity but a willingness to do what needs to be done. This is how all of us, heroes or not, must reinvent ourselves each morning. Whether parable or meditation, confession or praise, the poems in ON THE BUS WITH ROSA PARKS confirm Rita Dove’s place as one of the most important American voices of our time.


Click for more detail about Collected Poems Of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde Collected Poems Of Audre Lorde

by Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 17, 2000)
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A complete collection?over 300 poems?from one of this country’s most influential poets. "These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."?Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms?beautifully, forcefully?for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate."?Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by … one of our best contemporary poets… . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving."?Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde’s most potent genius … you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume."?Out Magazine


Click for more detail about The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey by Toi Derricotte The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey

by Toi Derricotte
W. W. Norton & Company (Jun 17, 1999)
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The Black Notebooks is the most profound document I have read on racism in America today… [It] is not just one of the best books on race I have ever read but just simply one of the best books I have ever read. The Black Notebooks is one of the most extraordinary and courageous accounts of race in this country, seen through the eyes of a light-skinned black woman and a respected American poet. It challenges all our preconceived notions of what it means to be black or white, and what it means to be human.


Click for more detail about Yesterday Will Make You Cry by Chester Himes Yesterday Will Make You Cry

by Chester Himes
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 17, 1999)
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“There could not be a fitter time or place for the publication of this great prison novel than today’s United States.” ?H. Bruce Franklin, The Nation A classic restored-the complete and unexpurgated text of a great African-American writer’s brutal and lyrical novel of prison life. First published in reduced and bowdlerized form in 1952 as Cast the First Stone, Yesterday Will Make You Cry was Chester Himes’s first, most powerful, and autobiographical novel. This Old School Books edition presents it for the first time precisely as Himes wrote it, a sardonic masterpiece of debasement and transfiguration in an American penitentiary and one of his most enduring literary achievements.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Honey, Hush!: An Anthology of African American Women’s Humor by Daryl Cumber Dance Honey, Hush!: An Anthology of African American Women’s Humor

by Daryl Cumber Dance
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 17, 1998)
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The vibrant humor of African American women is celebrated in this bold and unique collection that the Miami Herald describes as "breathtakingly broad and deep." In this "dazzling anthology" (Publishers Weekly), Daryl Cumber Dance has collected the often hard-hitting, sometimes risqué, always dramatic humor that arises from the depth of black women’s souls and the breadth of their lives. The eloquent wit and laughter of African American women are presented here in all their written and spoken manifestations: autobiographies, novels, essays, poems, speeches, comic routines, proverbial sayings, cartoons, mimeographed sheets, and folk tales. The chapters proceed thematically, covering the church, love, civil rights, motherly advice, and much more.


Click for more detail about The Farm by Clarence Cooper, Jr. The Farm

by Clarence Cooper, Jr.
W. W. Norton & Company (Jul 17, 1998)
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The Farm is a Dante-esque tour of the levels of hell to be found in a federal drug rehabilitation center and a powerful story of love growing in the most unnatural conditions. It is a stylistic tour de force and one of the most honest and unrelenting novels dealing with drug addiction ever written.


Click for more detail about S. R. O. (Old School Books Series) by Robert Deane Pharr S. R. O. (Old School Books Series)

by Robert Deane Pharr
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 01, 1998)
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College-educated writer and waiter Sid Bailey slowly learns to drop his conventional lifestyle and adopt the behavior of the misfits at the Harlem welfare hotel where he lives.


Click for more detail about Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement by Townsend Davis Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement

by Townsend Davis
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 01, 1998)
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Describes sites of significance to the Civil Rights movement, state-by-state across the South


Click for more detail about Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

by Walter Mosley
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 01, 1997)
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Three decades ago, the young Socrates had, in a burst of drunken rage, murdered a man and a woman with his huge “rock-breaking hands.” Twenty-seven years of hard time in an Indiana prison followed. Now Socrates lives in a cramped two-room apartment in an abandoned building in Watts, scavenging bottles and delivering groceries for a supermarket. In each of the linked stories that comprise this richly brooding work, Socrates, like his namesake, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism. He is an unforgettable presence and his perceptions cast a glow of somber lyricism upon an often harsh world.


Click for more detail about Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol

by Nell Irvin Painter
W. W. Norton & Company (Oct 17, 1997)
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A monumental biography of one of the most important black women of the nineteenth century. Sojourner Truth first gained prominence at an 1851 Akron, Ohio, women’s rights conference, saying, "Dat man over dar say dat woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches… . Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles … and ar’n’t I a woman?"

Sojourner Truth: ex-slave and fiery abolitionist, figure of imposing physique, riveting preacher and spellbinding singer who dazzled listeners with her wit and originality. Straight-talking and unsentimental, Truth became a national symbol for strong black women—indeed, for all strong women. Like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, she is regarded as a radical of immense and enduring influence; yet, unlike them, what is remembered of her consists more of myth than of personality.

Now, in a masterful blend of scholarship and sympathetic understanding, eminent black historian Nell Irvin Painter goes beyond the myths, words, and photographs to uncover the life of a complex woman who was born into slavery and died a legend. Inspired by religion, Truth transformed herself from a domestic servant named Isabella into an itinerant pentecostal preacher; her words of empowerment have inspired black women and poor people the world over to this day. As an abolitionist and a feminist, Truth defied the notion that slaves were male and women were white, expounding a fact that still bears repeating: among blacks there are women; among women, there are blacks.

No one who heard her speak ever forgot Sojourner Truth, the power and pathos of her voice, and the intelligence of her message. No one who reads Painter’s groundbreaking biography will forget this landmark figure and the story of her courageous life. Photographs


Click for more detail about Still I Rise: A Cartoon History Of African Americans by Roland Owen Laird, Taneshia Nash Laird, and Elihu Bey Still I Rise: A Cartoon History Of African Americans

by Roland Owen Laird, Taneshia Nash Laird, and Elihu Bey
W. W. Norton & Company (Oct 01, 1997)
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A complete documentary history of African Americans in one cartoon narrative. As National Book Award winner Charles Johnson points out in his Introduction, the history of African American cartooning is itself a vibrant one, and almost unknown. STILL I RISE is a great contribution that not only recounts history, but also makes history.


Click for more detail about The School on 103rd Street: A Novel (Old School Books) by Roland S. Jefferson The School on 103rd Street: A Novel (Old School Books)

by Roland S. Jefferson
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 1997)
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When Dr. Elwin Carter is confronted in his Watts clinic by two boys terrified by the brutal murder of their friend, his investigations lead him far beyond the usual suspicions of drugs or gang violence. This 1976 first and only novel (potentially an upcoming movie) of forensic psychiatrist Roland Jefferson presents a frighteningly prophetic picture of the subterranean war between the races in America.


Click for more detail about Black in America by Eli Reed Black in America

by Eli Reed
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 17, 1997)
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Noted Magnum photographer Eli Reed’s provocative and often poignant portrait of black life in America. Eli Reed has been documenting the black experience in America from the first time he began taking pictures. Now a member of Magnum, the prestigious photojournalist’s cooperative, he is known for his unflinching coverage of events both large and small. Here we see tender moments between parents and children contrasted with the Los Angeles riots. The joy of a wedding follows the sorrow and anger at the funeral of Yusef Hawkins in Brooklyn. The deceptive innocence of rural life balances the tensions of the urban drug scene. And a 104-year-old woman contemplates her life a few pages away from the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. There is truth in Reed’s work, as well as anger, and compassion. These images communicate to us—sometimes as gently as a kiss and sometimes as cruelly as a bullet. They are part of Eli Reed’s America—and ours. 135 duotones


Click for more detail about Collected Poems by Robert Hayden Collected Poems

by Robert Hayden
Liveright (Feb 17, 1997)
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Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award in its first publication. An introduction by Arnold Rampersad provides a biographical portrait of Hayden and a critical context in which to understand his poetry. Robert Hayden was a fellow of the American Academy of Poets, a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and a professor of English at the University of Michigan. He received numerous awards for his poetry in his lifetime, among them to Hopwood Awards, the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and the Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Arnold Rampersad is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University.


Click for more detail about Giveadamn Brown: A Novel (Old School Books) by Robert Deane Pharr Giveadamn Brown: A Novel (Old School Books)

by Robert Deane Pharr
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 17, 1997)
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In this surreal dark comedy, Larry "Giveadamn" Brown is transformed from a country bumpkin into a crime kingpin when he inherits the Harlem dope and numbers empire of his Uncle Harry. Unable to match firepower with the competition?Sonny, a coiffed millionaire; Baby Doll, a 300-pound Jesus freak; and Studs, a ruthless lesbian?Giveadamn devises a shrewd scheme. His secret weapon: the Golden Fleece, a fantastical machine that defies all known laws of chemistry and physics. When word of it leaks out, Harlem is never going to be the same … .


Click for more detail about Black! by Clarence Cooper, Jr. Black!

by Clarence Cooper, Jr.
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 17, 1997)
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Black! brings together three short novels by Clarence Cooper, Jr., a rediscovered genius of African-American writing. “The Dark Messenger” is a short, sizzling novel in which a reporter for a black newspaper discovers that truth and justice are no match for the next handout from the corrupt powers that be. “Yet Princes Follow" and ”Yet We Many" are both sardonic crime novellas set in the worlds of the numbers racket and Black Muslims, respectively. All of them demonstrate the hard-edged, ultra-hip style of realism that was Clarence Cooper’s trademark.


Click for more detail about The Music of Black Americans: A History (Third Edition) by Eileen Southern The Music of Black Americans: A History (Third Edition)

by Eileen Southern
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 17, 1997)
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A new edition of the classic text on African American music.
Beginning with the arrival of the first Africans in the English colonies, Eileen Southern weaves a fascinating narrative of intense musical activity. As singers, players, and composers, black American musicians are fully chronicled in this landmark book. Now in the third edition, the author has brought the entire text up to date and has added a wealth of new material covering the latest developments in gospel, blues, jazz, classical, crossover, Broadway, and rap as they relate to African American music. Over 50 photographs


Click for more detail about The Norton Anthology of African American Literature by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay The Norton Anthology of African American Literature

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 01, 1996)
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“ If Norton anthologies define the canon, then, with the publication of this volume, African American literature is now assured inclusion… With a star lineup of coeditors, each section is introduced and edited by leading scholars who provide thoughtful overviews and analyses. Any anthology fights against space limitation, and although this one omits some significant works by Zora Neale Hurston and includes nothing by Gayl Jones, it fortunately publishes many longer texts in their entirety—e.g., Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Toni Morrison’s Sula, August Wilson’s Fences, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.”
—D.J. Rosenthal, Choice

All collections. Copyright 1983 The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.

The Editors:

Henry Louis Gates Jr
General Editor
W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities, Chair of the Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University
University of Cambridge Ph.D.
Nellie Y. McKay
General Editor
Professor of American and Afro-American Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Harvard Ph.D.
William Andrews
E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ph.D.
Houston A. Baker Jr.
Albert M Greenfield Professor of Human Relations, Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, University of Pennsylvania

UCLA Ph.D.
Barbara T. Christian
Professor of African American Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Columbia University Ph.D.
Frances Smith Foster
Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Emory University

University of California, San Diego Ph.D.
Deborah E. McDowell
Professor of English, University of Virginia

Purdue University Ph.D.
Robert G. O’Meally
Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, Columbia University

Harvard Ph.D.
Arnold Rampersad
Wood Wilson Professor of Literature and Director of the Program in African-American Studies, Princeton University

Harvard Ph.D.
Hortense Spillers
Professor of English, Cornell University

Brandeis Ph.D.
Richard Yarborough
Associate Professor of English and Afro-American Studies, UCLA

Stanford Ph.D.
 


Book Description

Welcomed on publication as "brilliant, definitive, and a joy to teach from," (Russ Castronovo, University of Miami) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was adopted at more than 1,275 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, the new Second Edition offers these highlights:

Nine new writers The Second Edition includes nine new writers spanning three centuries: Jupiter Hammon, Venture Smith, Martin Delany, Elizabeth Keckley, Gayl Jones, Caryl Phillips, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, and Harryette Mullen.

Strengthened Vernacular Tradition Building on the editors’ view that vernacular expression lives in performance, the original Audio Companion CD has been expanded to a two-CD set; Disc 1, Music, includes vocal and instrumental pieces-from ragtime to Motown. Disc 2, Spoken Word, offers 24 speeches, readings, and performances, from Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Amiri Baraka and Rita Dove.

11 complete longer works Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa: But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America (new); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Nella Larsen, Quicksand (new); Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground; Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; Amiri Baraka, Dutchman; Ed Bullins, Goin’a Buffalo: A Tragifantasy; Adrienne Kennedy, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White; August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (new).

Strengthened Apparatus and a More Readable Format

  • An extensive, new Selected General Bibliography
  • Revised’some entirely rewritten period introductions, headnotes, footnotes, and updated author bibliographies
  • Updated timeline
  • A new trim size and bolder typeface for easier reading

Thoroughly Revised "Literature Since 1975" Succeeding the late Barbara Christian, new editor Cheryl A. Wall has included 5 new writers-poet Harryette Mullen and fiction writers Gayl Jones, Caryl Phillips, Edwidge Danticat, and Colson Whitehead. In addition, Wall has rewritten the period introduction and many headnotes in their entirety and updated all apparatus.

Course Guide by Joycelyn A. Moody, University of Washington Thoroughly revised, the Course Guide is now a more helpful resource. It provides a wealth of thematic approaches to teaching with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, teaching suggestions for individual works, questions and research projects, bibliographic resources for all authors, and a special section on teaching the vernacular traditions. Throughout, the Guide suggests ways to integrate the content of the Audio Companion CDs with the printed texts. —This text refers to the Paperback edition.


Click for more detail about The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Third Edition Vol. 1 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A. Smith The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Third Edition Vol. 1

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A. Smith
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 01, 1996)
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An exciting revision of the best-selling anthology for African American literary survey courses.

The much-anticipated Third Edition brings together the work of 140 writers from 1746 to the present writing in all genres, as well as performers of vernacular forms―from spirituals and sermons to jazz and hip hop. Fresh scholarship, new visuals and media, and new selections―with an emphasis on contemporary writers―combine to make The Norton Anthology of African American Literature an even better teaching tool for instructors and an unmatched value for students.

About the Editors:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.

Valerie Smith (Ph.D. University of Virginia), General Editor. Dean of the College, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, professor of English and African American Studies, and founding director of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University. Author of Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative; Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings; and Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination. Editor of several works, including Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video; African-American Writers; and New Essays on Song of Solomon.

William L. Andrews (Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is the editor of The Literature of Slavery and Freedom; co-editor of The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance. He is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is general editor of Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Other works include The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt; To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865; Sisters of the Spirit; The Curse of Caste by Julia C. Collins; Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave; and Slave Narratives after Slavery.

Kimberly Benston (Ph.D. Yale University), Editor, The Black Arts Era. Francis B. Gummere Professor of English, former provost and director of the Hurford Center for Arts and Humanities, Haverford College. Author of Performing Blackness: Enacting African-American Modernism and Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. Editor of several works, including Speaking for You: Ralph Ellison’s Cultural Vision; Larry Neal: A Callaloo Anthology; Baraka: A Collection of Essays; and the forthcoming books Malcolm X: A Critical Casebook; Who Blew Up America?: African-American Culture and the Crisis of ‘Terrorism’; and the Norton Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Brent Hayes Edwards (Ph.D. Columbia University), Editor, The Harlem Renaissance. Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association; and the forthcoming Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. Co-editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies and the journal Social Text.

Frances Smith Foster (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego), Editor, The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance; Co-Editor, The Literature of Slavery and Freedom. Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Emory University. Author of “Til Death or Distance Do Us Part”: Love and Marriage in African America; Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892; and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative. Co-editor of the Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Editor of several works, including Love and Marriage in Early African America; Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; and the Norton Critical Edition of Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Deborah E. McDowell (Ph.D. Purdue), Co-Editor, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism. Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia. Founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers series; co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of "The Changing Same”: Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; editor of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, and numerous articles and essays.

Robert G. O’Meally (Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, The Vernacular Tradition. Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature and founder of the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University. Author of The Jazz Singers; The Craft of Ralph Ellison; Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday; and Romare Bearden; A Black Odyssey. Editor of the essay collections History and Memory in African American Culture; New Essays on Invisible Man: Tales of the Congaree; The Jazz Cadence of American Culture; co-editor of History and Memory in African American Culture and Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies.

Hortense Spillers (Ph.D. Brandeis), Co-Editor, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University. Author of the essay collection Black, White, and in Color. Editor of the collection Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text; co-editor with Marjorie Pryse of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and the Literary Tradition, and an editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Director of Issues in Critical Investigation (ICI), an initiative to stimulate new scholarship in African diasporic studies, which she founded in 2007; founding editor of The A-Line Journal, A Journal of Progressive Commentary, which she launched in 2013. Recent work has appeared in Callaloo and boundary 2.

Cheryl A. Wall (Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, Literature Since 1975. Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, Rutgers University. Author of Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition and Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Editor of Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories and Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs & Other Writings; two volumes of criticism on Hurston’s fiction, “Sweat”: Texts and Contexts and Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook; and Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Co-editor with Linda J. Holmes of Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara.


Click for more detail about Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol

by Nell Irvin Painter
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 01, 1996)
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Sojourner Truth: ex-slave and fiery abolitionist, figure of imposing physique, riveting preacher and spellbinding singer who dazzled listeners with her wit and originality. Straight talking and unsentimental, Truth became a national symbol for strong black women - indeed, for all strong women. Like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, she is regarded as a radical of immense and enduring influence; yet unlike them, what is remembered of her consists more of myth than of historical fact. Now, in a masterful blend of scholarship and sympathetic understanding, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter goes beyond the myths, words, and photographs to uncover the life of a complex woman who was born into slavery and died a legend. Inspired by religion, Truth transformed herself from a domestic servant named Isabella into an itinerant Pentecostal preacher; her words of empowerment have inspired black women and poor people the world over to this day. As an abolitionist and a feminist, Truth defied the stereotype of "the slave" as male and "the woman" as white - expounding a fact that still bears repeating: among blacks there are women; among women, there are blacks.


Click for more detail about Coal by Audre Lorde Coal

by Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 1996)
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Of Coal, the poet and critic Hayden Carruth said, “For us these words indeed are jewels in the open light.’ Coal is one of the earliest collections of poems by a woman who, Adrienne Rich writes, “…for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet”.

Marilyn Hacker captures the essence of Lorde and her poetry: “Black, lesbian, mother, urban woman: none of Lorde’s selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems.”

Coal

I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a words, coloured
by who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the crash of sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book - buy and sign and tear apart -
and come whatever will all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Other know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me

Love is word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside
Now take my word for jewel in the open light.


Click for more detail about The Angry Ones by John A. Williams The Angry Ones

by John A. Williams
W. W. Norton & Company (Jul 01, 1996)
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The Angry Ones is a powerful story of the hidden and (unacknowledged) racism that faces an educated black man in the professional world and the painful truths that warp interracial sex. Steve Hill, a young black army officer, travels east from California to New York in search of a simple dream: a secure job with a future. He lands a position as a publicity director for a vanity press, and his experiences soon rip the facade of hypocrisy and condescension from a liberal and superficially hip society with its own peculiar political and sexual agendas. Based on the author’s own experiences, The Angry Ones is a searing look at the hidden conflicts and compromises underlying black-white relations.

Original title: One for New York.


Click for more detail about Mother Love: Poems by Rita Dove Mother Love: Poems

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 1996)
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Calling upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Mother Love examines the love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter, each daughter a potential mother. In settings as various as a patio in Arizona, the bistros and boulevards of Paris, the sun-drenched pyramids of Mexico?and directly from the Greek myth itself?Rita Dove explores this relationship and the dilemma of letting go.


Click for more detail about Where a Nickel Costs a Dime: Poems by Willie Perdomo Where a Nickel Costs a Dime: Poems

by Willie Perdomo
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 17, 1996)
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A first book of poems by one of the best new voices to emerge from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.Where a Nickel Costs a Dime captures the hip-hop rhythms and in-your-face intensity of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a downtown Manhattan club where the hottest young poets are finding their fame.

Willie Perdomo’s poems, in the tradition of Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and Ntozake Shange, meet at the intersection of the street and the academy.

The world in these piercing and heartbreaking poems is Spanish Harlem, "where night turns to day without sleep," where "Puerto Rico stays on our minds when the fresh breeze of cafe con leche y pan con mantequilla comes through half-opened windows and under our doors," where "babies fall asleep to the bark of a German shepherd," where "Independence Day is celebrated everyday," where "the police come into your house without knocking. They throw us off rooftops and say we slipped. They shoot my father and say he was crazy. They put a bullet in my head and say they found me that way."

Blending images of street life, drugs, and AIDS against hope and determination, Willie Perdomo is a cutting-edge bard who speaks to the soul of his generation.


Click for more detail about RL’s Dream by Walter Mosley RL’s Dream

by Walter Mosley
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 1995)
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When a black musician in New York is evicted for non-payment of rent, a white woman living in the same apartment block takes him in. He is Soupspoon Wise, a gentle jazz guitarist from Mississippi who has cancer. She is Kiki Waters, a drinking, swearing redhead from Arkansas who works on Wall Street. The novel traces their manage. RL’s Dream is a novel about the blues as an expression of black poetry and black tragedy and how they sit in judgment on the American experience. In contemporary New York, aging bluesman Soupspoon Wise is alone, ill, and dying. He has played his music in a thousand bars, clubs, and juke joints, but never so memorably as the time he played with one Robert Johnson in the Mississippi delta. That brief, indelible encounter with the great genius of country blues haunts Soupspoon, much as Johnson himself is said to have been possessed by Satan. And so Soupspoon proceeds to tell his story to Kiki Waters, the young white woman who has taken him in, another refugee from a South she can neither deny nor escape.


Click for more detail about The Black Unicorn: Poems (Norton Paperback) by Audre Lorde The Black Unicorn: Poems (Norton Paperback)

by Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 1995)
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The Black Unicorn is a collection of poems by a woman who, Adrienne Rich writes, "for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet." Rich continues: "Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader’s eye."


Click for more detail about Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women by Patricia Bell-Scott Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women

by Patricia Bell-Scott
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 17, 1995)
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Life Notes is the first collection devoted exclusively to writings from the journals, diaries, and personal notebooks of contemporary black women.
These intensely personal testimonies illuminate the complexities of black women’s lives, offering unique reflections about self, family, intimacy, work, politics, life transitions, violation, and recovery.


Click for more detail about Divine Days by Leon Forrest Divine Days

by Leon Forrest
W. W. Norton & Company (Jan 17, 1995)
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A unanimous chorus of critical acclaim greeted this powerful novel last year?one of the most significant works of African-American fiction since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This huge oratorio of a novel unfolds over seven days in the life of Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright making ends meet tending bar at his Aunt Eloise’s Night Lounge. A Rabelaisian cast of characters and a Shakespearean range of voices crowd the pages of this book, an infinitely rich and suggestive tapestry of Black-American life and identity.


Click for more detail about Greed by Ai Ogawa Greed

by Ai Ogawa
W. W. Norton & Company (Oct 17, 1994)
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Greed for money, power, sex, and love is the theme of this volume of dramatic monologues by the poet theNew York Times Book Reviewhas called "one of the most singular voices of her generation." Beginning with "Riot Act," a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, Ai explored racial and sexual politics through the voices of diverse characters.


Click for more detail about The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems, 1987-1992 by Audre Lorde The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems, 1987-1992

by Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 1994)
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“This volume resonates with some of the finest poems Audre Lorde ever wrote: sinewy, lyrical, celebratory even in the face of death, and always political in the best sense. Now the poet is gone?but the work lives, and sings.” —Robin Morgan

This collection, 39 poems written between 1987 and 1992, is the final volume written by Lorde, ”a major American poet whose concerns are international, and whose words have left their mark on many lives,” in the words of Adrienne Rich. Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was the author of ten volumes of poetry and five works of prose. She was named New York State Poet in 1991; her other honors include the Manhattan Borough President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994.


Click for more detail about Our Dead Behind Us: Poems by Audre Lorde Our Dead Behind Us: Poems

by Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 1994)
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In this collection, Audre Lorde gives us poems that explore "differences as creative tensions, and the melding of past strength / pain with future hope / fear; the present being the vital catalyst, the motivating force?activism." As Marilyn Hacker has written, "Black, lesbian, mother, cancer survivor, urban woman: none of Lorde’s selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems."


Click for more detail about The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical by Nell Irvin Painter The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical

by Nell Irvin Painter
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 17, 1993)
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“Among the many exemplary qualities of this narrative and its hero is their lack of sentimentality. For Hosea Hudson, there is no romance of American Communism; instead, his relationship with the Communist Party is a model of mutual exploitation… . [A] marvelous book. Moving, fearful, and funny, Hudson and Painter’s Narrative is as valuable an American life as has ever been wrested from anonymity.” ?Benita Eisler, The Nation Born into a Georgia sharecropper family in 1898, Hosea Hudson moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to work in the steel mills in the turbulent 1930s and 1940s and became a member of the Communist Party as well as president of a CIO union local. It was a hard, dangerous life, to be black and communist and pro-union, and Hudson talked about that life to Nell painter, who brilliantly recreates it in this collaborative oral autobiography.


Click for more detail about Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New by Audre Lorde Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New

by Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company (Oct 17, 1992)
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"Undersong is a remarkable poetic document…."—Adrienne Rich


Click for more detail about Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction by Nell Irvin Painter Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction

by Nell Irvin Painter
W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 1992)
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The first major migration to the North of ex-slaves.


Click for more detail about The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology by Ishmael Reed The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology

by Ishmael Reed
W. W. Norton & Company (Dec 17, 1991)
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This anthology includes 30 selections from a decade of award-winning fiction. Since 1976 the Before Columbus Foundation has been devoted to the task of redefining our notion of "mainstream" American literature to reflect this country’s multicultural, multi-ethnic richness and diversity. Since 1980 it has sponsored the American Book Awards.


Click for more detail about Grace Notes: Poems by Rita Dove Grace Notes: Poems

by Rita Dove
W. W. Norton & Company (Mar 17, 1991)
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With this her fourth book of poems, Rita Dove expands her role as a leading voice in contemporary American letters. The title of the collection serves as an umbrella for the intimate concerns expressed in the forty-eight poems; in music, grace notes are those added to the basic melody, the embellishments that?if played or sung at the right moment with just the right touch?can break your heart. Isn’t this what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks as she explored autobiographical events, most from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then turns to the shadowy areas of regret and memory. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.


Click for more detail about Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 by Nell Irvin Painter Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919

by Nell Irvin Painter
W. W. Norton & Company (Apr 17, 1989)
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Winner of the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize.


Click for more detail about Beirut: City of Regrets by Eli Reed Beirut: City of Regrets

by Eli Reed
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 28, 1988)
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Beirut, once called the "Paris of the Middle East,’ is now half rubble and all killing zone. Even if one has a vivid memory, it is difficult to recall the city as it was or to imagine what it must be like today. This book helps to bridge the inability to visualize war-torn Lebanon. More at bookverdict.com


Click for more detail about You May Plow Here - the Narrative of Sara Brooks by Sara Brooks You May Plow Here - the Narrative of Sara Brooks

by Sara Brooks
W. W. Norton & Company (Feb 12, 1986)
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“A wonderful book•funny, sad, packed with action and information about life in black Alabama in the decades before World War II… . A welcome addition to the growing of books by and about black women.” •Dorothy Sterling, author of We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century The daughter of a freeholder, Sara Brooks was born in 1911 on her parents’ subsistence farm in west Alabama. Here in her own words, she makes us understand what it felt like to be young, black, innocent, and steeped in the ways of a black rural world that has largely been lost to us.


Click for more detail about Scene by Clarence Cooper, Jr. Scene

by Clarence Cooper, Jr.
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 01, 1984)
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The Scene is an urban half-world of drug pushers and users, of pimps and prostitutes and narcotics detectives, laid bare in this explosive novel. From The Panic, the time of no dope, to The Man, who controls its ebb and flow on the streets, The Scene is a gripping work of heightened, hellish realism—a harrowing masterpiece of drug literature.


Click for more detail about Readings in Black American Music (Second Edition) by Eileen Southern Readings in Black American Music (Second Edition)

by Eileen Southern
W. W. Norton & Company (Aug 17, 1983)
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In this companion volume to The Music of Black Americans, Eileen Southern draws on letters, journals, memoirs, ledgers, books, articles, and even slave advertisements in newspapers to illuminate the story told that historical survey, now in its Third Edition. The collection includes documents dating from early America through the twentieth century. Monumental figures such as Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, W. E. B. DuBois, W. C. Handy, Ethel Waters, Dizzy Gillespie, Imamu Baraka, and Martha Jackson are represented, as are several complete musical works, by Francis Johnson and others.


Click for more detail about The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith by Lillian Smith and Michelle Cliff (Editor) The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith

by Lillian Smith and Michelle Cliff (Editor)
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 17, 1982)
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“This book brings Lillian Smith into focus as an unjustly neglected writer of force and talent and a courageous crusader for the unfettered potential of the human spirit.” —Publishers Weekly

This volume collects Lillian Smith’s speeches and essays, under three headings. In “Addressed to the South,” they are a historical record of segregation and the opposition to segregation. In “Words That Chain Us and Words That Set Us Free,” they discuss the power of language to change political and social situations, the necessity of respect for people’s differences, the groping for meaning that we do, and the political role of the creative person. The speeches and essays in “Of Women, Men, and Autobiography” deal with such topics as the difference in experience of women and men, the power and powerlessness of women, and the complexities of autobiographical truth.


Click for more detail about American Journal: Poems by Robert Hayden American Journal: Poems

by Robert Hayden
Liveright (Jan 17, 1982)
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Book by Hayden, Robert


Click for more detail about FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr: From “Solo” to Memphis by David J. Garrow FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr: From “Solo” to Memphis

by David J. Garrow
W. W. Norton & Company (Sep 01, 1981)
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FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr: From "Solo" to Memphis by David Garrow.


Click for more detail about The District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History by David Levering Lewis The District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History

by David Levering Lewis
W. W. Norton & Company (Nov 01, 1976)
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The States and the Nation Series, of which this volume is a part, is designed to assist the American people in a serious look at the ideals they have espoused and the experiences they have undergone in the history of the nation. The content of every volume represents the scholarship, experience, and opinions of its author. The costs of writing and editing were met mainly by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. The project was administered by the American Association for State and Local History, a nonprofit learned society, working with an Editorial Board of distinguished editors, authors, and historians.


Click for more detail about Angle Of Ascent: New And Selected Poems by Robert Hayden Angle Of Ascent: New And Selected Poems

by Robert Hayden
Liveright (Nov 17, 1975)
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Nothing superfluous, nothing lacking. William Hazlitt’s highest praise for good prose can justly be applied to the poetry of Robert Hayden. In his new poems, as before, but with a new mixture of modes, Hayden takes up, celebrates, and contends with the history of his people. He is involved with his Black Americanness, without being confined by it. The famous story elements can be found here but above all a renewed delight in the revelatory possibilities of the languages. In addition to the new poems, all the best of Hayden’s earlier work is here, including much that has for too long been unavailable.


Click for more detail about Black Inventors of America  by McKinley Burt, Jr. Black Inventors of America

by McKinley Burt, Jr.
National Book Company (Jun 01, 1969)
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How many industries vital to America’s success have been profoundly influenced by the contributions of African-Americans? Automobiles, railroads, trucking, communication, footwear, agricultural produce, and sugar refining, to name a few. Who are these individuals, and how did they come to make their contributions? Who was the Real McCoy?

This book moves beyond the realm of hearsay and folklore… and tells the truth about the very real and magnificent accomplishments of a talented race of people. Passing on knowledge of these triumphs to children and young adults is especially important.

The following is a partial list of African-Americans whose innovative and technological achievements have influenced and contributed to American Industry, Commerce and Culture in our global society. As referenced in Black Inventors of America:

 

(A)
Air Conditioning Unit F.M. Jones, July 12, 1949
Air Ship J.F. Pickering, Feb. 20, 1900
Almanac Benjamin Banneker, Approx. 1791
Automatic Air Brake Granville T. Woods, June 10, 1902
Automatic gear shift Richard Spikes, February 28, 1932

(B)
Baby buggy W.H. Richardson, June 18, 1899
Bicycle Frame L.R. Johnson, October 10, 1899
Blood plasma bag Charles Drew, Approx. 1945

(C)
Cellular phone Henry T. Sampson, July 6, 1971
Child’s Carriage W.H. Richardson, June 18, 1889
Churn A.C. Richardson, Feb. 17, 1891
Clothes Dryer G.T. Sampson, June 6, 1862

(D)
Detachable Car Fender R.Hearness, July 4, 1899
Dough Kneader L. Bell, Dec. 10, 1872
Door knob & stop O. Dorsey, December 10, 1878

(E)
Egg beater Willie Johnson, February 5, 1884
ElectroMechanical Brake Granville T. Woods, Aug. 16, 1887
Elevator Alexander Miles, October 11, 1867
Elevator Device J. Cooper, April 2, 1895
Electric lamp bulb Lewis Latimer, March 21, 1882
Electric Railway System Granville T. Woods, Jan. 13, 1903
Eye Protector P. Johnson, Nov. 2, 1880

(F)
Fire Escape Ladder J.B. Winters, May 7, 1878
Fire Extinguisher T. Marshall, October 26, 1872
Folding Bed L.C. Bailey, July 18, 1899
Folding Chair Purdy & Sadgwar, June 11, 1889
Fountain pen W.B. Purvis, January 7, 1890
Furniture Castor D.A. Fisher, March 14, 1876

(G)
Gas Burner B.F. Jackson, April 4, 1899
Gas Mask Garrett Morgan, October 13, 1914
Golf Tee T. Grant, December 12, 1899
Guitar Robert Fleming, Jr., March 3, 1886

(H)

Hair brush Lydia Newman, November 15, 18-
Heating Apparatus B.F. Jackson, March 1, 1898
Horse shoe J. Ricks, March 30, 1886

(I)
Ice cream scooper A.L. Cralle, February 2, 1897
Invalid Cot B.F.Cargill, July 25, 1899
Ironing board Sarah Boone, December 30, 1887

(J)
Joiner’s Clamp D.A. Fisher, Apr. 20, 1875

(K)
Key chain F. J. Loudin, January 9, 1894

(L)
Lantern Michael C. Harve, August 19, 1884
Lawn Mower L. A. Burr, May 19, 1889
Lawn Sprinkler Design Elijah McCoy, Sept. 26, 1899
Lemon Squeezer J.T. White, Dec. 8, 1896
Life Saving Apparatus J. Wormley, May 4, 1881
Life Saving Guards for
Trains & Street Cars J.H. Robinson, Mar. 14 & Apr. 25, 1899
Lubricator Elijah McCoy, May 27, 1893

(M)
Machine for Cleaning
Seed Cotton P. Walker, Feb. 16, 1897
Mailbox Paul L. Downing, October 27, 1891
Mop T.W. Stewart, June 13, 1893
Motor Frederick M. Jones, June 27, 1939

(N)
Nailing Machine J.E. Matzeliger, Feb. 25, 1896

(O)
Oil Stove J. Standard, Oct. 29, 1899

(P)
Peanut Butter George Washington Carver, 1896
Pencil sharpener J. L. Love, November 23, 1897
Planter & Cultivator G.W. Murray, June 5, 1894
Printing Press W.A. Lavalette, Sept. 17, 1878
Propeller for Vessels G. Toliver, April 28, 1891

(R)
Railcar Coupling A.J. Beard, Nov. 23, 1897
Railway Switch W.H. Jackson, March 9, 1897
Railway Telegraphy Granville T. Woods, Nov.15, 1887
Refrigerator J. Standard, June 14, 1891
Refrigration
Control Device F.M. Jones, Jan. 8, 1952
Rotary Dining Table D. Johnson, Jan. 15, 1888
Rotary Engine B.H. Taylor, Apr. 23, 1878

(S)
Scaffold H. Pickett, June 30, 1874
Shoe Lasting Machine J.E. Matzeliger, Sept. 22, 1891
Spark plug Edmond Berger, February 2, 1839
Spring Seat for Chairs A.B. Blackburn, Apr. 3, 1888
Steam Boiler Furnace Granville T. Woods, June 3, 1884
Steam Cylinder Lubricator Elijah McCoy, Feb. 1, 1876
Stethoscope Imhotep, Ancient Egypt
Stove T.A. Carrington, July 25, 1876
Straightening comb Madame C.J. Walker, Approx. 1905
Street Sprinkling Apparatus M.W. Binga, July 22, 1879
Street sweeper Charles B. Brooks, March 17, 1890
Sugar Refinement (The"Rillieux"Process) Norman Rillieux, Dec. 10, 1846
Swinging Chairs P. Johnson, Nov. 15, 1881

(T)
Telephone Transmitter Granville T. Woods, Dec. 2, 1884
Thermostat control Frederick M. Jones, February 23, 1960
Ticket Dispensing Machine Frederick M. Jones, June 27, 1939
Traffic light Garret Morgan, November 20, 1923
Tricycle M. A. Cherry, May 6, 1686
Two-Cycle Gas Engine Frederick M. Jones, March 11, 1947
Typewriter Burridge and Marshman, April 7, 1885

(U)
Umbrella Stand W.C. Carter, Aug. 4th, 1885

(V)
Velocipede M.A. Cherry, May 8, 1888
Ventilated Shoe H. Faulkner, April 29, 1890

(W)
Watch Benjamin Banneker, late 18th Century
Water Closets for Railway Cars Latimer & Brown, Feb. 10, 1874