Books
Books
Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong
Nearly 50 years after his death, Louis Armstrong remains one of the 20th century's most iconic figures. Popular fans still appreciate his later hits such as "Hello, Dolly!" and "What a Wonderful World," while in the jazz community, he remains...
$34.95
Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix
New York Times Book Review • "The Best Books to Give This Year"Publishers Weekly • Best Books of the Year (Nonfiction) A shattering new biography of rock music’s most outrageous―and tragic―genius. Over fifty years after his death, Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) is celebrated as the...
$28.95
Collected Poems
A representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement, spanning the 4 decades of her literary career.Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez’s poetry, this compilation is sure to inspire...
$29.95
Why Wakanda Matters: What Black Panther Reveals about Psychology, Identity, and Communication
$14.95
Why Wakanda Matters: What Black Panther Reveals about Psychology, Identity, and Communication
In 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally delivered on something fans had long been waiting for: a feature film with a solo Black superhero. Black Panther introduced viewers to the stunning world of Wakanda, a fictional African country with incredible technological...
$14.95
Funeral Diva
Funeral Divais the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry! A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art. "Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has...
$16.95
Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner
The narrative of Tumult! The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner is an extended exploration of the magical transformation of shy country girl Anna Mae Bullock into the boisterous force of nature we know today as Tina Turner. This is creative...
$24.95
In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
This biography of entertainment legend Sammy Davis, Jr. is an enthralling portrait of one of the most recognizable figures from the golden age of American show business. Davis, a guarded man who protected his private life with great vigor, lived...
$20.00
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected. These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with...
$28.00
Black Oscars: From Mammy to Minny, What the Academy Awards Tell Us about African Americans
Second only to the Super Bowl in audience size and revenue, the Oscars are more than a mere ceremony; they are a phenomenon. It is only recently that movements such as #OscarsSoWhite have raised awareness around the more complicated legacy...
$39.00
This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey, on and Off the Record
A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock’s greatest talents: Prince.Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his...
$29.99
The Brother You Choose: Paul Coates and Eddie Conway Talk about Life, Politics, and the Revolution
$45.00
The Brother You Choose: Paul Coates and Eddie Conway Talk about Life, Politics, and the Revolution
In 1971, Eddie Conway, Lieutenant of Security for the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of murdering a police officer and sentenced to life plus thirty years behind bars. Paul Coates was a community worker at the...
$45.00
Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
Say I’m Dead is the true story of family secrets, separation, courage, and trans-formation through five generations of interracial relationships. Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana’s antimiscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson’s black father and white mother fled...
$28.99
The Golden Thirteen: How Black Men Won the Right to Wear Navy Gold
The story of the 13 courageous black men who integrated the officer corps of the US Navy during World War II—leading desegregation efforts across America and anticipating the civil rights movementThrough oral histories and original interviews with surviving family members,...
$28.95
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry
John Murillo’s second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a...
$16.95
The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this landmark investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race.In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have...
$28.00
Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation
An illuminating journey to racial reconciliation experienced by two Americans—one black and one white. The 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, arguably the worst in our country’s history, has been widely unknown for the better part of a century, thanks to the whitewashing...
$27.95
The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s
In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto...
$25.95
Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems
Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poetI think now more than halfOf life is death but I can’t dieEnough for all the life I seeIn Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane...
$25.00
Here Is the Sweet Hand: Poems
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRYThe poems in Here is the Sweet Hand explore solitude as a way of seeing. In particular, the speakers in francine j. harris’ third collection explore the mystique, and myth, of female...
$25.00
Daughter of the Boycott: Carrying on a Montgomery Family's Civil Rights Legacy
In 1950, before Montgomery, Alabama, knew Martin Luther King Jr., before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger, before the city’s famous bus boycott, a Negro man named Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed by a...
$27.99
Seeing the Body: Poems
Nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in PoetryAn elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness "bodies" of grief and healing. Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes...
$26.95
The Age of Phillis
Poems imagine the life and times of Phillis WheatleyIn 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research,...
$26.95
Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole
One of the most popular and memorable American musicians of the 20th century, Nat King Cole (1919-65) is remembered today as both a pianist and a singer, a feat rarely accomplished in the world of popular music. Now, in this...
$34.95
Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture
A Kirkus Best Book of the Year Stamped from the Beginning meets You Can't Touch My Hair in this timely and resonant essay collection from Guardian contributor and prominent BBC race correspondent Emma Dabiri, exploring the ways in which black hair has been appropriated and stigmatized throughout history,...
$16.99
Daylight: Poems
Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Award for Lesbian PoetrydayliGht is a dazzling collection of poems from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race.Growing up,...
$15.00
Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty
From martyr to insult, how “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics. Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their...
$18.95
Slave Play
“The single most daring thing I’ve seen in a theater in a long time.” — Wesley Morris, New York Times The Old South lives on at the MacGregor Plantation—in the breeze, in the cotton fields…and in the crack of the whip....
$15.95
Jump the Clock: New & Selected Poems
Erica Hunt writes at the intersection of poetry and emancipatory politics―racial and gender justice, feminist ethics, and participatory democracy―showing us that altering our reading strategies frames our experiences. Ultimately, she finds that words matter, savoring the small ones: articles, pronouns,...
$19.95
The Malevolent Volume
Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of...
$16.95
Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest
An AudioFile Best Audiobook of 2020The first in-depth biography of the legendary singer and “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” who combatted racism and prejudice through her music.Odetta channeled her anger and despair into some of the most powerful folk music the...
$28.95