Biography

Available 10/15/2009New York Times­ best-selling author Cornel West is one of America’s most provocative and admired public intellectuals. Whether in the classroom, the streets, the prisons, or the church, Dr. West’s uncluttered brilliance has been a...

He is one of the great voices in African-American history: Booker T. Washington rose from a boyhood in shackles in West Virginia-he was eight when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution freed all slaves in 1865-to the status of national hero. In...

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through...

An incisive and insightful memoir by one of the most beloved icons of nineties television Jaleel White, the actor who portrayed Steve Urkel on the hit sitcom Family Matters. At the tender age of twelve, Jaleel White auditioned for the role of Steve...

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. The author of the New York Times bestselling The Book...

A dazzling hybrid of personal memoir and criticism, considering the work of Black visual artists as a means to explore loss, legacy, and the reclamation of life through art.At the age of twenty-one, Erica Cardwell finds herself in New York City, reeling...

From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing and personal work to date--a brutally honest, surprisingly poignant, and deeply intimate memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering...

An award-winning journalist, TV political analyst, and creator of theGrio documentary, Afro-Latinx Revolution: Puerto Rico, recounts her experiences as an African American and Puerto Rican woman, reflecting on her improbable journey from Syracuse to...

Find wisdom, inspiration, and new insight in this definitive volume of empowering quotes from the Pan African world. With over 60 quotations--carefully researched by National Black Cultural Information Trust founder, Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor--Black...

"The conscience of the AI revolution" (Fortune) explains how we've arrived at an era of AI harms and oppression, and what we can do to avoid its pitfalls. "Dr. Joy Buolamwini has been an essential figure in bringing irresponsible, profit-hungry tech...

With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author's struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father's strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find...

From Donald Bogle, the award-winning author of Hollywood Black and leading authority on Black cinema history, this is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive and lavish biography of Hollywood's first African American movie goddess. Lena Horne's life and...

The autobiography of a Black woman who defied nineteenth-century conventions to become a preacher, popular speaker, abolitionist, and women's rights activist. Sojourner Truth was an incredible, remarkable, epoch-defying woman who escaped from slavery and...

New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nurse shortage. So begins the remarkable true story of the Black nurses who helped cure one of the world's deadliest plagues: tuberculosis. During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when...

A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man's life At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but...