Cultural Literature

An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love As heard on NPR's Fresh Air A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our...

Ernest Withers took some of the most legendary images of the 1950s and '60s: Martin Luther King, Jr., riding a newly integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Till's uncle pointing an accusatory finger across the courtroom at his nephew's killer;...

Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10 million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar's sophomore album in the hours after its release. To Pimp a Butterfly was widely hailed as an instant classic, garnering...

A contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy. The Black Technical Object aims at introducing the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis--a system of racism...

He was a son of Africa who became father to a nation and, for billions of people around the world, a beacon of hope, courage, and perseverance in the face of opposition. Now, acclaimed poet Maya Angelou honors the life and remarkable soul of Nelson...

In this comprehensive book, published to coincide with a groundbreaking Tate exhibition, leading scholars examine how "the Black Atlantic," a key concept in post-colonial studies coined by British academic Paul Gilroy in 1993, applies to art, and in...

American pop music is arguably this country's greatest cultural contribution to the world, and its singular voice and virtuosity were created by a shining thread of Black women geniuses stretching back to the country's founding. This is their surprising,...

"Warm, witty, imaginative. . . . This is a rich and winning book."--The New YorkerDust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature's most...

Ngugi has put together a new collection under an old title, rewriting most of the pieces that appeared in the original 1981 edition, and adding completely new essays, such as 'Freedom of Expression', written for the campaign to try to save Ken Saro-Wiwa...

"Ford's overlap of past and present, narrative and commentary is masterful, and makes this volume all the more valuable to those readers wise enough to allow the past to inform the future. Of Blood and Sweat is a myth-busting work of genius that will...

From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker's fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the only authoritative edition of all three autobiographies by the escaped slave who became a great American leader.   Here in this Library of America volume are collected Frederick Douglass's three autobiographical...

NAACP 2017 Image Award Finalist2018 Michigan Notable Books honoreeThe author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit--a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that...

The Negro Leagues are Major Leagues is a unique introduction to the history of the segregation of professional baseball, telling the story of the Negro Leagues while simultaneously recounting how researchers, statisticians, and historians rebuilt and...

A thoughtful, insider view of The Five Percenters-a deeply complex and misunderstood community whose ideas and symbols influenced the rise of hip-hop. Misrepresented in the media as a black parallel to the Hell's Angels, portrayed as everything from a...

"A love letter to our people--full of fury and passion.-- José Olivarez, award-winning poet and author of Citizen Illegal If you could take Rodolfo Gonzales epic poem 'I Am Joaquin' and explain it through compelling, personal narrative in twenty-first...