Literary Criticism

The Messenger was the third most popular magazine of the Harlem Renaissance after The Crisis and Opportunity. Unlike the other two magazines, The Messenger was not tied to a civil rights organization. Labor activist A. Philip Randolph and economist...

Baldwin on race is Baldwin on the white American psyche.... The Cross of Redemption becomes an absorbing portrait of Baldwin's time--and of him. --New York Review of Books   A revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays,...

A landmark anthology of forty poets that brought serious attention to writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. The poetry, the prefaces, and Johnson's critical notes have made this book a classic. Indices.

One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing and lectures from the last twenty-three years. For...

The Encyclopedia of Black Comics, focuses on people of African descent who have published significant works in the United States or have worked across various aspects of the comics industry. The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers,...

The first novel by "master of mystery" (The New York Times) Walter Mosley, featuring Easy Rawlins, the most iconic African American detective in all of fiction. Named one of the "best 100 mystery novels of all time" by the Mystery Writers of America,...

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz--situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and...

Baldwin's Harlem is an intimate portrait of the life and genius of one of our most brilliant literary minds: James Baldwin. Perhaps no other writer is as synonymous with Harlem as James Baldwin (1924-1987). The events there that shaped his youth...

By the time of her death, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of...

In Open Admissions Danica Savonick traces the largely untold story of the teaching experience of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the City University of New York (cuny) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period,...

"James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. . . . He was a giant." -- Maya Angelou This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year...

A monumental collection by one of America's greatest authors of children's literature -- and the launch of a new imprint, ReLIT, that republishes lost classics for a modern readership! Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002) was not only one of the most...

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time. Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of...

This long-awaited and much-needed volume shines new light on one of America's most beloved, and profound, poets--Lucille Clifton.Black Buffalo Woman is a deep, comprehensive dive into Clifton's work through the eyes of celebrated poet and scholar, Kazim...

In Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, readers are spectators of mis-en-scènes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives. Moving from cultural analysis to cinematic (re)creation, Bryant's prose traverses...