African American English

Now that she’s returned to New Orleans for Thanksgiving break, Viva is charged with figuring out the truth behind a mysterious bout of illness traced back to a local creole restaurant called Madame Bouchard’s. Were customers poisoned on purpose, or was it a simple cooking mistake? And who could be behind the chaos? Viva only has a week to solve the culinary mystery, and to do so, she’ll have to contend with a longtime rivalry, rumors of voodoo magic, and Thanksgiving dinner with her extended family!

In this romantic-comedy novella, the sexiest player in the NFL and a small-town librarian prove that when opposites attract, their chemistry can be game changing.

How did a Black child, growing up in segregationist Mississippi during the early 1900s, become the commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Corps during the brutal Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935? In this gripping, never-before-told tale, biographer Thomas E. Simmons brings to life Robinson’s outstanding success in becoming a pilot, his expertise in building and assembling his own working aircraft, his influence on the establishment of a school of aviation at Tuskegee Institute, and his wartime service.

Andre Monroe is ready to move on from heartbreak, and the first step is bringing home his rescue pup. He’d bonded instantly with the playful Zeus and was already planning their first adventures. But one thing he definitely hadn’t daydreamed about was Zeus accidentally being promised to someone else - or that he might go home empty-handed and brokenhearted all over again.

When an unexpected blizzard grounds all flights, Nia and Andrew’s holiday plans are put on ice, and they’re stuck spending Christmas Eve at the airport. Soon the pair of travelers decide to make the best of it and team up to spread holiday cheer to the other stranded passengers. After all, just because their flight is cancelled doesn’t mean Christmas is. Now they’re about to discover that with the right person, home for the holidays can be anywhere—and life’s crossroads are the perfect place to begin a new story.

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how Black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds - the intertwinement of the mental and the physical - in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging Black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations.

This national best-seller chronicles the true story of two brothers coming of age in the Henry Horner public housing complex in Chicago. Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers are 11 and nine years old when the story begins in the summer of 1987. Living with their mother and six siblings, they struggle against grinding poverty, gun violence, gang influences, overzealous police officers, and overburdened and neglectful bureaucracies. Immersed in their lives for two years, Kotlowitz brings us this classic rendering of growing up poor in America’s cities.

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, Jimmy Lee believes, is his destiny, someday working with his drunkard father at the sawmill, or sitting next to his arsonist brother in the penitentiary.

Oakland-bred LaVeesha “Vee” Gilliam (Coco Jones) is a determined single mother of an autistic son and a gifted aspiring coder. When Vee loses her job as a food-services worker at the onsite restaurant at Grapengine, a large Silicon Valley tech company, she’s unable to pay for her son’s much-needed specialized education. By a twist of fate, mistaken identity, and her tech skills, Vee meets Troy Wilson (Keith Powers), the company’s wealthy founder and CEO and a wunderkind in the tech industry, who believes that Vee is a college-educated techie who works at his company.

Lance Christopher is a semi-reformed thug who was lucky enough to run into the right connection to propel him to the top. His success, of course, hasn't come without its fair share of bloodshed, problems, and disappointments. A dangerously ungrateful brother who won't shake his street mentality and a money-hungry ex who tricked her way into his heart are just some of the issues he faces that money can't seem to fix. Lance doesn't want much more, just peace and a woman who can relate to him and help him battle the demons he faces.

An ancient prophecy comes to pass. The shackled and the oppressed gain unimaginable powers. And the re-evolution of Earth begins. In 1850s Mississippi, a young enslaved woman named Mirabelle barely survives day to day, praying for a better life. Then, a solar eclipse envelops the world in an eerie glow. Suddenly, not only Mirabelle but all Black people become virtually unkillable. The enslaved throw off their shackles. And all that was is now–undone. But evil will always find a way. So it falls on Mirabelle and her allies to outrun their enemies and unlock the secrets of an ages-old prophecy.

On a snowy Christmas Eve in an unnamed American city, the archangel Michael wanders the streets. He is alone and hungry, his clothes tattered, and when he sees his face reflected in a store window, it is that of a young African American boy. Who will offer him food and shelter and who will turn him away? And when he becomes a blonde, freckle-faced child, is his fate different?

Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram fled Nazi Germany only to find racism as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe. As a white woman and a Holocaust refugee, Marione was the most unlikely of heroes in the fight for civil rights for African Americans. This is her empowering story - a tale of courage, strength, and determination.

A renowned midwife, doula trainer, and Master of Public Health celebrates the lost art of African American postnatal healing practices in this practical, essential guide to maternal health. As a mother, grandmother, and traditional midwife, Shafia M. Monroe intimately knows about childbirth and...

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

The author and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Publishing Project gives voice to long silent African Americans from the past, allowing them to tell their own stories that shed new light on critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenging what we think we know about...

Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor's son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven't happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands. Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative.