Showing results by narrator "Bahni Turpin" in All Categories

The reigning Queen of Hip-Hop Lit, Nikki Turner returns with a fresh and fierce tale sure to satisfy longtime fans and create new ones. Desember Day is beautiful, confident, and smart. She has more game in the streets than a basketball player does on the court, and her boyfriend, Fame, loves every single inch of her. But unlike her mother, who has been in one bad relationship after another, Desember is not going to wait on a knight in shining armor to save her.

Otis, Willie, and Hibernia are three children with a lot in common: they've all lost a loved one, they each have secret dreams, and they won't stop fighting for what they want. And they're also a lot like their hero, famed boxer Joe Louis. Throughout this moving novel, their lives gradually converge to form friendship, family, and love. Their trials and triumphs echo those of Joe Louis, as he fights to become the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion.

Joan Steinau Lester's newest book looks that the emotional and social experience of Nina, a teen girl living in LA who feels caught between two worlds - the "white" world of her mother and the "black" world of her father. This nowhere land of race becomes harder to navigate when the support system her parents offered is shattered by their divorce.

Harlem is home to all kinds of kids. Jin sees life passing her by from the window of her family's bodega. Alex wants to help the needy one shelter at a time but can't tell anyone who she really is. Elvin's living on Harlem's cold, lonely streets, surviving on his own after his grandfather was mysteriously attacked. When these three strangers join forces to find out what happened to Elvin's grandfather, their digging leads them to an enigmatic artist whose missing masterpieces are worth a fortune.

At the end of Not a Day Goes By, the terminally bisexual John Basil Henderson declares: “I’m back, in full form. And I’m out there. Roamin’. And switching lanes.” Now, in Any Way the Wind Blows, Basil, good-looking gadabout and homme fatal, is back at the top of his game (razzle-dazzling both the women and the men). All is well until Basil’s picture-perfect life starts to unravel.

This is the story of one brave family: Mildred Loving, Richard Perry Loving, and their three children. It is the story of how Mildred and Richard fell in love, and got married in Washington, DC. But when they moved back to their hometown of Virginia, they were arrested (in dramatic fashion) for violating that state's laws against interracial marriage. The Lovings refused to allow their children to get the message that their parents' love was wrong, and so they fought the unfair law, taking their case all the way to the Supreme Court - and won!

This should be an exciting time for Caprice. She has been offered a place at the school of her dreams, where she's just had a fantastic summer. But this great opportunity coincides with a lot of internal doubt and the disturbing news that her long-estranged grandmother has fallen ill and may be near death. As Caprice tries to figure out her future, she is pulled back toward her past, and the abuse she endured from her uncle when she was little—an abuse she's never told anyone about.

Wangari lives in a magical place in rural Kenya where the soil is rich for planting, the trees abundant, and the nearby pond full of mysterious creatures. She drinks from cool, clean streams and plays beneath her favorite fig tree under her mother's watchful gaze. Then Wangari grows up and goes away to school, and things start changing at home. Farmers chop down the trees.

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or astronauts walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used their knowledge, pencils, adding machines, and writing paper to calculate the orbital mechanics needed to launch spacecraft. Katherine Johnson was one of these mathematicians who used trajectories and complex equations to chart the space program. Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws were in place in the early 1950s, Katherine worked analyzing data at the NACA (later NASA) Langley laboratory.

A stunning collection of fiction, diary entries, screenplays, and scripts by the brilliant African American artist and filmmaker.

In the world of children's literature, Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret are widely recognized as epoch-making. They have been received by young learners, year after year, with excitement and love. Nobody's Family Is Going to Change - the story of an African American family in New York in the 1970s - shares the vigorous sense of comedy and unflinching fidelity to the real world that has made Fitzhugh's other books into classics.

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities - and envies - the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.

From the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing follows Harlan Jane Eagleton as she travels to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds, and healing bodies. But before she found her calling, Harlan had been a minor rock star’s manager and, before that, a beautician. Harlan retraces her story to the beginning, when she once had a fling with the rock star’s ex-husband and found herself infatuated with an Afro-German horse dealer.

Tash didn't want to go to camp, didn't want to spend the summer with a bunch of strangers, didn't want to be separated from the only two people she has ever been able to count on: her uncle Kevin, who saved her from foster care, and Cap'n Jackie, who lives next door. Camp turns out to be pretty fun, actually, but when Tash returns home, Cap'n Jackie is gone. And Tash needs her — the Captain always said all Tash had to do was hold it tight and the magic would come. Was it true? Could the key bring Cap'n Jackie back?

When Minerva and Keira King were born, they made headlines: Keira is black like Mama, but Minni is white like Daddy. Together the family might look like part of a chessboard row, but they are first and foremost the close-knit Kings. Then Grandmother Johnson calls, to invite the twins down South to compete for the title of Miss Black Pearl Preteen of America. Minni dreads the spotlight, but Keira assures her that together they'll get through their stay with Grandmother Johnson. But when their grandmother's bias against Keira reveals itself, Keira pulls away from her twin.

Gillian Tillman learned all about landing a wealthy man from her globe-trotting mother, Imelda, but this second-generation gold digger has a style all her own. With big dreams of becoming a huge star, she slept her way right into the million-dollar mansion of her now-husband, star producer Brandon Russell. He not only launched Gillian's film career, but landed her the starring and Oscar-nominated role in the hit film Gold Diggers. But all that glitters may not be gold....

As Fabiola climbs the ladder of success, she is pulled between the spotlight and the street, trying to resist industry moguls who find the allure of fresh meat irresistible and the thugs from the shadowy side of the ghetto who threaten to keep her close.

In 1904 Ota Benga, a young Congolese "pygmy" - a person of petite stature - arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines across the nation and in Europe.

As the year passes, the narrator's favorite dress goes through a series of creative changes, from dress to shirt to tank top to scarf and so on, until all that's left of it is a good memory. Assisted by her patient and crafty mama, the narrator finds that when disaster strikes her favorite things, she doesn't need to make mountains out of molehills - she makes molehills out of mountains instead!

When a 14-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice - of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives.