African American Families

Caregiving is a core value in the African American culture. And African American women of faith often fill that role—for elderly parents, sick children, and other members of their community. Yet no one is fully prepared for the reality of disrupted schedules, unpredictable needs, and many sleepless nights that come with caregiving. Jeanne Porter King shares 90 devotions written from her own experience as a caregiver for her mother to encourage you to take time to care for your whole self.

Embark on an extraordinary journey through the segregated South of 1957 with Drunetta Brown, a woman determined to rewrite her story of struggle and heartbreak. Fleeing her shattered dreams and an alcoholic husband, Drunetta takes her children to New York City for a fresh start. There, she finds unexpected allies in Raycie, a talented bar singer, and Rose, a devoted church secretary. As Drunetta navigates the challenges of her new life, her friendships become her lifeline, offering the strength she needs to carve her own path in a changing world.

Both an epic history and an intimate family story, a startling account of the lives of Black cops in one Midwestern city. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a Black police organization in Cleveland called the Black Shield was causing a stir. Officers broke ranks with their fellow cops...

Most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying black men and women even their names. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and...

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY USA TODAY, NPR, VULTURE, MARIE CLAIRE, THE TIMES OF LONDON, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY A group portrait of young adults enmeshed in desire and violence, a...

In Modern Conversations of a Slave Mother, Mitchelle Harvey amplifies the voice of African-American mothers and shares the multi-generational experiences of these strong and resilient women who managed to thrive through adversity. In this book you will find out how challenges turn into success.

A “raw, tensely plotted, profound high-wire act of a book” (Téa Obreht) on the intricacies of marriage, class, and race, and just how far one man will go to protect his family—and himself. Sharif is a good person. He knows that he is good because he’s aware of the privilege that he...

Marilyn Grimes is a wife, mother, sister, and daughter. Today she's decided to be something different: herself. First, she has to find out who that is...

A “vivid, urgent” (Entertainment Weekly) story that follows a young man faced with a fraught decision: escape a dangerous past alone—or brave his old life and keep the woman he loves. Sayon Hughes longs to escape the volatile Bris­tol neighborhood known as Ends, the tight-knit but...

The Millions “Most Anticipated” Books of 2023 Never-before-seen unpublished works by award-winning American literary icon Ntozake Shange, featuring essays, plays, and poems from the archives of the seminal Black feminist writer who stands alongside giants like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker...

In this analysis of social history, examine the complex lineage of America's oppression of Black companionship. According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs...

An "intoxicating, propulsive...utterly mesmerizing" novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student (Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!) After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find...

Jamie MacKenzie was my light in a childhood of captivity—until his clan ripped him away and left me in the dark. Now, he's back. No longer a boy, but a battle-hardened ex-Marine, armed with vengeance and regrets. He says he’ll burn the world to the ground to free me—even if I fight him every step of the way. But I’m not just haunted by my past… I belong to a ruthless Bratva tsar who branded me as his. And he won’t let me go without a war.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Simmons’s evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity.”—The New...

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her...

Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah's fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world.

The new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery. A literary classic that remains vital to our understanding of the past, Corregidora is Gayl Jones’s powerful...

You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her 68-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control. As Gregory's memory wavers and fades, Diane and her children must reexamine their connection to the man he once was - and learn to love the man he has become.

A mysterious organization recruits an ambitious scion of elite Black DC society—but to what end? This electric debut novel brilliantly contends with family legacies and what it takes to break free from the expectations of others. Nina Johnson has always taken pride in belonging to The Tenth...

Stigmatized at birth due to his interracial parentage and reared in a household poisoned by domestic abuse, Kevin Matthews is orphaned at age ten after losing his mother to a violent attack at the hands of his father, who is jailed for the crime. Raised by his paternal grandfather, a Baptist Minister who instills values of the church as a base for recovery, Kevin is content with life in rural Louisiana during the 1970s until disturbing news surfaces regarding his mother's attack—news that sheds doubt on his father's guilt, and leads Kevin to relive painful memories.