African American Families

ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 An electrifying, dazzlingly written reckoning and an essential addition to the national conversation about race and class, Survival Math takes its name from the calculations...

Peabody Award–winning journalist Michele Norris offers a transformative dialogue on race and identity in America, unearthed through her decade-long work at The Race Card Project. The prompt seemed simple: Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send. The answers, though, have been challenging...

In the first in-depth history of the Obama family, Peter Firstbrook recounts a journey that starts in a mud hut by the White Nile and ends seven centuries later in the White House. Interweaving oral history and tribal lore, interviews with Obama family members and other Kenyans, the writings of...

WINNER OF THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER OF THE CORETTA SCOTT KING AUTHOR AWARD National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson's stirring novel-in-verse explores how a family moves forward when their glory days have passed and the cost of professional sports on Black bodies. For as long as ZJ can...

A fake summer fling between a stand-in girlfriend and a handsome business heir becomes way too real in this glittering new romance by USA Today bestselling author Kristina Forest. Noelle Lewis doesn’t have time for long walks on the beach, brunch with the girls, or summer vacations. She’s...

In this gripping, emotionally-layered novel set in Prohibition-era Martha’s Vineyard, a young woman from a Black seafaring family plunges into the dangerous world of rum-running to save her home and uncover the truth about her father’s death. Martha’s Vineyard, 1923. The sea is a gift...

When Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males appeared in 1998, it was hailed as "a crucial book" (Baltimore Sun) and "undoubtedly one of the most important tools the African American parent can possess" (Kweisi Mfume, President NAACP). Now, in response to enormous demand, the authors turn their attention to African American young women. Statistics indicate that African American females, as a group, fare poorly in the United States.

“A magnificent piece of writing, a beautiful tapestry of prose in which the stories of two of Atlanta’s most celebrated families have been woven densely into the history of the city itself.” —The New York Times The Intersection of Peachtree Street, historically the residential and...

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.

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...

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...

Dark, lanky, and bald, New York-raised photographer Sabre Cumberbatch can’t tell if she’s highly talented or just highly Instagrammable. Up to here with art critics and their gaseous praise, Sabre returns to Barbados, her childhood island home, to water her roots. She needs to quell self-doubt by doing something—anything—profoundly important. Welcoming her with bejeweled open arms is her aunt Aggie, a fearsome high-society attorney eager to show off her famous American niece. When Sabre witnesses Aggie unleash her wrath on the household staff over a minor mistake, Sabre finds her cause.

Long live the Queen of Hip Hop Lit! Nikki Turner is back with another explosive, page-turning sequel to her #1 bestselling novels A Hustler’s Wife and Forever a Hustler’s Wife. Yarni Taylor is a successful corporate attorney who wants nothing more than for her husband, Des, to...

"Narrator Landon Woodson delivers the story perfectly, bringing out its range of emotions...Woodson offers the right inflections at the right times for the author's words--the emotional swings range from grief at the loss of a loved one to the pride Rosser feels in his accomplishments on the...

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...

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...

In this spellbinding memoir, popular CNN anchor Zain E. Asher pays tribute to her mother’s strength and determination to raise four successful children in the shadow of tragedy. Awaiting the return of her husband and young son from a road trip, Obiajulu Ejiofor receives shattering news...

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...

After Winna's little sister breaks her glasses, her grandfather gives her an old-timey pair of spectacles that belonged to her great-aunt Estelle. The specs are silver and perfectly circular, with tiny stars on the bridge and earpieces that curl all the way around her ears. Best of all, they're magic. Because when Winna makes a wish beginning with the words "What if"—that is, when she speculates—the spectacles grant it.