Cultural Memoir

In his debut essay collection, award-winning poet Jaswinder Bolina meditates on "how race," as he puts it, "becomes metaphysical": the cumulative toll of the microaggressions and macro-pressures lurking in the academic market, on the literary circuit, in the dating pool, and on the sidewalks of any given US city. Training a keenly thoughtful lens on questions that are never fully abstract, Of Color is a bold, expansive, and finally optimistic diagnosis of present-day America.

Before Chef Aaron Sanchez rose to fame on shows like MasterChef and Chopped, he was a restless Mexican-American son, raised by a fiercely determined and talented woman who was a successful chef and restaurateur in her own right. In this memoir, Sanchez delves into his formative years with remarkable candor, injecting his story with adrenaline and revealing how he fell in love with cooking and started a career in the fast-paced culinary world.

Set in the Upper Snake River Valley in rural Idaho, this story is about relationships. Beginning in the 1970’s and spanning four generations of life on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, it is a study of friendship, fatherhood, and a dog named Bradley. It is a tale of love and loss through the eyes of the author.

As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge.

Saad Mohseni, chairman and CEO of Moby Group, Afghanistan’s largest media company, charts a twenty-year effort to bring a free press to his country after years of Taliban rule, and how that effort persists even after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.

In Across That Bridge, Congressman John Lewis draws from his experience as a prominent leader of the civil rights movement to offer timeless wisdom, poignant recollections, and powerful principles for anyone interested in challenging injustices and inspiring real change toward a freer, more peaceful society. The civil rights movement gave rise to the protest culture we know today, and the experiences of leaders like Congressman Lewis, a close confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr., have never been more relevant.

A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction. As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time, he was immersed in street life. Today he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist - Columbia University's first tenured African American professor in the sciences.

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was a former slave who became a social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. One of the most prominent figures in the anti-slavery movement, Douglass emerged as a national leader of the abolitionist movement, speaking and writing widely on behalf of the cause. In this classic work, Douglass gives a firsthand account of his life from birth through his time spent in slavery, his escape to freedom in 1838, and his transition from bondage to liberty.

This family saga starts with a young South African woman searching for her family origins and history in Britain. While starting work on compiling notes on The Gravel Road, I earnestly began to want to bring back to life those long-forgotten beginnings of an ancestral family, hoping to capture their experiences of surviving under extreme circumstances in their daily lives. At this time, men of different colors and creeds could put aside their grievances, uniting in the determination and will to succeed.

Stevie Wonder's achievements as a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer are extraordinary. During a career that has spanned almost fifty years, he has earned more than 30 Top 10 hits, 26 Grammy Awards, and a place in both the Rock and Roll and Songwriter Halls of Fame - and he's not finished yet. On the verge of turning 60, he is still composing, still touring, and still attracting dedicated fans around the world.

Nowhere Like This Place is a coming-of-age memoir set against the backdrop of the weirdness of an enclave with more PhDs per capita than anywhere else on Earth. It’s steeped in thinly-veiled sexism and the searing angst of an artsy child trapped in a terrarium full of white-bread nuclear scientists and their nuclear families. Everything happens, and nothing happens, and it all works out in the end. Maybe.

David and Tamela Mann have been married for 30 years, but the singers, actors, and entrepreneurs are just as, if not more than, happily in love as they were in the early days of their relationship. In their new audiobook, the couple will relate the story of their first encounters as teenagers, the importance of communication, and how they’ve been able to keep that spark burning through all these years.

From humble beginnings in the remote Pilbara, psychologist and Nyamal woman Tracy Westerman has redefined what's possible at every turn. Despite neither of her parents progressing past primary school, and never having met a psychologist before attending university, Westerman was the first Aboriginal person in Australia to complete a PhD in Clinical Psychology, rising to become one of the country's foremost psychologists.

Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul documents the beloved singing star’s rocky personal life and internationally acclaimed show business career. An in-depth and frank examination of Aretha, this definitive biography traces her career from her beginnings as a 12-year-old member of a church choir in the early 1950s, recording her first album at the age of 14, a major recording contract at 18, and stardom in her 20s, right up through her headline-grabbing 2010 health scare, to her triumphant return: singing to her cheering Detroit hometown fans in summer 2011.

Acclaimed archeologist and historian Karolyn Smardz Frost painstakingly resurrects Thornton and Lucie Blackburn's perilous 1830s journey from Kentucky slavery to Canadian freedom.

In the tradition of Neil Postman's masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death, Audience of One shows how American media have shaped American society and politics, by interweaving two crucial stories. The first story follows the evolution of television from the three-network era of the 20th century, which joined millions of Americans in a shared monoculture, into today's zillion-channel, internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures. The second story is a cultural critique of Donald Trump.

In the first biography of Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives us an unconventional portrait of arguably America’s most eminent jazz singer. He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday’s artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law.

Born in the gold mining hot bed of Tarkwa, Ghana, T. P. Manus Ulzen is the oldest of 5 children. His parents were both educators. He grew up in Bolgatanga, Wa, Wenchi, Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi in Ghana until he was 12 years old. He started high school at the age of 10 at St. Augustine's College, Cape Coast and continued his education at Kabulonga School for Boys in Lusaka, Zambia after his family left Ghana following the 1966 coup which ended Nkrumah's first republic. He returned to Ghana to complete his high school education at Ghana Secondary Technical School, Takoradi.

Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that.

Carrie Bradshaw’s pairing of a tutu with a tank top is one of the most iconic outfits ever seen on television—and a look that turned avant-garde New York designer and stylist Patricia Field into a household name. But before she was crowned the fairy godmother of haute couture, Field was the owner of the longtime East Village emporium Pat Field, a haven for drag queens, club kids, starving artists, NYU freshmen, and creative visionaries alike.