These books are a selected representation of what is available. Search the library catalog to discover more!
Inciting Joy: Essays
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Prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.
Mouths of Rain: an Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
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A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers, in the tradition of Words of Fire
Black Lives Matter at School: an Uprising for Educational Justice
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An essential collection of essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from educators, students, and activists who have been building the Black Lives Matter at School movement across the country, including a foreword by Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi
Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up
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Intertwining personal essays and interviews with distinguished poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith and Natasha Trethewey, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions that Grew Me Up, explores the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on writing and the artistic process in the latter half of the twentieth century
What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker
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Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic
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An anthology of Black resilience and reclamation, bringing together the voices of those most harshly affected by the intersecting pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism, Bigger Than Bravery explores comfort and compromise, challenge and resilience.
Notes on Grief
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Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father's death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it.
The Message
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oates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories -- our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking -- expose and distort our realities.
Letters to the Future: Black Women, Radical Writing
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The anthology collects late-modern and contemporary work by Black women from the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean--work that challenges readers to participate in meaning making. Because one contextual framework for the collection is "art as a form of epistemology," the writing in the anthology is the kind of work driven by the writer's desire to radically present, uncovering what she knows and does not know, as well as critically addressing the future.
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race
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National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines
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An anthology that gives access to the voices of mothers of color and marginalized motherswomen who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day.
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies
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The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study.
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
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This collection of essays by fifteen scholars establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated.
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment
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A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation's most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing.
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies
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Originally published in 1982, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies is the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship. Featuring contributions from Alice Walker and the Combahee River Collective, this book is vital to today's conversation on race and gender in America.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
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Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”
Words of Fire: an Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought
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The first major anthology to trace the development, from the early 1800s to the present, of black feminist thought in the United States, Words of Fire is Beverly Guy-Sheftall's comprehensive collection of writings, in the feminist tradition, of more than sixty African American women
Intimations
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Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next.
The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence
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Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge's Area Two and follows the city's networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay -Ralph's story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism.
Just Us: An American Conversation
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As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces-the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth-where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together
African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity
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The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities.
Thick
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In these eight ... explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and ... author of Lower Ed--embraces her ... role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society
The Source of Self-Regard
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The Source of Self-Regard is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us:
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In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Abdurraqib Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in doing so proves himself a bellwether for out times.
Feel Free: Essays
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A collection of both previously unpublished works and classic essays includes discussions of recent cultural and political events, social networking, libraries, and the failure to address global warming.
The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
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An introvert braves the cybersex, the pitfalls of eating out alone, the difficulties of weight gain, and other hurdles faced by shy people living in a world that urges us to be cool as "J" humorously recounts her life in all its awkward glory.
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
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The poet-lecturer explores the intimate and vulnerable experiences of raising a child, counting on the goodwill of others, and living with illness.
Bla_K: Essays and Interviews
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Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence.
In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Bla_K explores questions of timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, race, the body politic, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.
Meaty: Essays
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Samantha Irby's debut collection of essays about trying to laugh her way through failed relationships, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn's disease, and more.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
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The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America
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In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.
We Should All Be Feminists
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Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
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In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles.
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, New Perspectives
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Illustrated volume to accompany an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum opening April 2017, including an introduction by the exhibition co-curators; three scholarly critical essays; remarks from a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition on April 21, 2017, consisting of personal reminiscences of the theater group Rodeo Caldonia.
You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain
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Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every day. Robinson has experienced her fair share over the years: she's been relegated to the role of "the black friend," as if she is somehow the authority on all things racial; she's been called "uppity" for having an opinion in the workplace; she's been followed around stores by security guards; and yes, people do ask her whether they can touch her hair all. the. time.
Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture
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In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are "routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied" for speaking out. Highlighting the stories of well-known actors, writers, and experts, as well as new voices being published for the first time, Not That Bad covers a wide range of topics and experiences, from an exploration of the rape epidemic embedded in the refugee crisis to first-person accounts of child molestation and street harassment. Often deeply personal and always unflinchingly honest, this provocative collection both reflects the world we live in and offers a call to arms insisting that "not that bad" must no longer be good enough.
Bad Feminist
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A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.
Love for Sale: and Other Essays
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The triumph of this deeply satisfying essay collection is its presentation of a whole human being: immensely cultivated, likable because unfailingly honest, reasonable, mature, witty, and never less than eloquent. Clifford Thompson s perspective is that of a humane African-American male who is wary of any condescending sentimentality or group-rant, who loves jazz, movies, books, and the oddities of daily life.
A Time for New Dreams: Poetic Essays
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In 'A Time for New Dreams', Ben Okri breaks new ground in an unusual collection of linked essays, which address such diverse themes as childhood, self-censorship, the role of beauty, the importance of education and the real significance of the recent economic meltdown.
Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future
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Essays examine the challenges faced by African Americans in preserving and shaping African-American history.
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
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Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic
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In Born to Use Mics, Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai have brought together renowned writers and critics including Mark Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., and many others to confront Illmatic song by song, with each scholar assessing an individual track from the album. The result is a brilliant engagement with and commentary upon one of the most incisive sets of songs ever laid down on wax.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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Notes from a trip to Russia -- Poetry is not a luxury -- The transformation of silence into language and action -- Scratching the surface : some notes on barriers to women and loving -- Uses of the erotic : the erotic as power -- Sexism : an American disease in blackface -- An open letter to Mary Daly -- Man child : a black lesbian feminist's response -- An interview : Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich -- The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house -- Age, race, class, and sex : women redefining difference
Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts
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Contains over twenty essays in which African-American women discuss their bodies and physical characteristics, including selections from Iyanla Vanzant, Jill Scott, Melyssa Ford, and others.
Everything but the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture
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In a collection of essays, editor Geg Tate takes on what his mother used to call "everything but the burden," dissecting the ways in which white culture has misappropriated much of black culture, from music to dance, fashion, sports, and more.
From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism
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In From Class to Race, Charles Mills maps the theoretical route that brought him to the innovative conceptual framework outlined in his academic bestseller The Racial Contract (1997). Mills argues for a new critical theory that develops the insights of the black radical political tradition.
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Lights in a Time of Darkness: Mediations
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A book of spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge, from the Pulitzer Prize-winner who has devoted her life to befriending the earth. Walker has long been a force for sanity in a chaotic world. Here she draws on her deep spiritual grounding, her political conviction and experience, and her literary gifts to offer a series of meditations filled with wisdom, hope, encouragement, and, at times, serenity to a world in need of all these things.
Beyond Katrina: a Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
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eaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens--particularly African Americans--were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit.
Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist at Work
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Poetica Agwe: Essays, Poems and Testimonials on Resistance, Peace, and the Ideal of Being
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Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays
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Essayist June Jordan presents this collection that follows the more than 40-year span of her writing career, which includes political essays about the incomplete legacy of the civil rights movement as well as more personal essays about her experience as a single mother, and also as a black feminist bisexual.
