Through images and texts both historical and contemporary, this book looks at the Great Migration and its profound and ongoing impactThis thoughtful interweaving of text and imagery presents a variety of perspectives on the Great Migration (1915–70), the mass exodus and dispersion of millions of African Americans out of the South. Through archival photography, newspaper clippings, maps, journal articles, book excerpts, and ephemera such as family recipes, the book immerses readers in Black history, the Great Migration, and its legacy. The book includes texts by authors ranging from W. E. B. Du Bois and Jean Toomer to Toni Tipton-Martin and culminates in a candid roundtable discussion about familial migration stories among some of the most respected Black artists, writers, and scholars working today: Theaster Gates, Kiese Laymon, Carrie Mae Weems, and others. The material is presented in three unique, thematic sections that explore the Great Migration’s impact on the American city, Black Southern foodways, and cultural expression. Taken as a whole, this important volume provides powerful testimony to the systemic challenges such as social segregation, racism, and discrimination that Black communities have faced from the post-Emancipation period to the present moment. BIO Jessica Bell Brown is curator and department head of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Ryan N. Dennis is chief curator and artistic director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art. [H] Yale University Press / June 21, 2022 ﻿1.5" H x 10.5" L x 8.2" W (3.45 lbs) 320 pages

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A Movement in Every Direction: A Great Migration Critical Reader /// edited by Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan N. Dennis

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From a highly lauded modern voice in feminism and racial justice comes a deeply personal and insightful testament to the power of reimagining to dismantle the frameworks and systems that no longer serve us while building new ones that do.There are breaking points in all our lives when we realize that the way things have been done before just don’t work for us anymore, be it the way we approach our relationships, our belief systems, our work, our education, even our rest. For activist, philanthropist, and CEO Rachel E. Cargle, reimagining—the act of creating in our minds that which does not exist but that we believe can and should—has been a lifelong process. Reimagining served as the most powerful catalyst for Cargle’s personal transformation from a small-town Christian wife to an incisive queer feminist voice of a generation.In A Renaissance of Our Own, we witness the sometimes painful but always inspiring breaking points in Cargle’s life that fostered a truer identity. These defining moments offer a blueprint for how we must all use our imagination—the space that sees beyond limits—to live in alignment with our highest values and to craft a world independent of oppressive structures, both personal and societal. Cargle now invites you to acknowledge ways of being that stem from societal expectations instead of your personal truth, and to embark on a renaissance of your own. She provides the very tools and prompts that she used to unearth her own truth, tools that opened her up to being a more authentic feminist and purpose-driven matriarchal leader. A Renaissance of Our Own gives us the courage to look at the world and say “I want something different.” It serves as a reminder of the power and possibility of reimagining a life that feels right, all the way down to the marrow of your bones. BIO Rachel E. Cargle is an activist, entrepreneur, and philanthropic innovator. She is the founder of The Loveland Group, a family of companies including Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, a literary space that celebrates marginalized voices, and The Great Unlearn, an adult learning platform that centers the teaching of BIPOC thinkers. In 2018, she founded The Loveland Foundation, offering free access to mental health care for Black women and girls. Cargle is a regular contributor to Cultured magazine, Atmos, and The Cut, and her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. REVIEWS “Dazzling—a loving, bold tale of imagination, bravery, and radical action in the face of injustice . . . Through an account of Cargle’s own complicated life journey, she provides a framework for our own acts of courage as brutality threatens to strip us of humanity.” -- Elle“I loved and admired this book as much as I have always loved and admired its author. Rachel Cargle is that rare sort of phoenix who rises from the ashes of her life not only reborn on the personal level but also fully ready to change the world. A Renaissance of Our Own is an elegant, thoughtful, vulnerable, and inspiring memoir. May this book land in a million hands, all over the world.” -- Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic“Magical. Shape-shifting. Cargle recounts how she spun silk out of the threadbare yarns of patriarchy and white supremacy while reminding readers that such alchemy is possible for them, too. Such wonder is inevitable if we give ourselves permission to reimagine our existence and re-create ourselves in our own divine image.” -- Sonya Renee Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of The Body Is Not an Apology“What a beautiful offering and gentle invitation Rachel Cargle has extended with A Renaissance of Our Own. I felt the pull to really slow down and sit with both her stories and my own. This book is not meant to be simply consumed but explored.” -- Joy Harden Bradford, PhD, founder of the award-winning Therapy for Black Girls and author of Sisterhood Heals“A profoundly moving and powerful story of how one woman transformed both herself and her community while giving us the tools to do the same . . . Rachel shows that the closer we get to our own true light, the brighter we may shine for the world. You will celebrate, you will mourn, but ultimately you will leave these pages changed for the better.” -- Gabrielle Union, New York Times bestselling author of We’re Going to Need More Wine [H] Ballantine Books / May 16, 2023 1.2" H x 8.4" L x 5.9" W (0.85 lbs) 256 pages

A Renaissance of Our Own /// Rachel E. Cargle

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2022An exuberant, opinionated, stereotype-busting portrait of contemporary Africa in all its splendid diversity, by one of its leading new writers. So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa’s rich diversity, communities, and histories. Starting with an immersive description of the lively and complex urban life of Lagos, Faloyin unearths surprising truths about many African countries’ colonial heritage and tells the story of the continent’s struggles with democracy through seven dictatorships. With biting wit, he takes on the phenomenon of the white savior complex and brings to light the damage caused by charity campaigns of the past decades, revisiting such cultural touchstones as the KONY 2012 film. Entering into the rivalries that energize the continent, Faloyin engages in the heated debate over which West African country makes the best jollof rice and describes the strange, incongruent beauty of the African Cup of Nations. With an eye toward the future promise of the continent, he explores the youth-led cultural and political movements that are defining and reimagining Africa on their own terms. The stories Faloyin shares are by turns joyful and enraging; proud and optimistic for the future even while they unequivocally confront the obstacles systematically set in place by former colonial powers. Brimming with humor and wit, filled with political insights, and, above all, infused with a deep love for the region, Africa Is Not a Country celebrates the energy and particularity of the continent’s different cultures and communities, treating Africa with the respect it deserves. BIO Dipo Faloyin is a senior editor at VICE, where he focuses on race, culture, and identity around the world. His writing has appeared in Dazed, Prospect, and HuffPost. Born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, he now lives in London. REVIEWS "Warm, funny, biting and essential reading." -- Adam Rutherford, author of How to Argue With a Racist "A brilliant, prescient exploration of a richly complex continent. An antidote for our times." -- Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch "An impeccably researched work, brimming with humor and intellect. A necessary read for 2022." -- J K Chukwu, author of The Unfortunates "A triumph of a book. A charismatic and hugely enjoyable read packed full of essential information—revealing a huge, vastly diverse set of stories, situations, and histories that really do pop the balloon of lazy stereotyping of Africa. You’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t read this book." -- Nels Abbey, coauthor of Think Like a White Man "This book should be on the curriculum." -- Nikki May, author of Wahala "This book is hilarious, ferocious, generous, and convincing. It made me reconsider almost everything I thought I knew about Africa, which is somewhere we often hear about, but far too rarely hear from." -- Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland "With clarity and incisive wit, journalist Faloyin explores the origins of the 54 countries of Africa…Africa Is Not a Country [is] a forceful rebuttal of erased histories and simplified imagery as well as a celebration of a continent already living its dynamic future." -- Booklist (starred review) [H] W. W. Norton / September 06, 2022 1.32" H x 8.44" L x 5.78" W (1.02 lbs) 400 pages [P] W. W. Norton / November 07, 2023 1.1" H x 8.2" L x 5.4" W (0.65 lbs) 400 pages

Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent /// Dipo Faloyin

Paperback

The past as a building block of a more affirming and hopeful future As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories. Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, Ahad-Legardy reveals nostalgia's capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments. Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past. BIO Badia Ahad-Legardy is an associate professor in the Department of English and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture. REVIEWS "If you've been waiting for a book that steps out of trauma-time and the perpetual present of slavery clear-eyed and with its critical faculties alight, you've found it. Badia Ahad-Legardy breathes gentle and sweet smelling fresh air into stale corners in her book on Afro-Nostalgia, which cogently analyzes and affectively affirms Black cultural producers and chefs who treat the past less as an ongoing traumatic wound and more as a surrealistic space of black historical regenerative possibility and happiness. A gem." --Avery Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination "This thoroughly researched book seeks and sheds light on the spaces where Black joy can live and flourish. Though its tone is academic, its insights reach far beyond the classroom.... a worthy addition to any multicultural studies library and to readers interested in American culture." --Museum of Americana "An important dissection of looking beyond the traumas of the past to find the happiness that existed (and exists) within the Black community. " --Library Journal [P] University of Illinois Press / April 12, 2021 ﻿0.7" H x 8.9" L x 6.0" W (0.75 lbs) 240 pages

Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture /// Badia Ahad-Legardy

Discover the untold story of African surf culture in this glorious and colorful collection of profiles, essays, photographs, and illustrations. AFROSURF is the first book to capture and celebrate the surfing culture of Africa. This unprecedented collection is compiled by Mami Wata, a Cape Town surf company that fiercely believes in the power of African surf. Mami Wata brings together its co-founder Selema Masekela and some of Africa's finest photographers, thinkers, writers, and surfers to explore the unique culture of eighteen coastal countries, from Morocco to Somalia, Mozambique, South Africa, and beyond. Packed with over fifty essays, AFROSURF features surfer and skater profiles, thought pieces, poems, photos, illustrations, ephemera, recipes, and a mini comic, all wrapped in an astounding design that captures the diversity and character of Africa. A creative force of good in their continent, Mami Wata sources and manufactures all their wares in Africa and works with communities to strengthen local economies through surf tourism. With this mission in mind, Mami Wata is donating 100% of their proceeds to support two African surf therapy organizations, Waves for Change and Surfers Not Street Children. BIO Mami Wata is an African surf brand whose mission is to be a creative force for good in Africa. They manufacture their products in Africa to create jobs and build skills, support the African surf therapy organization Waves for Change, and help strengthen African surf tourism to grow local economies. They are located in Cape Town. Selema Masekela is a beloved commentator, journalist, host, activist, and Emmy-nominated producer best known for his work across VICE, E!, ESPN/ABC, National Geographic, Red Bull Media House, and beyond. He is a co-founder of Mami Wata and lives in Los Angeles, California. Ten Speed Press / June 15, 2021 1.3" H x 11.1" L x 8.6" W (3.7 lbs) 320 pages

Afrosurf /// Mami Wata with foreword by Selema Masekela

In the tradition of The Glass Castle, this "gorgeous" (The New York Times, Editors' Choice) and deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu tells the "incredible story" (Malala Yousafzai) about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through. "In Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu tells the incredible story of her young life. How does a girl--abandoned by her mother at age two and orphaned at thirteen when her beloved father dies--find her place in the world? This memoir is the story of Nadia creating her own solid ground across countries and continents. I know the struggle of rebuilding your life in an unfamiliar place. While some of you might be familiar with that and some might not, I hope you'll take as much inspiration and hope from her story as I did." --MALALA YOUSAFZAI ​ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 SELECTED BY VULTURE AND TIME MAGAZINE! Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia's nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia's stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo. With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together. "A magnificent, complex assessment of selfhood and why it matters" ( Elle), Aftershocks depicts the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life's perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand. "Full of narrative risk and untrammeled lyricism" (The Washington Post), Aftershocks joins the likes of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and William Styron's Darkness Visible, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts. BIO Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay So Devilish a Fire won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Granta, The Guardian, Bon Appétit, Electric Literature, The Paris Review Daily, and Catapult. Aftershocks is her first book. REVIEWS "'I have lived in disaster, and disaster has lived in me, ' writes one of the literary world's most promising new voices, Nadia Owusu, in this astonishing memoir. After her mother left and her father died, Owusu became a woman of many homelands and identities: she grew up in many countries including Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda, Italy, and the UK. [ Aftershocks] is Owusu's account of hauling herself out of the wreckage; an intimate look behind the division of today's world." --RED (UK) "Aftershocks is more than just a book--it is delicate, intricate choreography. This memoir is a testimony to how certain books and writers can tell you their story in a way that mirrors your own. Even if the facts of that story are different, the emotion is familiar. Owusu is that writer. She has created a book full of shared emotional memories and I wanted to sit in those memories with her for as long as I could. Nadia Owusu is powerful, beautiful, poetic, and Aftershocks is a testimony to her commitment to constructing towering, lovingly-rendered sentences. Quite simply, Aftershocks is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read." --BASSEY IKPI, New York Times bestselling author of I'm Lying but I'm telling the Truth "Nadia Owusu's Aftershocks bleeds honesty. It is a majestically rendered telling of all the history, hurt and love a body can contain. A wonderful work of art made of so many stories and histories it is bursting with both harshness and perseverance. An incredible debut."-- NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, author of New York Times bestseller Friday Black [H] Simon & Schuster / January 12, 2021 1.1" H x 8.5" L x 5.5" W (1.01 lbs) 320 pages

Aftershocks: A Memoir /// Nadia Owusu

The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' Love Song to the Nation," All About Love is a revelation about what causes a polarized society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. "The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love. As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better. BIO bell hooks is an influential cultural critic, feminist theorist, and writer. Celebrated as one of America's leading public intellectuals, she is a charismatic speaker and writer who teaches and lectures around the world. Previously a professor in the English departments at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks is the author of more than 17 books, including All About Love: New Visions; Salvation: Black People and Love; Communion: the Female Search for Love, as well as the landmark memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. REVIEWS "Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us." --Maya Angelou "She provides a refreshing spiritual treatise that steps outside the confines of the intellect and into the wilds of the heart." --Seattle Weekly "Like love, this book is worth the commitment." --Toronto Sun [P] William Morrow & Company / January 30, 2018 0.7" H x 8.0" L x 5.3" W (0.52 lbs) 272 pages

All About Love: New Visions /// bell hooks

A New York Times Bestseller! Optioned for television by Gabrielle Union Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Today Show, and MSNBC feature stories Velshi Banned Book Club Amazon Best Book of the Year Indie Bestseller Teen Vogue Recommended Read Buzzfeed Recommended Read People Magazine Best Book of the Summer A New York Library Best Book of 2020 A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 ... and more!In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson's emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults. BIO George M. Johnson is a writer and activist based in New York. They have written on race, gender, sex, and culture for Essence, the Advocate, BuzzFeed News, Teen Vogue, and more than forty other national publications. George has appeared on BuzzFeed’s AM2DM as well as on MSNBC. All Boys Aren’t Blue is their debut, and was an Amazon Best Book of the Year, an Indie Bestseller, a People Magazine Best Book of the Year, and optioned for television by Gabrielle Union. The New York Times called it "an exuberant, unapologetic memoir infused with a deep but cleareyed love for its subjects." At the time of publication, George used he/him pronouns. Speak with them on Twitter: @IamGMJohnson. iamgmjohnson.com REVIEWS "An exuberant, unapologetic memoir infused with a deep but cleareyed love for its subjects." --The New York Times"This title opens new doors, as the author insists that we don't have to anchor stories such as his to tragic ends: 'Many of us are still here. Still living and waiting for our stories to be told—to tell them ourselves.' A critical, captivating, merciful mirror for growing up black and queer today." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review"An absolute necessity . . . the personal stories and the healing and reconciliation of self in this title are all undeniably honest and relatable—a reminder of our shared imperfection and humanity." --Booklist"The conversational tone will leave readers feeling like they are sitting with an insightful friend . . . This young adult memoir is a contemporary hallmark of the blossoming genre. Johnson anchors the text with encouragement and realistic guidance for queer Black youth." --School Library Journal"Johnson’s debut is a collection of heartfelt personal essays revolving around themes of identity and family . . . In a publishing landscape in need of queer black voices, readers who are sorting through similar concepts will be grateful to join him on the journey." --Publishers Weekly [H] Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Byr) / April 28, 2022 1.2" H x 8.3" L x 5.7" W (0.85 lbs) 320 pages [P] Square Fish / January 16, 2024 1.0" H x 8.2" L x 5.3" W (0.6 lbs) 336 pages

All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto /// George M. Johnson

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST - ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly - ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR "Deeply layered and insightful . . . [a] bold reflection on American history, African American resilience, and the human capacity for love and perseverance in the face of soul-crushing madness."--The Washington Post "A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness."--Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language--including Rose's wish that "It be filled with my Love always." Ruth's sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley's sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose's gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women's faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives--and the lives of so many women like them--to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. The search to uncover this history is part of the story itself. For where the historical record falls short of capturing Rose's, Ashley's, and Ruth's full lives, Miles turns to objects and to art as equally important sources, assembling a chorus of women's and families' stories and critiquing the scant archives that for decades have overlooked so many. The contents of Ashley's sack--a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, "my Love always"--are eloquent evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley's journey, Miles metaphorically unpacks the bag, deepening its emotional resonance and exploring the meanings and significance of everything it contained. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today. BIO Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series. REVIEWS "Tiya Miles is a gentle genius . . . All That She Carried is a gorgeous book and a model for how to read as well as feel the precious artifacts of Black women's lives." --Imani Perry, author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons "A brilliant exercise in historical excavation and recovery . . . With creativity, determination, and great insight, Miles illuminates the lives of women who suffered much, but never forgot the importance of love and family." --Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello "Tiya Miles uses the tools of her trade to tend to Black people, to Black mothers and daughters, to our wounds, to collective Black love and loss. This book demonstrates Miles's signature genius in its rare balance of both rigor and care." --Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower [H] Random House / June 08, 2021 ﻿1.5" H x 8.35" L x 5.91" W (1.32 lbs) 416 pages[P] Random House Trade / February 01, 2022 1.0" H x 7.9" L x 5.1" W (0.65 lbs) 416 pages

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives.
KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST - ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly - ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR 
"Deeply layered and insightful . . . [a] bold reflection on American history, African American resilience, and the human capacity for love and perseverance in the face of soul-crushing madness."--The Washington Post  
"A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness."--Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States 
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. 
Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language--including Rose's wish that "It be filled with my Love always." Ruth's sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley's sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose's gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women's faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives--and the lives of so many women like them--to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.
The search to uncover this history is part of the story itself. For where the historical record falls short of capturing Rose's, Ashley's, and Ruth's full lives, Miles turns to objects and to art as equally important sources, assembling a chorus of women's and families' stories and critiquing the scant archives that for decades have overlooked so many. The contents of Ashley's sack--a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, "my Love always"--are eloquent evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley's journey, Miles metaphorically unpacks the bag, deepening its emotional resonance and exploring the meanings and significance of everything it contained.
All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.
BIO
<meta charset="UTF-8">Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series.
REVIEWS
<meta charset="UTF-8">"Tiya Miles is a gentle genius . . . All That She Carried is a gorgeous book and a model for how to read as well as feel the precious artifacts of Black women's lives." --Imani Perry, author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
"A brilliant exercise in historical excavation and recovery . . . With creativity, determination, and great insight, Miles illuminates the lives of women who suffered much, but never forgot the importance of love and family." --Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello
<meta charset="UTF-8">"Tiya Miles uses the tools of her trade to tend to Black people, to Black mothers and daughters, to our wounds, to collective Black love and loss. This book demonstrates Miles's signature genius in its rare balance of both rigor and care." --Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
[H] Random House  /  June 08, 2021
﻿1.5" H x 8.35" L x 5.91" W (1.32 lbs) 416 pages [P]  Random House Trade  /  February 01, 2022
<meta charset="utf-8">1.0" H x 7.9" L x 5.1" W (0.65 lbs) 416 pages

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake /// Tiya Miles

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. "A powerful read that fills one with, dare I say . . . hope?" --The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone. All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States--scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race--and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society. Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, the book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save. With essays and poems by: Emily Atkin - Xiye Bastida - Ellen Bass - Colette Pichon Battle - Jainey K. Bavishi - Janine Benyus - adrienne maree brown - Régine Clément - Abigail Dillen - Camille T. Dungy - Rhiana Gunn-Wright - Joy Harjo - Katharine Hayhoe - Mary Annaïse Heglar - Jane Hirshfield - Mary Anne Hitt - Ailish Hopper - Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe - Emily N. Johnston - Joan Naviyuk Kane - Naomi Klein - Kate Knuth - Ada Limón - Louise Maher-Johnson - Kate Marvel - Gina McCarthy - Anne Haven McDonnell - Sarah Miller - Sherri Mitchell, Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset - Susanne C. Moser - Lynna Odel - Sharon Olds - Mary Oliver - Kate Orff - Jacqui Patterson - Leah Penniman - Catherine Pierce - Marge Piercy - Kendra Pierre-Louis - Varshini - Prakash - Janisse Ray - Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez - Favianna Rodriguez - Cameron Russell - Ash Sanders - Judith D. Schwartz - Patricia Smith - Emily Stengel - Sarah Stillman - Leah Cardamore Stokes - Amanda Sturgeon - Maggie Thomas - Heather McTeer Toney - Alexandria Villaseñor - Alice Walker - Amy Westervelt - Jane Zelikova BIO Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and Brooklyn native. She is co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, co-founder of the climate initiative The All We Can Save Project, and co-creator of the podcast How to Save a Planet. In 2021, she was named to the Time 100 Next list. Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson is an author, strategist, teacher, and homegrown Atlantan, named one of fifteen "Women Who Will Save the World" by Time. Her writing has been featured in The Drawdown Review and the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and she is the author of Between God & Green. REVIEWS "A fiery, hopeful manifesto on how to make sense of the staggering loss posed by climate change--and take justice-oriented action in spite of it." --Mashable "Hopeful and illuminating, All We Can Save is an anthology of essays by women at the forefront of the climate crisis. So often climate writing can make us feel doomed and anxious, but this collection is a comfort because of its honesty and courage . . . a reminder that we can work with hope towards a better future." --BuzzFeed [H] One World / September 22, 2020 1.5" H x 9.2" L x 6.5" W (1.74 lbs) 448 pages [P] One World / July 20, 2021 1.02" H x 8.05" L x 5.28" W (1.0 lbs) 448 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward.
"A powerful read that fills one with, dare I say . . . hope?" --The New York Times
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.
All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States--scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race--and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society.
Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, the book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save. With essays and poems by: 
Emily Atkin - Xiye Bastida - Ellen Bass - Colette Pichon Battle - Jainey K. Bavishi - Janine Benyus - adrienne maree brown - Régine Clément - Abigail Dillen - Camille T. Dungy - Rhiana Gunn-Wright - Joy Harjo - Katharine Hayhoe - Mary Annaïse Heglar - Jane Hirshfield - Mary Anne Hitt - Ailish Hopper - Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe - Emily N. Johnston - Joan Naviyuk Kane - Naomi Klein - Kate Knuth - Ada Limón - Louise Maher-Johnson - Kate Marvel - Gina McCarthy - Anne Haven McDonnell - Sarah Miller - Sherri Mitchell, Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset - Susanne C. Moser - Lynna Odel - Sharon Olds - Mary Oliver - Kate Orff - Jacqui Patterson - Leah Penniman - Catherine Pierce - Marge Piercy - Kendra Pierre-Louis - Varshini - Prakash - Janisse Ray - Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez - Favianna Rodriguez - Cameron Russell - Ash Sanders - Judith D. Schwartz - Patricia Smith - Emily Stengel - Sarah Stillman - Leah Cardamore Stokes - Amanda Sturgeon - Maggie Thomas - Heather McTeer Toney - Alexandria Villaseñor - Alice Walker - Amy Westervelt - Jane Zelikova 
BIO 
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and Brooklyn native. She is co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, co-founder of the climate initiative The All We Can Save Project, and co-creator of the podcast How to Save a Planet. In 2021, she was named to the Time 100 Next list.
Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson is an author, strategist, teacher, and homegrown Atlantan, named one of fifteen "Women Who Will Save the World" by Time. Her writing has been featured in The Drawdown Review and the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and she is the author of Between God &amp; Green.
REVIEWS
"A fiery, hopeful manifesto on how to make sense of the staggering loss posed by climate change--and take justice-oriented action in spite of it." --Mashable
"Hopeful and illuminating, All We Can Save is an anthology of essays by women at the forefront of the climate crisis. So often climate writing can make us feel doomed and anxious, but this collection is a comfort because of its honesty and courage . . . a reminder that we can work with hope towards a better future." --BuzzFeed
[H] One World  /  September 22, 2020
1.5" H x 9.2" L x 6.5" W (1.74 lbs) 448 pages
<meta charset="utf-8">[P] One World  /  July 20, 2021
<meta charset="utf-8">1.02" H x 8.05" L x 5.28" W (1.0 lbs) 448 pages

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis /// edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

A memoir of global travel and the 160 recipes it inspired.Always Enough: A Global Food Memoir​ is a storied cookbook, a love letter to the author's tables in America, Europe, and Africa. From Philadelphia to Paris, Morocco to the Ivory Coast, Bologna to Greece to London, Always Enough tracks the cultural insights the author absorbed by shopping, cooking, and eating across the world, and provides 160 recipes learned across those kitchens. Always Enough's meals model adapting to one's environment and what ingredients are available; its recipes capture a broad swath of international cuisines while also promoting flavors and ingredients not emphasized in traditional Western cooking; its approach encourages sustainable and healthy eating, with health-conscious dishes for vegetarians and meat-eaters alike.Always Enough shares good food and good stories of how one cook's identity took shape by immersing herself in local cooking and culture around the world. BIO Annette Anthony, mother, daughter of Philadelphia, American, British, businessperson, and writer, began her career as counsel at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Always Enough, her first book, celebrates an upbringing that facilitated her entry into other cultures and cuisines and shares recipes from a most unexpected life in Europe and Africa. She is a fellow of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (USA), a Hedgebrook Master Class alum, and graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. Annette enjoys gatherings around good food and exploring near and far. She lives in England. [H] Skyhorse Publishing / April 02, 2024 1.34" H x 9.06" L x 5.98" W (1.15 lbs) 320 pages

A memoir of global travel and the 160 recipes it inspired. Always Enough: A Global Food Memoir​ is a storied cookbook, a love letter to the author's tables in America, Europe, and Africa. From Philadelphia to Paris, Morocco to the Ivory Coast, Bologna to Greece to London, Always Enough tracks the cultural insights the author absorbed by shopping, cooking, and eating across the world, and provides 160 recipes learned across those kitchens.  Always Enough's meals model adapting to one's environment and what ingredients are available; its recipes capture a broad swath of international cuisines while also promoting flavors and ingredients not emphasized in traditional Western cooking; its approach encourages sustainable and healthy eating, with health-conscious dishes for vegetarians and meat-eaters alike. Always Enough shares good food and good stories of how one cook's identity took shape by immersing herself in local cooking and culture around the world. 
BIO
Annette Anthony, mother, daughter of Philadelphia, American, British, businessperson, and writer, began her career as counsel at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Always Enough, her first book, celebrates an upbringing that facilitated her entry into other cultures and cuisines and shares recipes from a most unexpected life in Europe and Africa. She is a fellow of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (USA), a Hedgebrook Master Class alum, and graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia Law School.    Annette enjoys gatherings around good food and exploring near and far. She lives in England.
[H]  Skyhorse Publishing  /  April 02, 2024
1.34" H x 9.06" L x 5.98" W (1.15 lbs) 320 pages

Always Enough: A Global Food Memoir /// Annette Anthony /// new

NAACP Image Award Nominee · NPR Best Book of 2022 A searing memoir of American racism from a Somalian-American who survived hardships in his birth country only to experience firsthand the dehumanization of Blacks in his adopted land, the United States. “No one told me about America.” Born in Somalia and raised in a valley among nomads, Boyah Farah grew up with a code of male bravado that helped him survive deprivation, disease, and civil war. Arriving in America, he believed that the code that had saved him would help him succeed in this new country. But instead of safety and freedom, Boyah found systemic racism, police brutality, and intense prejudice in all areas of life, including the workplace. He learned firsthand not only what it meant to be an African in America, but what it means to be African American. The code of masculinity that shaped generations of men in his family could not prepare Farah for the painful realities of life in the United States. Lyrical yet unsparing, America Made Me a Black Man is the first book-length examination of American racism from an African outsider’s perspective. With a singular poetic voice brimming with imagery, Boyah challenges us to face difficult truths about the destructive forces that threaten Black lives and attempts to heal a fracture in Black men’s identity. BIO Boyah J. Farah’s writing has been featured in the Guardian, the Harvard Transition, Grub Daily, and Truthdig, and on the Scheer Intelligence podcast at KCRW. He is the winner of Salon’s best essay of 2017. His essays have also appeared in Harvard’s Kennedy School Review, Pangyrus magazine, and the Huffington Post. He recently founded the Abaadi Center in Garowe, Somalia, which offers instruction in English, Math, and Science to students age thirteen to twenty-four. REVIEWS ﻿“Unflinching and raw, Farah’s powerful memoir is a melancholic ode to thriving in a world that’s forcing us to simply survive based solely on the color of our skin. A searing story for our times that challenges prejudices and stereotypes. Farah’s unique and courageous voice highlights what it means to live outside society’s predefined boxes for Black men.” — Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström, international bestselling author of In Every Mirror She's Black “Somalian refugee and writer Farah recounts a long record of dehumanization and racism in his adoptive country… An eye-opening, upsetting catalog of indignities that no one should have to suffer in a supposedly free country.” — Kirkus Reviews [H] Harper / September 06, 2022 ﻿1.1" H x 8.3" L x 5.7" W (0.75 lbs) 256 pages

America Made Me a Black Man /// Boyah J. Farah

Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In American Negra, a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of Syracuse, NY. In smart, vivid prose, Alford illustrates the complexity of being multiethnic in Upstate New York and society’s flawed teachings about matters of identity. When she travels to Puerto Rico for the first time, she is the darkest in her family, and navigates shame for not speaking Spanish fluently. She visits African-American hair salons where she’s told that she has “good” hair, while internalizing images that as a Latina she has "bad” hair or pelo malo. When Alford goes from an underfunded public school system to Harvard University surrounded by privilege and pedigree, she wrestles with more than her own ethnic identity, as she is faced with imposter syndrome, a shocking medical diagnosis, and a struggle to define success on her own terms. A study abroad trip to the Dominican Republic changes her perspective on Afro-Latinidad and sets her on a path to better understand her own Latin roots. Alford then embarks on a whirlwind journey to find her authentic voice, taking her across the United States from a hedge fund boardroom to a classroom and ultimately a newsroom, as a journalist. A coming-of-age story about what it's like to live at the intersections of race, culture, gender, and class, all while staying true to yourself, American Negra is a captivating look at one woman’s experience being Negra in the United States. As the movement to highlight Afro-Latin identity and overlooked histories of the African diaspora grows, American Negra illustrates the diversity of the Black experience in the larger fabric of American society. BIO Natasha S. Alford is an award-winning journalist, host, and media executive driven by the power of storytelling to inspire and change people’s lives. Natasha serves as vice president of digital content for theGrio and an anchor for theGrio TV. She is also a CNN political analyst, where she offers commentary on the news, politics, and movements of the moment. Her work has also been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Oprah Daily, Time magazine, and Vogue. Natasha is currently completing a Master in Public Policy at Princeton University and resides with her family in New Jersey. REVIEWS An Essence 'Best Book To Consider Adding To Your 'Must-Read' List' * An Elle 'Most Anticipated Book' In her searing debut, Alford smartly and candidly examines what it means to be Black and Latina in America, and interrogates identity, class, race and success—on her terms. American Negra is required reading for anyone longing to understand the intricacies of intersectionality in this country, and be inspired in the process. -- Sunny Hostin, 3x Emmy Award-winning co-host of ABC’s “The View” and New York Times best-selling author A heartening and instructive portrait of a young woman’s search for identity. -- Kirkus Reviews Alford's story is one of belonging and feeling a connection to her past and her present. Alford’s journalistic writing style is engaging and accessible, and her account is never overly sentimental or nostalgic. -- Booklist American Negra is one of those rare books that offers an eye-opening and entirely different perspective on not just the world around us, but our own identities and experiences. I read it in one sitting, compelled to keep turning pages by Alford’s accessible, engaging and insightful prose, and a story that is both distinctive and entirely relatable. Watching her navigate her multiple identities in a world that has always been keen to box her in, find her power and learn to put herself, her dreams and her wellbeing at the center was an inspiration. -- Alisha Fernandez Miranda, author of My What If Year [H] Harper / February 27, 2024 1.1" H x 8.5" L x 6.0" W (0.9 lbs) 288 pages

Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In American Negra, a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of Syracuse, NY.
In smart, vivid prose, Alford illustrates the complexity of being multiethnic in Upstate New York and society’s flawed teachings about matters of identity. When she travels to Puerto Rico for the first time, she is the darkest in her family, and navigates shame for not speaking Spanish fluently. She visits African-American hair salons where she’s told that she has “good” hair, while internalizing images that as a Latina she has "bad” hair or pelo malo.
When Alford goes from an underfunded public school system to Harvard University surrounded by privilege and pedigree, she wrestles with more than her own ethnic identity, as she is faced with imposter syndrome, a shocking medical diagnosis, and a struggle to define success on her own terms. A study abroad trip to the Dominican Republic changes her perspective on Afro-Latinidad and sets her on a path to better understand her own Latin roots.
Alford then embarks on a whirlwind journey to find her authentic voice, taking her across the United States from a hedge fund boardroom to a classroom and ultimately a newsroom, as a journalist.  
A coming-of-age story about what it's like to live at the intersections of race, culture, gender, and class, all while staying true to yourself, American Negra is a captivating look at one woman’s experience being Negra in the United States.
As the movement to highlight Afro-Latin identity and overlooked histories of the African diaspora grows, American Negra illustrates the diversity of the Black experience in the larger fabric of American society.
BIO
Natasha S. Alford is an award-winning journalist, host, and media executive driven by the power of storytelling to inspire and change people’s lives. Natasha serves as vice president of digital content for theGrio and an anchor for theGrio TV. She is also a CNN political analyst, where she offers commentary on the news, politics, and movements of the moment. Her work has also been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Oprah Daily, Time magazine, and Vogue. Natasha is currently completing a Master in Public Policy at Princeton University and resides with her family in New Jersey.
REVIEWS
An Essence 'Best Book To Consider Adding To Your 'Must-Read' List' * An Elle 'Most Anticipated Book'
In her searing debut, Alford smartly and candidly examines what it means to be Black and Latina in America, and interrogates identity, class, race and success—on her terms. American Negra is required reading for anyone longing to understand the intricacies of intersectionality in this country, and be inspired in the process. -- Sunny Hostin, 3x Emmy Award-winning co-host of ABC’s “The View” and New York Times best-selling author
A heartening and instructive portrait of a young woman’s search for identity. -- Kirkus Reviews
Alford's story is one of belonging and feeling a connection to her past and her present. Alford’s journalistic writing style is engaging and accessible, and her account is never overly sentimental or nostalgic. -- Booklist
American Negra is one of those rare books that offers an eye-opening and entirely different perspective on not just the world around us, but our own identities and experiences. I read it in one sitting, compelled to keep turning pages by Alford’s accessible, engaging and insightful prose, and a story that is both distinctive and entirely relatable. Watching her navigate her multiple identities in a world that has always been keen to box her in, find her power and learn to put herself, her dreams and her wellbeing at the center was an inspiration. -- Alisha Fernandez Miranda, author of My What If Year
[H]  Harper  /  February 27, 2024
1.1" H x 8.5" L x 6.0" W (0.9 lbs) 288 pages

American Negra: A Memoir /// Natasha S. Alford /// new

A unique collaboration from two of America’s leading artists that explores the fascinating and hidden history of the plant world.In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them.Kara Walker, one of America’s greatest visual artists, illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors.There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children—so inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal. BIO Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont. Kara Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes [H] Farrar, Straus and Giroux / May 07, 2024 1.0" H x 9.12" L x 7.38" W (1.0 lbs) 96 pages

A unique collaboration from two of America’s leading artists that explores the fascinating and hidden history of the plant world. In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them. Kara Walker, one of America’s greatest visual artists, illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors. There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children—so inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal.
BIO
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont.
Kara Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes
[H]  Farrar, Straus and Giroux  /  May 07, 2024
1.0" H x 9.12" L x 7.38" W (1.0 lbs) 96 pages

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children /// Jamaica Kincaid, illustrations by Kara Walker /// pre

“An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend.”—Ibram X. KendiThis beautiful new edition of Angela Davis’s classic Autobiography features an expansive new introduction by the author.“I am excited to be publishing this new edition of my autobiography with Haymarket Books at a time when so many are making collective demands for radical change and are seeking a deeper understanding of the social movements of the past.” —Angela Y. DavisAngela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements for more than 50 years. First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, An Autobiography is a powerful and commanding account of her early years in struggle. Davis describes her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century: from her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Told with warmth, brilliance, humor and conviction, Angela Davis’s autobiography is a classic account of a life in struggle with echoes in our own time. BIO Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. REVIEWS “Angela Davis has spent more than 50 years working for social justice. This summer, society started to catch up.” -- Ava Duvernay, Vanity Fair“An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend.” -- Ibram X. Kendi“Angela Davis: An Autobiography is riveting; as fresh and relevant today as it was almost 50 years ago. The words fire off the page with humour, anger and eloquence.” -- The Guardian“Before the world knew what intersectionality was, the scholar, writer and activist was living it, arguing not just for Black liberation, but for the rights of women and queer and transgender people as well.” -- New York Times“If anyone is qualified to make an assessment on the current situation, it is Angela Davis. She has spent five decades as an intellectual campaigning for racial justice, yet the causes she has pursued – prison reform, defunding the police, restructuring the bail system – had, until recently, been considered too radical for mainstream political thinking.” -- The Guardian [H] Haymarket Books / January 18, 2022 1.5" H x 9.1" L x 6.3" W (1.55 lbs) 420 pages [P] Haymarket Books / May 02, 2023 1.5" H x 9.0" L x 6.0" W (1.17 lbs) 400 pages

Angela Davis: An Autobiography /// Angela Y. Davis

A powerful, visually stunning celebration of Black homeownership, featuring inspiring homes and family histories of notable Black Americans—including chef Alexander Smalls and actor Danielle Brooks.“The most important design book of our time.”—Stacey Lindsay, design editor, Camille StylesJeanine Hays and Bryan Mason invite you into the intimate spaces of actors and musicians, the creative studios of artists and curators, the “boss” homes of entrepreneurs and executives, “off-the-beaten-path” homes that defy the stereotypes of urban living, and places filled with pieces handed down from generations past. Tour the creative and culturally infused Washington, DC, rowhouse of author Jason Reynolds. Take in the bursts of color and layers of memory that fill the Harlem Renaissance–inspired interior of renowned chef Alexander Smalls. And get inspired by the design of actor Danielle Brooks and her husband Dennis Gelin’s Brooklyn townhome, where Haitian heritage and South Carolina roots meet. Showcasing the amazing diversity of the Black experience through striking interiors, stories of family and community, and histories exploring the obstacles Black homeowners have faced for generations, this groundbreaking book honors the journey, recognizes the struggle, and celebrates the joy that is the Black family home. BIO Jeanine Hays is an accomplished writer, interior and product designer, and together with her husband, Bryan Mason, is the founder and creative director of AphroChic, a brand dedicated to celebrating design, culture, creativity, health and wellness throughout the African diaspora. A graduate of Spelman College and American University Washington College of Law, Hays pursued a career as a policy attorney, working with the Obama administration to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Hays and her husband are the authors of “Remix: Decorating with Culture, Objects and Soul” and the new, “AphroChic: Celebrating the Legacy of the Black Family Home External,” which will be featured at the 2023 National Book Festival. REVIEWS “AphroChic transforms stories about home into reflections on plantations where ancestors were enslaved; a conversation about design into a recollection of the Great Migration that brought a generation of refugees north and west; and a homeowner’s stylish love of color into a rebuke of this country’s efforts to cover over its past with thin coats of beige and gray.” -- Robin Givhan, Senior Critic-at-Large, The Washington Post“This book is an homage to cultural alchemists who transmute the material of everyday life—experimenting with color and texture, playing with pattern and placemaking, and crafting new stories of belonging that ripple across generations.” -- Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies, Princeton University“With AphroChic, Jeanine Hays and Bryan Mason have written the most important design book of our time.” -- Stacey Lindsay, design editor, Camille Styles“Sixteen tours thrillingly document Black homes in Bryan Mason and Jeanine Hays’s AphroChic, at once a rousing celebration of Black homeownership and a salient reminder of the obstacles that many still face.” -- Parker Bowie Larson, style director, ELLE Decor“Jeanine and Bryan laid down the magic recipe: design sparks the eye, story opens the heart, and space moves the soul. AphroChic continues to celebrate, elevate, and inspire us all.” -- Kim Myles, HGTV host [H] Clarkson Potter Publishers / November 15, 2022 ﻿1.02" H x 10.55" L x 8.27" W (2.8 lbs) 256 pages

Aphrochic: Celebrating the Legacy of the Black Family Home /// Jeanine Hays and Bryan Mason

At the Table of Power is both a cookbook and a culinary history that intertwines social issues, personal stories, and political commentary. Renowned culinary historian Diane M. Spivey offers a unique insight into the historical experience and cultural values of African America and America in general by way of the kitchen. From the rural country kitchen and steamboat floating palaces to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance, Africans in America cooked their way to positions of distinct superiority, and thereby indispensability. Despite their many culinary accomplishments, most Black culinary artists have been made invisible—until now. Within these pages, Spivey tells a powerful story beckoning and daring the reader to witness this culinary, cultural, and political journey taken hand in hand with the fight of Africans in America during the foundation years, from colonial slavery through the Reconstruction era. These narratives, together with the recipes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expose the politics of the day and offer insight on the politics of today. African American culinary artists, Spivey concludes, have more than earned a rightful place at the table of culinary contribution and power. BIO Diane M. Spivey is a culinary historian who has devoted more than forty years to the study and recording of African American food traditions and cooking. She is the author of the much heralded The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine and has written articles for The Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, the Black Scholar, Blackpast.org, South Florida Gourmet, the Black Book Review, Newsday, and Scribner’s Encyclopedia of World Food and Culture. Born and reared in Chicago, she and her family now reside in Palmetto Bay, Florida. REVIEWS "Diane M. Spivey has written a book that intersects African American cooks and cuisine with freedom, justice, law, and oppression. We now have a history of the professionalism of Black cuisine and the forces that have historically removed Black cooks from the center of their culinary creativity. Spivey presents an historical gentrification of African American culinary traditions that overtime has relegated cooks to the periphery of their history and traditions. This book documents and illustrates the presence of race in determining the status of African American culinary artists overtime limiting their growth and command of their culture." --Samuel W. Black, director of the African American Program at the Senator John Heinz History Center "Diane M. Spivey has compellingly moved Black cooks, chefs, caterers, and cuisine from the shadows into the floodlights of foodways in the United States and the Caribbean. With an amalgam of African, Native American, and European sources, she has put to rest the traditional narrative with sound scholarship and illustrative recipes. This book is a must to understand the African American story in its full dimensions." --Robert L. Harris, Jr., professor emeritus of African American history and American studies at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University "This singularly original, meticulously researched and wonderfully written work seamlessly integrates the extensive experience of Diane Spivey as insightful historian and international cookbook writer. It skillfully weaves together the important although neglected account of the essential contribution of African cuisine in the entire history of the United States. At the Table of Power can be rewardingly enjoyed as a marvelous cookbook, as an excellent general history, or as a powerful biographical dictionary. It excels in all three categories." --Franklin W. Knight, coeditor of the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography [H] University of Pittsburgh Press / October 18, 2022 1.42" H x 9.06" L x 6.06" W (1.65 lbs) 377 pages

At the Table of Power: Food and Cuisine in the African American Struggle for Freedom, Justice, and Equality /// Diane Spivey

New York Times Bestseller - TIME Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 - New York Public Library's Best Book of 2018 - NPR's Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 - Economist Book of the Year - SELF.com's Best Books of 2018 - Audible's Best of the Year - BookRiot's Best Audio Books of 2018 - The Atlantic's Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered - Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018 - The Christian Science Monitor's Best Books 2018 - "A profound impact on Hurston's literary legacy."--New York Times "One of the greatest writers of our time."--Toni Morrison "Zora Neale Hurston's genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece."--Alice Walker A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade--abducted from Africa on the last Black Cargo ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture. BIO Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. An author of four novels (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore (Mules and Men, 1935, and Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College and Columbia University, and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1928. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida. She died in Fort Pierce, in 1960. In 1973, Alice Walker had a headstone placed at her gravesite with this epitaph: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South." REVIEWS "[ Barracoon's] belated publication of her phonetic transcription offers spine-chilling access to one of modernity's great crimes, an atrocity that, when described by a victim, suddenly becomes far less distant."-- The Guardian "Zora Neale Hurston's recovered masterpiece, Barracoon, is a stunning addition to several overlapping canons of American literature."-- Tayari Jones, Washington Post "Short enough to be read in a single sitting, this book is one of those gorgeous, much too fleeting things...Brimming with observational detail from a man whose life spanned continents and eras, the story is at times devastating, but Hurston's success in bringing it to light is a marvel."-- NPR [H] Amistad Press / May 08, 2018 0.8" H x 8.3" L x 5.8" W (0.7 lbs) 208 pages [P] Amistad Press / January 07, 2020 0.7" H x 8.0" L x 5.3" W (0.44 lbs) 256 pages

Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo /// Zora Neale Hurston, introduction by Alice Walker

A business memoir from fifteen year-old lemonade entrepreneur and one of TIME Magazine's Top 30 Most Influential Teens, Mikaila Ulmer, and her advice for life and business. When Mikaila Ulmer was four, she was stung by a bee--twice in one week. She was terrified of going outside, so her parents encouraged her to learn more about bees so she wouldn't be afraid. It worked. Mikaila didn't just learn what an important role bees play in our ecosystem, but she also learned bees are endangered, and set out to save them. She started by selling cups of lemonade in front of her house and donating the small proceeds to organizations dedicated to bee conservation. When she realized the more lemonade she sold, the more bees she could help, Me & the Bees Lemonade was born. Now she sells her lemonade across the country. From meetings with Fortune 500 CEOs, to securing a deal on Shark Tank, to even visiting the Obama White House, Mikaila's lemonade and passion for bee conservation have taken her far. In Bee Fearless, part memoir, part business guide, Mikaila--now fifteen--shares her personal journey and special brand of mindful entrepreneurship and offers helpful tips and guidance for young readers interested in pursuing their own ventures, instilling in them the bee-lief that they can bee fearless and achieve their dreams too. BIO Mikaila Ulmer is an American entrepreneur who started a lemonade business in Austin, Texas. Her lemonade is sold in over 1500 stores [H] G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers / August 18, 2020 ﻿0.9" H x 8.6" L x 5.7" W (0.7 lbs) 240 pages [P] G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers / September 7, 2021 0.7" H x 7.7" L x 5.0" W (0.39 lbs) 240 pages

Bee Fearless: Dream Like a Kid /// Mikaila Ulmer

Climate change. Two words that are quickly becoming the clarion call to action in the twenty-first century. It is a voter issue, an economy driver, and a defining dynamic for the foreseeable future. Yet, in Black communities, climate change is seen as less urgent when compared to other pressing issues, including police brutality, gun violence, job security, food insecurity, and the blatant racism faced daily around the country. However, with Black Americans disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change--making up 13 percent of the US population but breathing 40 percent dirtier air and being twice as likely to be hospitalized or die from climate-related health problems than white counterparts--climate change is a central issue of racial justice and affects every aspect of life for Black communities. In Before the Streetlights Come On, climate activist Heather McTeer Toney insists that those most affected by climate change are best suited to lead the movement for climate justice. McTeer Toney brings her background in politics, community advocacy, and leadership in environmental justice to this revolutionary exploration of why and how Black Americans are uniquely qualified to lead national and global conversations around systems of racial disparity and solutions to the climate crisis. As our country delves deeper into solutions for systemic racism and past injustices, she argues, the environmental movement must shift direction and leadership toward those most affected and most affecting change: Black communities. BIO Heather McTeer Toney is an attorney, environmentalist, speaker, and writer. She was the first Black, first female, and youngest mayor elected in Greenville, Mississippi, at age twenty-seven. In 2014, she was appointed by President Barack Obama as regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency's Southeast Region. Formerly the senior director for Moms Clean Air Force, Toney is now vice president of community engagement for the Environmental Defense Fund. She is a frequent guest on numerous shows and networks including CNN, Apple's The Problem with Jon Stewart, MSNBC, Democracy Now!, and Fox News. Heather lives with her husband and three children in Oxford, Mississippi. REVIEWS "A persuasive case for why Black activists should be at the forefront of the environmental movement." -- Publishers Weekly "Heather McTeer Toney gives us a practical, accessible, essential book that directly responds to Mother Earth's call: 'Say my name; you gonna respect me,"' as she dishes out some 'Do Right' to make sure we all know she's pissed about how we have disrespected the gift and how she expects us to do better moving forward." -- Mustafa Santiago Ali, EVP, National Wildlife Association "This book is so important. Heather McTeer Toney brings to life the intersection of climate change and the social justice issues faced by Black Americans daily through her stories and lived experience. ...This is the urgent solution we need in order to effectuate equitable climate policy. Heather's book will help people of all backgrounds see clearly the effects of unjust and unbalanced actions on Black America as well as understand why it is critical to our collective survival." -- from the foreword by Dr. Robert D. Bullard and Dr. Beverly Wright, authors of The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities [H] Broadleaf Books / April 18, 2023 1.5" H x 8.1" L x 5.9" W (0.95 lbs) 198 pages

Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America's Urgent Call for Climate Solutions /// Heather McTeer Toney

A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine's award-winning "1619 Project" issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation's founding and construction--and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander - Michelle Alexander - Carol Anderson - Joshua Bennett - Reginald Dwayne Betts - Jamelle Bouie - Anthea Butler - Matthew Desmond - Rita Dove - Camille T. Dungy - Cornelius Eady - Eve L. Ewing - Nikky Finney - Vievee Francis - Yaa Gyasi - Forrest Hamer - Terrance Hayes - Kimberly Annece Henderson - Jeneen Interlandi - Honorée Fanonne Jeffers - Barry Jenkins - Tyehimba Jess - Martha S. Jones - Robert Jones, Jr. - A. Van Jordan - Ibram X. Kendi - Eddie Kendricks - Yusef Komunyakaa - Kevin M. Kruse - Kiese Laymon - Trymaine Lee - Jasmine Mans - Terry McMillan - Tiya Miles - Wesley Morris - Khalil Gibran Muhammad - Lynn Nottage - ZZ Packer - Gregory Pardlo - Darryl Pinckney - Claudia Rankine - Jason Reynolds - Dorothy Roberts - Sonia Sanchez - Tim Seibles - Evie Shockley - Clint Smith - Danez Smith - Patricia Smith - Tracy K. Smith - Bryan Stevenson - Nafissa Thompson-Spires - Natasha Trethewey - Linda Villarosa - Jesmyn Ward BIO Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine, and creator of the landmark 1619 Project. In 2017, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Grant, for her work on educational inequality. She has also won a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and the 2018 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2016, Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization geared toward increasing the number of investigative reporters of color. Hannah-Jones is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she has founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy. In 2021, she was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It is led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein and editors Ilena Silverman and Caitlin Roper. REVIEWS "[A] groundbreaking compendium . . . These bracing and urgent works, by multidisciplinary visionaries ranging from Barry Jenkins to Jesmyn Ward, build on the existing scholarship of The 1619 Project, exploring how the nation's original sin continues to shape everything from our music to our food to our democracy. This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling." --Esquire, Best Books of Fall 2021 "Hannah-Jones and colleagues consider a nation still wrestling with the outcomes of slavery, an incomplete Reconstruction, and a subsequent history of Jim Crow laws and current legal efforts to disenfranchise Black voters . . . Those readers open to fresh and startling interpretations of history will find this book a comprehensive education. A much-needed book that stakes a solid place in a battlefield of ideas over America's past and present." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Powerful . . . Based on the landmark 1619 Project, this collection . . . expands on the groundbreaking work with added nuance and new contributions by poets like Tracy K. Smith, writers including Kiese Laymon, and historians such as Anthea Butler. . . . This work asks readers to deeply consider who is allowed to shape the collective memory. Like the magazine version of the 1619 Project, this invaluable book sets itself apart by reframing readers' understanding of U.S. history, past and present." --Library Journal (starred review) "Pulitzer winner Hannah-Jones . . . and an impressive cast of historians, journalists, poets, novelists, and cultural critics deliver a sweeping study of the 'unparalleled impact' of African slavery on American society. . . . Stories and poems by Claudia Rankine, Terry McMillan, Darryl Pinckney, and others bring to vivid life historical moments. . . . The result is a bracing and vital reconsideration of American history." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) One World / November 16, 2021 1.5" H x 9.0" L x 6.3" W (2.0 lbs) 624 pages

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story /// Nikole Hannah-Jones & The New York Times Magazine

Esteemed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is an engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form such an important part of African American culture, history, and identity. Although the story of African cuisine in America begins with slavery, High on the Hog ultimately chronicles a history of triumph and survival. BIO Jessica B. Harris is the author of eleven cookbooks documenting the foods of the African Diaspora, including The Africa Cookbook and The Welcome Table, and has written and lectured widely about the culture of Africa in the Americas. A professor at Queens College, CUNY, she also consults at Dillard University in New Orleans, where she founded the Institute for the Study of Culinary Cultures. She was recently inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America. REVIEWS "Our leading historian of African-American cooking continues her quest to trace the multiplicity of ways that American food has been enriched-and in many ways created-by the Africans who were forced to immigrate to North America and their descendants." --Vogue.com "Harris's flavorful writing moves with an effortless voice that you feel could recite most of these pages from loving memory. As much historical document as ethnography of a vital and rich gastronomy, High on the Hog is a book to make your mouth water." --Paste Magazine "In High on the Hog, the inimitable Jessica B. Harris tells the story of the African American diaspora from the perspective of an accomplished food historian. Food, she tells us, is a metaphor for society. If so, I can't think of a better one. From slave food to Taste of Ebony, this is a gripping saga laced with descriptions of food that will make your mouth water." --Marion Nestle, NYU professor and author of Food Politics and What to Eat Bloomsbury USA / January 24, 2012 0.9" H x 8.1" L x 5.4" W (0.6 lbs) 289 pages

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America /// Jessica B. Harris

An expanded edition of a celebrated book that travels throughout the African diaspora to savor the timeless joy of black cuisine and culture. A hidden gem by the author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Some Sing, Some Cry, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, and Betsey Brown, a delightfully eclectic tribute to black cuisine as a food of life that reflects the spirit and history of a people. This edition, with delectable illustrations, features additional recipes--including two vegan dishes--that connect the culinary past to the present and welcomes a new generation of readers. With recipes such as "Cousin Eddie's Shark with Breadfruit" and "Collard Greens to Bring You Money," Shange instructs us in the nuances of a cuisine born on the slave ships of the Middle Passage, spiced by the jazz of Duke Ellington, and shared by generations across the African diaspora. Rich with personal memories and historical insight, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can is a timeless story of the migration of a people and the cuisine that marks their living legacy and celebration of taste. BIO Ntozake Shange (1948-2018) was a renowned playwright, poet, and novelist. Her works include the Tony Award-nominated and Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, as well as Some Sing, Some Cry (written with her sister Ifa Bayeza), Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigoand Liliane. Among her honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and a Pushcart Prize. She was a graduate of Barnard and recipient of a Masters in American Studies from University of Southern California. REVIEWS "This book is the first one I recommend to all cooks to understand the soul of our food. . . . It's as indispensable as hot sauce." --Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South "A rich, dense gumbo of food memories, history, recipes, and the special kind of magic that only Shange can create . . . I loved it the first time around; in this new version, it, like the rainbow, is more than enuf." --Jessica B. Harris, author of My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir and High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America "Listen. To sister Shange's rainbow recipes of light and love. Listen. To the stirring of her pots and pans with food that fuels our movements and memories. Can't wait for her to cook me up some of her magic so we can eat and laugh and be. Stay human." --Sonia Sanchez, poet and activist Beacon Press / January 29, 2019 0.5" H x 8.4" L x 5.4" W (0.45 lbs) 140 pages

An expanded edition of a celebrated book that travels throughout the African diaspora to savor the timeless joy of black cuisine and culture.  
A hidden gem by the author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Some Sing, Some Cry, Sassafrass, Cypress &amp; Indigo, and Betsey Brown, a delightfully eclectic tribute to black cuisine as a food of life that reflects the spirit and history of a people. This edition, with delectable illustrations, features additional recipes--including two vegan dishes--that connect the culinary past to the present and welcomes a new generation of readers. With recipes such as "Cousin Eddie's Shark with Breadfruit" and "Collard Greens to Bring You Money," Shange instructs us in the nuances of a cuisine born on the slave ships of the Middle Passage, spiced by the jazz of Duke Ellington, and shared by generations across the African diaspora. Rich with personal memories and historical insight, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can is a timeless story of the migration of a people and the cuisine that marks their living legacy and celebration of taste.
BIO
Ntozake Shange (1948-2018) was a renowned playwright, poet, and novelist. Her works include the Tony Award-nominated and Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, as well as Some Sing, Some Cry (written with her sister Ifa Bayeza), Sassafrass, Cypress &amp; Indigoand Liliane.
Among her honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and a Pushcart Prize. She was a graduate of Barnard and recipient of a Masters in American Studies from University of Southern California.
REVIEWS
<meta charset="UTF-8">"This book is the first one I recommend to all cooks to understand the soul of our food. . . . It's as indispensable as hot sauce." --Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South 
"A rich, dense gumbo of food memories, history, recipes, and the special kind of magic that only Shange can create . . . I loved it the first time around; in this new version, it, like the rainbow, is more than enuf." --Jessica B. Harris, author of My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir and High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America
"Listen. To sister Shange's rainbow recipes of light and love. Listen. To the stirring of her pots and pans with food that fuels our movements and memories. Can't wait for her to cook me up some of her magic so we can eat and laugh and be. Stay human." --Sonia Sanchez, poet and activist
Beacon Press  /  January 29, 2019
0.5" H x 8.4" L x 5.4" W (0.45 lbs) 140 pages

If I Can Cook/You Know God Can: African American Food Memories, Meditations, and Recipes /// Ntozake Shange

A soulful collection of illuminating essays and interviews that explore Black people’s spiritual and scientific connection to the land, waters, and climate, curated by the acclaimed author of Farming While Black Author of Farming While Black and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, Leah Penniman reminds us that ecological humility is an intrinsic part of Black cultural heritage. While racial capitalism has attempted to sever our connection to the sacred earth for 400 years, Black people have long seen the land and water as family and understood the intrinsic value of nature. This thought-provoking anthology brings together today’s most respected and influential Black environmentalist voices —leaders who have cultivated the skill of listening to the Earth —to share the lessons they have learned. These varied and distinguished experts include Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Alice Walker; the first Queen Mother and official spokesperson for the Gullah/Geechee Nation, Queen Quet; marine biologist, policy expert, and founder and president of Ocean Collectiv, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson; and the Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers, Land Loss Prevention Project, Savi Horne. In Black Earth Wisdom, they address the essential connection between nature and our survival and how runaway consumption and corporate insatiability are harming the earth and every facet of American society, engendering racial violence, food apartheid, and climate injustice. Those whose skin is the color of soil are reviving their ancestral and ancient practice of listening to the earth for guidance. Penniman makes clear that the fight for racial and environmental justice demands that people put our planet first and defer to nature as our ultimate teacher. Contributors include: Alice Walker • adrienne maree brown • Dr. Ross Gay • Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson • Rue Mapp • Dr. Carolyn Finney • Audrey Peterman • Awise Agbaye Wande Abimbola • Ibrahim Abdul-Matin • Kendra Pierre-Louis • Latria Graham • Dr. Lauret Savoy •Ira Wallace • Savi Horne • Dr. Claudia Ford • Dr. J. Drew Lanham • Dr. Leni Sorensen • Queen Quet • Toshi Reagon • Yeye Luisah Teish • Yonnette Fleming • Naima Penniman • Angelou Ezeilo • James Edward Mills • Teresa Baker • Pandora Thomas • Toi Scott • Aleya Fraser • Chris Bolden-Newsome • Dr. Joshua Bennett • B. Anderson • Chris Hill • Greg Watson • T. Morgan Dixon • Dr. Dorceta Taylor • Colette Pichon Battle • Dillon Bernard • Sharon Lavigne • Steve Curwood • and Babalawo Enroue Halfkenny BIO Leah Penniman (li/she/ya/elle) is a Black Kreyol farmer/peyizan, mother, soil nerd, author, food justice activist, and cofounder of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. She has been farming for more than twenty-five years, holds an MA in Science Education and a BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University, and is a member of clergy in West African Indigenous Orisa tradition. Her first book, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, is a love song for the land and her people. REVIEWS In this uplifting compendium, Penniman (Farming While Black), cofounder of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, N.Y., brings together pieces linking racial justice with environmental stewardship. In interviews with 16 Black environmental activists—including Ifa priest Awise Agbaye Wande Abimbola and novelist Alice Walker—Penniman discusses acidifying oceans, environmental racism, and the unsustainable consumption of nonrenewable resources, while also touching on more positive considerations of the beauty of the natural world and what it means to live in “right relationship” with the Earth. Culinary historian Leni Sorensen notes that the legacy of chattel slavery complicates many Black Americans’ relationship with land, a theme Penniman takes up in her conversation with Greg Watson, director of policy at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, about deepening Black involvement in agriculture through urban farming. The need for activism is highlighted throughout: Penniman emphasizes the importance of boosting the voices of young eco-warriors, while Aleya Fraser, cofounder of Black Dirt Farm in Maryland, opines on the “Afroecology” movement, which promotes kinship and living in harmony with nature. Soulful, spirited, and often joyful, this is sustained by a deep reverence for the Earth and its “symbiotic living ecosystems.” The result is a potent look at the overlap between the environmental and racial justice movements. -- Publishers Weekly [H] Amistad Press / February 28, 2023 1.05" H x 9.0" L x 6.0" W (1.42 lbs) 352 pages

Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists /// Leah Penniman

By the time he was twenty-seven years old, Kwame Onwuachi had opened--and closed--one of the most talked about restaurants in America. He had sold drugs in New York and been shipped off to rural Nigeria to "learn respect." He had launched his own catering company with twenty thousand dollars made from selling candy on the subway and starred on Top Chef. Through it all, Onwuachi's love of food and cooking remained a constant, even when, as a young chef, he was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the food world can be for people of color. In this inspirational memoir about the intersection of race, fame, and food, he shares the remarkable story of his culinary coming-of-age; a powerful, heartfelt, and shockingly honest account of chasing your dreams--even when they don't turn out as you expected. BIO Kwame Onwuachi is the James Beard Award-winning executive chef at Kith/Kin in Washington, D.C. He was born on Long Island and raised in New York City, Nigeria, and Louisiana. Onwuachi was first exposed to cooking by his mother, in the family's modest Bronx apartment, and he took that spark of passion and turned it into a career. From toiling in the bowels of oil cleanup ships to working at some of the best restaurants in the world, he has seen and lived his fair share of diversity. Onwuachi trained at the Culinary Institute of America and opened five restaurants before turning thirty. A former Top Chef contestant, he has been named Esquire's Chef of the Year, one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs, and a 30 Under 30 honoree by both Zagat and Forbes. Joshua David Stein is a Brooklyn-based author and journalist. He is the co-author of Food & Beer, the U.S. editor of Where Chefs Eat, the author of forthcoming To Me He Was Just Dad as well as the children's books, Can I Eat That?, What's Cooking?, Brick: Who Found Herself in Architecture and The Ball Book. Stein was previously the restaurant critic for the New York Observer and the Village Voice. He is the founding member of The Band Books and the food zine, Reduced Circumstance. REVIEWS "Onwuachi's memoir should be required reading, not just for future chefs, but for anyone who wants a glimpse into one man's tale of what it's like to be young, black and ambitious in America." --The Washington Post "Kwame Onwuachi's story shines a light on food and culture not just in American restaurants or African American communities but around the world." --Questlove "Kwame Onwuachi has lived two or three lifetimes in his journey thus far and recounts them with humor, insight, and honesty in Notes from a Young Black Chef. It's Kitchen Confidential from a Black point of view." --Jessica B. Harris, author of My Soul Looks Back Vintage / March 31, 2020 1.0" H x 8.0" L x 5.19" W (0.65 lbs) 288 pages

Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir /// Kwame Onwuachi and Joshua David Stein

In 1920, 14 percent of all land-owning US farmers were black. Today less than 2 percent of farms are controlled by black people--a loss of over 14 million acres and the result of discrimination and dispossession. While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in "food apartheid" neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness. The system is built on stolen land and stolen labor and needs a redesign.Farming While Black is the first comprehensive "how to" guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. Throughout the chapters Penniman uplifts the wisdom of the African diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described--from whole farm planning, soil fertility, seed selection, and agroecology, to using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, sharing stories of ancestors, and tools for healing from the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation on the land. Woven throughout the book is the story of Soul Fire Farm, a national leader in the food justice movement.The technical information is designed for farmers and gardeners with beginning to intermediate experience. For those with more experience, the book provides a fresh lens on practices that may have been taken for granted as ahistorical or strictly European. Black ancestors and contemporaries have always been leaders--and continue to lead--in the sustainable agriculture and food justice movements. It is time for all of us to listen. BIO Leah Penniman, the 2019 recipient of the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, is a Black Kreyol farmer who has been organizing for an anti-racist food system for over fifteen years. She began with the Food Project in Boston, Massachusetts, and went on to work at Farm School in Athol, Massachusetts, and Many Hands Organic Farm in Barre, Massachusetts. She cofounded Youth Grow urban farm in Worcester, Massachusetts. She currently serves as founding co-executive director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a people-of-color led project that works to dismantle racism in the food system through a low cost fresh food delivery service for people living under food apartheid, training programs for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous aspiring farmer-activists, Uprooting Racism training for food justice leaders, and regional-national-international coalition building between farmers of color advocating for policy shifts and reparations. She has dedicated her life's work to racial justice in the food system and has been recognized by the Soros Equality Fellowship, NYSHealth Emerging Innovator Awards, The Andrew Goodman Foundation Hidden Heroes Award, Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Program, New Tech Network National Teaching Award, Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (New York finalist), among others. She has contributed to two published volumes, authored numerous online articles, and given dozens of public talks on the subject. REVIEWS "Farming While Black is such an incredible gift to our movement. From Black history to soil health to movement building to land preservation, this book is incredibly generous in offering a roadmap for Black people to return to our rich, land-based heritage. Calling all farmers, organizers, and lovers of freedom to pick up this book, read, share, study, and build together. In the words of freedom fighter Assata Shakur: 'Carry on the tradition.' Our movement needs this." --Dara Cooper, National Black Food and Justice Alliance Chelsea Green Publishing Company / October 30, 2018 0.9" H x 9.9" L x 7.9" W (2.25 lbs) 368 pages

In 1920, 14 percent of all land-owning US farmers were black. Today less than 2 percent of farms are controlled by black people--a loss of over 14 million acres and the result of discrimination and dispossession. While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in "food apartheid" neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness. The system is built on stolen land and stolen labor and needs a redesign. Farming While Black is the first comprehensive "how to" guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. Throughout the chapters Penniman uplifts the wisdom of the African diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described--from whole farm planning, soil fertility, seed selection, and agroecology, to using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, sharing stories of ancestors, and tools for healing from the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation on the land. Woven throughout the book is the story of Soul Fire Farm, a national leader in the food justice movement. The technical information is designed for farmers and gardeners with beginning to intermediate experience. For those with more experience, the book provides a fresh lens on practices that may have been taken for granted as ahistorical or strictly European. Black ancestors and contemporaries have always been leaders--and continue to lead--in the sustainable agriculture and food justice movements. It is time for all of us to listen.
BIO
Leah Penniman, the 2019 recipient of the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, is a Black Kreyol farmer who has been organizing for an anti-racist food system for over fifteen years. She began with the Food Project in Boston, Massachusetts, and went on to work at Farm School in Athol, Massachusetts, and Many Hands Organic Farm in Barre, Massachusetts. She cofounded Youth Grow urban farm in Worcester, Massachusetts. She currently serves as founding co-executive director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a people-of-color led project that works to dismantle racism in the food system through a low cost fresh food delivery service for people living under food apartheid, training programs for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous aspiring farmer-activists, Uprooting Racism training for food justice leaders, and regional-national-international coalition building between farmers of color advocating for policy shifts and reparations. She has dedicated her life's work to racial justice in the food system and has been recognized by the Soros Equality Fellowship, NYSHealth Emerging Innovator Awards, The Andrew Goodman Foundation Hidden Heroes Award, Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Program, New Tech Network National Teaching Award, Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (New York finalist), among others. She has contributed to two published volumes, authored numerous online articles, and given dozens of public talks on the subject.
REVIEWS
<meta charset="UTF-8">"Farming While Black is such an incredible gift to our movement. From Black history to soil health to movement building to land preservation, this book is incredibly generous in offering a roadmap for Black people to return to our rich, land-based heritage. Calling all farmers, organizers, and lovers of freedom to pick up this book, read, share, study, and build together. In the words of freedom fighter Assata Shakur: 'Carry on the tradition.' Our movement needs this." --Dara Cooper, National Black Food and Justice Alliance
Chelsea Green Publishing Company  /  October 30, 2018
0.9" H x 9.9" L x 7.9" W (2.25 lbs) 368 pages

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land /// Leah Penniman with foreword by Karen Washington

Black Futures is a collection of work--art, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more--that tells the story of the radical, imaginative, bold, and beautiful world that black artists, high and low, are producing today. The book presents a succession of brilliant and provocative pieces--from both emerging and renowned creators of all kinds--that generates an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with hackers and street artists to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful prose to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. A generational document that captures this fast-moving generation in its own dynamic and expansive language. While shaped in the tradition of other generational statements, from The New Negro to Black Fire to Toni Morrison's landmark The Black Book, Black Futures does not have a retrospective air. It showcases the present, but points to the future. We live at a time when black culture--whether it's created by Ava DuVernay or Donald Glover, Kendrick Lamar or Cardi B, meme-makers or YouTubers--is opening our imaginations and offering new paths forward, a multi-voiced, utopian alternative to a world of walls and white nationalism. Black Futures captures this expansive vision and energy and makes it available to any reader, of any color, who wants to explore this exciting cultural moment and see the next one coming. BIOS Kimberly Drew is a writer, curator, and activist. Drew received her B.A. from Smith College in art history and African-American studies. During her time at Smith, she launched the Tumblr blog Black Contemporary Art, which has featured artwork by nearly 5,000 black artists. Drew's writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Elle UK, and Glamour. She lives in Brooklyn, New York (just a few blocks away from Jenna Wortham). Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. She is also co-host of the podcast Still Processing, as well as a sound healer, reiki practitioner, and herbalist, all of which she lovingly practices on Kimberly Drew. She is currently working on a book about the body and dissociation. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. REVIEWS "A dynamic mixed-media exhibition of Black creativity and culture . . . The work is vivid, juicy, thick--as fecund as all of Black culture--and equal parts anthology, scrapbook, and art xhibition. The editors and contributors make clear the 'infinite'" nature of Blackness via more than 500 crammed pages of essays, art, interviews, and ephemera. . . . A must-own compendium illustrating the richness, joy, and power of the modern Black experience." --Kirkus Reviews "An intriguing and beautiful book meant to inspire . . . Punctuated throughout with photography and other artwork and using vibrant colors smartly, the book is as interesting visually as intellectually. In their introduction, the editors state that one of their intentions with this book 'is to encourage readers to follow their interests into a deep warren of rabbit holes and discoveries.' They succeed; every reader will engage with this work differently, and will be able to come back to it again and again for inspiration." --Booklist "[A] multifaceted and visually arresting anthology of essays, poems, and art . . . Bold graphics, vibrant artwork in a plethora of styles and media, and contributions from activists, scholars, and journalists across a wide range of experiences and perspectives showcase the multidimensionality of Black voices in America. This unique and imaginative work issues a powerful call for justice, equality, and inclusion." --Publishers Weekly [H] One World / December 01, 2020 1.5" H x 9.2" L x 7.6" W (3.16 lbs) 544 pages [P] One World / October 26, 2021 1.2" H x 9.1" L x 7.3" W (3.15 lbs) 544 pages

Black Futures /// Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham

A new edition of the classic New York Times bestseller edited by Toni Morrison, offering an encyclopedic look at the black experience in America from 1619 through the 1940s with the original cover restored. "I am so pleased the book is alive again. I still think there is no other work that tells and visualizes a story of such misery with seriousness, humor, grace and triumph." --Toni Morrison Seventeenth-century sketches of Africans as they appeared to marauding European traders. Nineteenth-century slave auction notices. Twentieth-century sheet music for work songs and freedom chants. Photographs of war heroes, regal in uniform. Antebellum reward posters for capturing runaway slaves. An 1856 article titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child." In 1974, Middleton A. Harris and Toni Morrison led a team of gifted, passionate collectors in compiling these images and nearly five hundred others into one sensational narrative of the black experience in America-- The Black Book. Now in a newly restored hardcover edition, The Black Book remains a breathtaking testament to the legendary wisdom, strength, and perseverance of black men and women intent on freedom. Prominent collectors Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith joined Harris and Morrison (then a Random House editor, ultimately a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Nobel Laureate) to spend months studying, laughing at, and crying over these materials--transcripts from fugitive slaves' trials and proclamations by Frederick Douglass and celebrated abolitionists, as well as chilling images of cross burnings and lynchings, patents registered by black inventors throughout the early twentieth century, and vibrant posters from "Black Hollywood" films of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, it was an article she found while researching this project that provided the inspiration for Morrison's masterpiece, Beloved. A labor of love and a vital link to the richness and diversity of African American history and culture, The Black Book honors the past, reminding us where our nation has been, and gives flight to our hopes for what is yet to come. Beautifully and faithfully presented and featuring a foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison, The Black Book remains a timeless landmark work. ﻿REVIEWS "An incredible testament to the strength, character, and endurance of a people . . . Especially in these historic times, I can think of no better way to celebrate African American achievement than through a retrospective look at our history--painful and pleasurable--our shared experiences and our successes. This is a book no American--black or white--can afford to ignore." --Cornel West "I first read The Black Book as a young man, sneaking it out of my dad's library. It is appropriate that it should be returned to the world of publishing as we consider Morrison's legacy, and the many dimensions of the much deserved monument we now seek to erect in her honor." --Ta-Nehisi Coates "I remember first coming across this book as a child and understanding even then that I was holding in my hands a majestic miracle that managed to beautifully, painfully, and accurately convey both the tragedy and the triumph of four hundred years of the black experience. I am so grateful that a new generation will get the opportunity to feel what I felt." --Nikole Hannah-Jones Random House / December 03, 2019 0.86" H x 11.64" L x 8.28" W (1.93 lbs) 193 pages

The Black Book /// edited by Middleton A Harris, Ernest Smith, Morris Levitt and Roger Furman with foreword by Toni Morrison

Meet Cherry Bombe's Issue 25 cover star: Dr. Jessica B. Harris! Dr. Jessica is a revered professor, prolific author, and surprise streaming star. You might have spotted her on Netflix’s High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America series, which is based on her book of the same name. Other Issue 25 cover stars include: Madhur is the award-winning actress and culinary superstar who has taught millions about the regional foods of India through her TV shows and 30+ cookbooks (and her beautiful memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees). Grace Young is an award-winning cookbook author known as the Chinatown Champion and has been recognized for her work by The James Beard Foundation, Forbes 50 Over 50, The Julia Child Foundation, and others. ⁠ In our exclusive portfolios, you’ll find new photos by Jennifer Livingston (who's shot all of our covers) and interviews by Cherry Bombe founder Kerry Diamond. We are honored to feature these three women and can't wait for you to learn more about them. A few other icons featured in this issue are: Italian food superstar Marcella Hazan, cookbook author Claudia Roden, pastry legend Claudia Fleming in convo with pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz, and La Caravelle's Rita Jammet interviewed by sommelier Victoria James. Plus, we go on a pastry crawl with budding fashion icon Abi Balingit of The Dusky Kitchen and have a beautiful story on cake artist From Lucie's wedding ceremonies (yes, plural!).

Meet Cherry Bombe's Issue 25 cover star: Dr. Jessica B. Harris!
Dr. Jessica is a revered professor, prolific author, and surprise streaming star. You might have spotted her on Netflix’s High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America series, which is based on her book of the same name.
Other Issue 25 cover stars include:
Madhur is the award-winning actress and culinary superstar who has taught millions about the regional foods of India through her TV shows and 30+ cookbooks (and her beautiful memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees).
Grace Young is an award-winning cookbook author known as the Chinatown Champion and has been recognized for her work by The James Beard Foundation, Forbes 50 Over 50, The Julia Child Foundation, and others. ⁠
In our exclusive portfolios, you’ll find new photos by Jennifer Livingston (who's shot all of our covers) and interviews by Cherry Bombe founder Kerry Diamond. We are honored to feature these three women and can't wait for you to learn more about them. 
A few other icons featured in this issue are: Italian food superstar Marcella Hazan, cookbook author Claudia Roden, pastry legend Claudia Fleming in convo with pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz, and La Caravelle's Rita Jammet interviewed by sommelier Victoria James. Plus, we go on a pastry crawl with budding fashion icon Abi Balingit of The Dusky Kitchen and have a beautiful story on cake artist From Lucie's wedding ceremonies (yes, plural!).

Issue Nº 25: The Icons Issue (Jessica B. Harris) /// Cherry Bombe

Magazine

African American traditional medicine is an American classic that emerged out of the necessity of its people to survive. It began with the healing knowledge brought with the African captives on the slave ships and later merged with Native American, European and other healing traditions to become a full-fledged body of medicinal practices that has lasted in various forms down to the present day. Working the Roots: Over 400 Years Of Traditional African American Healing is the result of first-hand interviews, conversations, and apprenticeships conducted and experienced by author Michele E. Lee over several years of living and studying in the rural South and in the West Coast regions of the United States. She combines a novelist's keen ear for storytelling and dialogue and a healer's understanding of folk medicine arts into a book that makes for both pleasant, interesting reading, and serves as a permanent household healing guide. Divided between sections on interviews of healers and their stories and a comprehensive collection of traditional African American medicines, remedies, and the many common ailments they were called upon to cure, Working The Roots is a valuable addition to African American history and American and African folk healing practices. BIO Michele Elizabeth Lee has worked for over 30 years in the integrated arts field as a visual arist, curator, administrator, educator, and writer. She has a MFA from the University of Southern California and a BA from Antioch College. She is a native of Oakland, California, who was raised in a family of traditional healers from the South. She currently lives and works in her native Oakland, where she teaches art in a public school. She has two adult children, Milon and Nora. ﻿REVIEWS "I love this book! Working the Roots is an impressively well-written account of African American root medicine that reads like an adventure novel and is hard to put down. The book is an invaluable treasure for anthropologists, ethno-botanists, historians, herbalists, and others wanting a look inside the uncharted terrain of African American root and folk medicine." --Dr. Gail P. Myers, Cultural anthropologist and filmmaker "Working the Roots is an example and testimony of African tradition that permeates the Americas and speaks to the widespread and in-depth knowledge African people possess about health and healing. Luck for us to now have this wealth of invaluable knowledge at our finger-tips."--Opal Palmer Adisa, Distinguished professor, poet, novelist, and photographer "This book is fundamental to the deeper understudying of a culture that usually is glossed over and commandeered or down played way too often. Working The Roots is my story as it is in many different degrees, the story of all Afro-Americans." --Opensanwo Ifakorede Fadario, Traditional health consultant, healer, visual artist, and initiated Ifa practitioner Wadastick / December 15, 2017 0.81" H x 11.0" L x 8.5" W (2.01 lbs) 396 pages

African American traditional medicine is an American classic that emerged out of the necessity of its people to survive. It began with the healing knowledge brought with the African captives on the slave ships and later merged with Native American, European and other healing traditions to become a full-fledged body of medicinal practices that has lasted in various forms down to the present day.
Working the Roots: Over 400 Years Of Traditional African American Healing is the result of first-hand interviews, conversations, and apprenticeships conducted and experienced by author Michele E. Lee over several years of living and studying in the rural South and in the West Coast regions of the United States. She combines a novelist's keen ear for storytelling and dialogue and a healer's understanding of folk medicine arts into a book that makes for both pleasant, interesting reading, and serves as a permanent household healing guide.
Divided between sections on interviews of healers and their stories and a comprehensive collection of traditional African American medicines, remedies, and the many common ailments they were called upon to cure, Working The Roots is a valuable addition to African American history and American and African folk healing practices.
BIO
<meta charset="utf-8">Michele Elizabeth Lee has worked for over 30 years in the integrated arts field as a visual arist, curator, administrator, educator, and writer. She has a MFA from the University of Southern California and a BA from Antioch College. She is a native of Oakland, California, who was raised in a family of traditional healers from the South. She currently lives and works in her native Oakland, where she teaches art in a public school. She has two adult children, Milon and Nora.
﻿REVIEWS
"I love this book! Working the Roots is an impressively well-written account of African American root medicine that reads like an adventure novel and is hard to put down. The book is an invaluable treasure for anthropologists, ethno-botanists, historians, herbalists, and others wanting a look inside the uncharted terrain of African American root and folk medicine." --Dr. Gail P. Myers, Cultural anthropologist and filmmaker
"Working the Roots is an example and testimony of African tradition that permeates the Americas and speaks to the widespread and in-depth knowledge African people possess about health and healing. Luck for us to now have this wealth of invaluable knowledge at our finger-tips."--Opal Palmer Adisa, Distinguished professor, poet, novelist, and photographer
"This book is fundamental to the deeper understudying of a culture that usually is glossed over and commandeered or down played way too often. Working The Roots is my story as it is in many different degrees, the story of all Afro-Americans." --Opensanwo Ifakorede Fadario, Traditional health consultant, healer, visual artist, and initiated Ifa practitioner
Wadastick  /  <meta charset="utf-8">December 15, 2017
<meta charset="utf-8">0.81" H x 11.0" L x 8.5" W (2.01 lbs) 396 pages

Working the Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing /// Michele Elizabeth Lee

For Black Americans, the food system is broken. When it comes to nutrition, Black consumers experience an unjust and inequitable distribution of resources. Black Food Matters examines these issues through in-depth essays that analyze how Blackness is contested through food, differing ideas of what makes our sustenance "healthy," and Black individuals' own beliefs about what their cuisine should be. Primarily written by nonwhite scholars, and framed through a focus on Black agency instead of deprivation, the essays here showcase Black communities fighting for the survival of their food culture. The book takes readers into the real world of Black sustenance, examining animal husbandry practices in South Carolina, the work done by the Black Panthers to ensure food equality, and Black women who are pioneering urban agriculture. These essays also explore individual and community values, the influence of history, and the ongoing struggle to meet needs and affirm Black life. A comprehensive look at Black food culture and the various forms of violence that threaten the future of this cuisine, Black Food Matters centers Blackness in a field that has too often framed Black issues through a white-centric lens, offering new ways to think about access, privilege, equity, and justice. BIO Hanna Garth is assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, San Diego. She is author of Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal. Ashanté M. Reese is assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is author of Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. University of Minnesota Press / October 27, 2020 0.9" H x 8.4" L x 5.5" W (0.9 lbs) 256 pages

Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice /// edited by Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans. America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the fantastic tale of slaves that spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and negro spirituals. It is a sugarcoated legend based on an almost true story. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history. Combining unapologetically provocative storytelling with meticulous research based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering Black historians, scholars, and journalists, Harriot removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. With incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, subverting conventional historical narratives with little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans. From the African Americans who arrived before 1619 to the unenslavable bandit who inspired America’s first police force, this long overdue corrective provides a revealing look into our past that is as urgent as it is necessary. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that American history is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF. BIO Michael Harriot is a columnist at theGrio.com where he covers the intersection of race, politics, and culture. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, NBC, BET, and on his mother’s refrigerator. He is a political commentator on MSNBC and CNN and has been honored by the National Association of Black Journalists for commentary, digital commentary, and TV news writing. Michael is the creator and cohost of the podcast Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History, produced in partnership with Pharrel's OTHERtone. His college course “Race: An Economic Construct” was adapted by university economics departments across the country as a model for teaching the combination of history, economics, politics, and class structures. REVIEWS ﻿“A razor-sharp reassessment of American history. . . . Entertainingly colloquial and impressively erudite, this meticulous survey of the American past is an invaluable resource.” -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) 'Fresh eyes and bold, entertaining language combine in this authoritative, essential work of U.S. history.' -- Kirkus Reviews “A stirring correction of U.S. history. . . . Emphasizing Black survival and resistance, Harriot simplifies complex issues into easily understandable, digestible bites. . . . With blunt, entertaining, irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes laugh-out-loud statements, Harriot provocatively explains how the United States came to be and how money-focused, self-serving intentions made it what it is today.” -- Library Journal “Michael Harriot has done it. Written a book that evokes the full range of human emotions. Laughter. Rage. Sadness. Love (of Black resistance). Hate (of anti-Blackness). More laughter. Constant thinking and connecting and discovering. What an experience. But how can this book be anything less when it is Black AF History.” -- Ibram X. Kendi, Award-winning author “This is history as it should be told: straight, no chaser; unvarnished and unembossed. Michael Harriot, the Samuel L. Jackson of the written word, strikes again, weaving fascinating facts, scathing humor and pieces of his own life story to detail the stony road we trod.” -- Joy Reid, Host of The ReidOut on MSNBC [H] Dey Street Books / September 19, 2023 1.57" H x 9.06" L x 5.98" W (1.36 lbs) 432 pages

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America /// Michael Harriot

For over forty years, professor and culinary historian Jessica B. Harris has collected postcards depicting Africans and their descendants in the American diaspora. They are presented for the first time in this exquisite volume. Vintage Postcards from the African World: In the Dignity of Their Work and the Joy of Their Play brings together more than 150 images, providing a visual document of more than a century of work in agricultural and culinary pursuits and joy in entertainments, parades, and celebrations. Organized by geography--Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States--as well as by the types of scenes depicted--the farm, the garden, and the sea; the marketplace; the vendors and the cooks; leisure, entertainments, and festivities--the images capture the dignity of the labors of everyday life and the pride of festive occasions. Superb and rare images demonstrate everything from how Africans and their descendants dressed to what tools they used to how their entertainments provided relief from toil. Three essays accompany the postcards, one of which details Harris's collection and the collecting process. A second presents suggestions on how to interpret the cards. A final essay gives brief information on the history of postcards and postcard dating and its increasing use and value to scholars. BIO Jessica B. Harris is author, editor, or translator of seventeen books, including twelve cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African diaspora. She lectures and consults widely in the United States and abroad and has written extensively for scholarly and popular publications. Recently retired after five decades of teaching at Queens College, CUNY, Harris is the recipient of numerous awards for her work including an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Johnson and Wales University. She was recently inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. REVIEWS "Each of these images has a story behind it that calls for analysis by food studies scholars. Harris's Vintage Postcards should inspire all of us to become avid deltiologists." --Marion Nestle, "Food, Culture, and Society" University Press of Mississippi / May 15, 2020 0.8" H x 9.3" L x 9.1" W (1.95 lbs) 152 pages

Vintage Postcards from the African World: In the Dignity of Their Work and the Joy of Their Play /// Jessica B. Harris

In this captivating new memoir, award-winning writer Jessica B. Harris recalls her youth "surrounded by some of the most famous creative minds of the seventies and eighties...James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Nina Simone" (New York magazine)--in a vibrant, lost era of New York City. In the Technicolor glow of the early seventies, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of Greenwich Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day--luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her tribute to that fascinating social circle and their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other. With "simmering warmth" ( The New York Times), Harris paints evocative portraits of her illustrious friends: Baldwin as he read aloud an early draft of If Beale Street Could Talk, Angelou cooking in her California kitchen, and Morrison relaxing at Baldwin's house in Provence. Harris describes her role as theater critic for the New York Amsterdam News and editor at then-burgeoning Essence magazine; star-studded parties in the South of France; drinks at Mikell's, a hip West Side club; and the simple joy these extraordinary people took in each other's company. At the center is Harris's relationship with Sam Floyd, a fellow professor at Queens College, who introduced her to Baldwin. More than a memoir of friendship and first love, My Soul Looks Back is a carefully crafted, intimately understood homage to a bygone era and the people that made it so remarkable. BIO Jessica B. Harris holds a PhD from NYU, teaches English at Queens College, and lectures internationally. The author of the memoir My Soul Looks Back as well as twelve cookbooks, her articles have appeared in Vogue, Food & Wine, Essence, and The New Yorker, among other publications; she has made numerous television and radio appearances and has been profiled in The New York Times. Considered one of the preeminent scholars of the food of the African Diaspora, Harris has been inducted into the James Beard Who's Who in Food and Beverage in America, received an honorary doctorate from Johnson & Wales University and recently helped the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture to conceptualize its cafeteria. REVIEWS "This is a lively, entertaining, and informative recounting of a time and place that shaped and greatly enriched American culture." --Publishers Weekly "Come for the insight into the circle of friends that first resolved around James Baldwin, then shifted orbit to revolve around Maya Angelou. Stay because you're enraptured by the candid, passionate woman narrating from the periphery. This is an intimate look at an inner circle of Black writers, scholars, and glamazons moving through the middle of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, told with bold tenderness by a woman who grew up in their company, under their gaze." --Alice Randall, author of Ada's Rules and The Wind Done Gone "In My Soul Looks Back, Jessica Harris uses her amazing griot voice and exquisite writing skills to take the reader with her on a serendipitous journey filled with everything from a sampling of her unique culinary creations to up-close-and-personal looks at some of the world's most renowned arists--from James Baldwin, aka Jimmy, to the inner circle she was allowed into by her mysterious lover, Sam. A tour de force that holds its own among the great memoirs of all time." --Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Emmy Award-winning journalist and author of In My Place Scribner Book Company / May 15, 2018 0.8" H x 8.3" L x 5.4" W (0.45 lbs) 272 pages

My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir /// Jessica B. Harris

Kitchen Table Series is the first publication dedicated solely to this early and important body of work by the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships—with lovers, children, friends—and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes." Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist’s words, "unrequited love." BIO Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) is considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists. In a career spanning over 30 years, she has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems and the consequences of power. Weems’ complex body of art employs photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation and video. Weems has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including the prestigious MacArthur "Genius" grant and the Prix de Roma. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor of history and art and architecture and African American studies at Harvard University and the founder of the Vision and Justice Project. Her research focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice, and democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. Her books and edited volumes include The Rise, translated into seven languages, Carrie Mae Weems, which won the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize, and “Vision & Justice” by Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. REVIEWS Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series renders a page-by-page account of a woman’s life within the intimate setting of her kitchen—a stage for female individuality, intricacy and strength. -- Hilary Moss, T: The New York Times Style Magazine In book form, Kitchen Table is more intimate… Unlike the experience of meandering through a museum, stepping back to appreciate the images and nearing the text panels to skim them, the pace of exploration is now in a person’s hands. [Weems] and Matsumoto spread out the series—and essays by the scholars Sarah Lewis and Adrienne Edwards—over 86 pages, supplying ample space to absorb it. Weems remarks, of Kitchen Table in particular, 'It has clearly touched the lives of a great many people. It touches a chord and speaks to something that’s fairly universal.' And, something that’s continuously fresh. -- Stephanie Eckardt, W Magazine [Weems's] Kitchen Table Series... [is] enduring, making its way into plenty of books and museums over the years. It’s now finally getting a stand-alone copy. -- Suzanne Shaheen, Vogue.com [H] Mw Editions / November 01, 2022 0.7" H x 13.9" L x 10.1" W (2.47 lbs) 78 pages

Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series /// Carrie Mae Weems, foreword by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis

-- This title ﻿is available for pre-order only. It will ship on or soon after its release date, June 18, 2024 -- In this incredible story of entrepreneurship and perseverance, Fawn Weaver seeks to uncover the forgotten history of Uncle Nearest, the Black master distiller who taught Jack Daniel how to distill.In 2016, while a divided America wrestled its demons, Fawn Weaver traveled to the tiny town of Lynchburg, Tennessee in pursuit of a hidden story at the heart of one of America’s most iconic whiskey brands: Jack Daniel’s.In this remarkable place, with its one stoplight, one main road, and one industry—whiskey—Fawn peeled back the layers of a Southern town that had bucked societal expectations for generations and a lineage that refused to let their history be lost. This was the home of the best whiskey maker the world never knew: Nearest Green.As an enslaved man during the Civil War, Nearest befriended a young Jack Daniel and taught him how to make whiskey. As a free man after the war, Nearest became Jack Daniel Distillery's first Master Distiller.How was the story of their remarkable friendship and allyship allowed to be forgotten? And what could be done now to honor and preserve his legacy for generations to come? “We think Nearest deserves to have his own bottle,” the Green descendants told Fawn. “His name should be on a bottle.”What began—and will always remain—as a way to permanently honor the legacy of Nearest Green grew into Uncle Nearest, the record-breaking independent whiskey that’s become the fastest-growing Black-owned spirit brand of all time, the fastest-growing Bourbon in U.S. history, and disrupted the American spirits industry to its core.An incredible true story of friendship, faith, and purpose, Love & Whiskey details how Fawn launched herself into the historical mystery, living among the residents of Lynchburg, discovering a trail of unknown records, and reconnecting branches of a family tree across the generations. BIO Fawn Weaver is an American entrepreneur and author who holds the position of CEO at Grant Sidney Inc. In 2017, Weaver co-founded Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey where she serves as the chief historian. She is the founder of the Nearest Green Foundation. In March 2021, she was named to Endeavor's board of directors. [H] Melcher Media Inc. / June 18, 2024 1.0" H x 9.0" L x 6.0" W, 336 pages

-- This title ﻿is available for pre-order only. It will ship on or soon after its release date, June 18, 2024 --
In this incredible story of entrepreneurship and perseverance, Fawn Weaver seeks to uncover the forgotten history of Uncle Nearest, the Black master distiller who taught Jack Daniel how to distill. In 2016, while a divided America wrestled its demons, Fawn Weaver traveled to the tiny town of Lynchburg, Tennessee in pursuit of a hidden story at the heart of one of America’s most iconic whiskey brands: Jack Daniel’s. In this remarkable place, with its one stoplight, one main road, and one industry—whiskey—Fawn peeled back the layers of a Southern town that had bucked societal expectations for generations and a lineage that refused to let their history be lost. This was the home of the best whiskey maker the world never knew: Nearest Green. As an enslaved man during the Civil War, Nearest befriended a young Jack Daniel and taught him how to make whiskey. As a free man after the war, Nearest became Jack Daniel Distillery's first Master Distiller. How was the story of their remarkable friendship and allyship allowed to be forgotten? And what could be done now to honor and preserve his legacy for generations to come? “We think Nearest deserves to have his own bottle,” the Green descendants told Fawn. “His name should be on a bottle.” What began—and will always remain—as a way to permanently honor the legacy of Nearest Green grew into Uncle Nearest, the record-breaking independent whiskey that’s become the fastest-growing Black-owned spirit brand of all time, the fastest-growing Bourbon in U.S. history, and disrupted the American spirits industry to its core. An incredible true story of friendship, faith, and purpose, Love &amp; Whiskey details how Fawn launched herself into the historical mystery, living among the residents of Lynchburg, discovering a trail of unknown records, and reconnecting branches of a family tree across the generations.
BIO
Fawn Weaver is an American entrepreneur and author who holds the position of CEO at Grant Sidney Inc. In 2017, Weaver co-founded Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey where she serves as the chief historian. She is the founder of the Nearest Green Foundation. In March 2021, she was named to Endeavor's board of directors. 
[H]  Melcher Media Inc.  /  June 18, 2024
1.0" H x 9.0" L x 6.0" W, 336 pages

Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest /// Fawn Weaver /// pre

From the author of Queen Sugar--now a critically acclaimed series on OWN directed by Ava Duvernay--comes a beautiful exploration and celebration of black farming in America. In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people's connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers' personal experiences. In their own words, middle aged and elderly black farmers explain why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss. The Returning Generation--young farmers, who are building upon the legacy of their ancestors, talk about the challenges they face as they seek to redress issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations. These farmers are joined by other influential voices, including noted historians Analena Hope Hassberg and Pete Daniel, and award-winning author Clyde W. Ford, who considers the arrival of Africans to American shores; and James Beard Award-winning writers and Michael Twitty, reflects on black culinary tradition and its African roots. Poetry and inspirational quotes are woven into these diverse narratives, adding richness and texture, as well as stunning four-color photographs from photographers Alison Gootee and Malcom Williams, and Baszile's personal collection. As Baszile reveals, black farming informs crucial aspects of American culture--the family, the way our national identity is bound up with the land, the pull of memory, the healing power of food, and race relations. She reminds us that the land, well-earned and fiercely protected, transcends history and signifies a home that can be tended, tilled, and passed to succeeding generations with pride. We Are Each Other's Harvest elevates the voices and stories of black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil. BIO Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel Queen Sugar, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014, longlisted for the Crooks Corner Southern Book Prize, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and adapted for television by writer/director Ava DuVernay and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey for OWN. Baszile holds a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. She lives in San Francisco. REVIEWS "Black, brown and tan hands in dark rich loamy soil or in sandy shoals have been a part of the agricultural life of this country since its inception. Yet, all too often, the stories of African American farmers have remained unharvested. In We Are Each Other's Harvest, Natalie Baszile reaps a bounty of tales and shares them along with photographs, history, poetry, and more. This is a must-have volume for anyone who revers that land and those who work it." --Jessica B. Harris, Ph.D., Culinary Historian, Professor, and author of My Soul Looks Back "Journeying from Alaska to Louisiana to Napa Valley, We Are Each Other's Harvest uplifts the voices of Black farmers, honoring their perseverance and resilience. This insightful, eye-opening collection helps to reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the land." --Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, owner of Chez Panisse and founder of The Edible Schoolyard Project 1.7" H x 9.3" L x 7.7" W (2.45 lbs) 368 pages

We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy /// Natalie Baszile

Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association Winner of the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning. Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children's literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary "foodie" culture's vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege. For more, visit the author's tumblr page: http: //racialindigestion.tumblr.com BIO Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at Pomona College. She is a former journalist and restaurant critic. REVIEWS "Kyla Wazana Tompkins's study on eating in nineteenth-century America is mesmerizing. From the playful literary history of children's tales in the antebellum period to the tightly woven cultural analysis of chromo-lithographed trade cards for food products in the Gilded Age, Tompkins convincingly makes the case that eating as a social practice was inextricably tangled with the construction and performance of nineteenth-century American identities." --WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly "Racial Indigestion is as creative as it is theoretically rigorous and archivally grounded. Tompkins sets forth a marvelous, fruitful array of analytic sites and clever juxtapositions, tracing the politics inherent in the decline of the hearth and the rise of stoves, reimagining the mouth as the window to an alimentary politics, and tracking the post-Reconstruction politics of trade cards. The connections she makes between eating and vernacular culture make the book satisfyingly literary, even as it is so clearly a stellar work of cultural studies." --Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds New York University Press / July 30, 2012 0.9" H x 8.9" L x 6.0" W (1.2 lbs) 275 pages

Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association
Winner of the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award 
The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning. 
Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children's literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary "foodie" culture's vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege. 
For more, visit the author's tumblr page: http: //racialindigestion.tumblr.com
BIO
<meta charset="UTF-8">Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at Pomona College. She is a former journalist and restaurant critic.
REVIEWS
"Kyla Wazana Tompkins's study on eating in nineteenth-century America is mesmerizing. From the playful literary history of children's tales in the antebellum period to the tightly woven cultural analysis of chromo-lithographed trade cards for food products in the Gilded Age, Tompkins convincingly makes the case that eating as a social practice was inextricably tangled with the construction and performance of nineteenth-century American identities." --WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly
"Racial Indigestion is as creative as it is theoretically rigorous and archivally grounded. Tompkins sets forth a marvelous, fruitful array of analytic sites and clever juxtapositions, tracing the politics inherent in the decline of the hearth and the rise of stoves, reimagining the mouth as the window to an alimentary politics, and tracking the post-Reconstruction politics of trade cards. The connections she makes between eating and vernacular culture make the book satisfyingly literary, even as it is so clearly a stellar work of cultural studies." --Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds
New York University Press  /  July 30, 2012 
0.9" H x 8.9" L x 6.0" W (1.2 lbs) 275 pages

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