"Gracetown, Florida June 1950 Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie's journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort...

"When I Was Your Age is a hilarious, heartwarming and surprising ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and luck, life, and learning from the school of hard knocks, from SNL's longest-serving actor, Kenan Thompson"-- Thompson provides an ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and learning from the school of hard knocks. He is the longest-ever-service cast member of Saturday Night Live, as well as the survivor of early 2000s television programs...

"Poet Renée Watson looks back at her childhood and urges readers to look forward at their futures with love, understanding, and celebration in this fully illustrated poetry collection"--

"A lyrical culinary journey that explores the hidden stories of Black Appalachians through powerful essays and forty comforting recipes from the Poet Laureate of Kentucky. Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother's presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; There were an abundance of ancestors stirring, measuring, and braising with her. These...

Seventh-grader Sharkita "Kita" embarks on a tumultuous journey to keep her family together while handling the consequences of her mother's alcoholism.

"An uplifting collection of speeches by African American women, curated by civil and human rights activist, scholar, and author Janet Dewart Bell. These magnificent speakers explore ethics, morality, courage, authenticity, and leadership, and Bell's substantive introductions provide rich new context for each woman's speech, highlighting Black women speaking truth to power in service of freedom and justice"--

From an international drag superstar and pop culture icon comes his most revealing and personal work to date-a deeply intimate memoir of growing up black, poor and queer in a broken home and discovering the power of performance, found family and self-acceptance.

"Film legend recalls his remarkable life of nearly eight decades-a heralded actor who's played the roles he wanted, unchecked by the racism and typecasting so rife in the mostly all-white industry in which he triumphed. Billy Dee Williams was born in Harlem in 1937 and grew up in a household of love and sophistication. As a young boy, he made his stage debut working with Lotte Lenya in an Ira Gershwin/Kurt Weill production where Williams ended up...

"Here in one volume is an exceptional selection from Chester Himes's acclaimed Harlem Detectives series. Winner of France's prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and lauded by Jean Cocteau as a "prodigious masterpiece," A Rage in Harlem introduces detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson in a searing escapade. In The Real Cool Killers, the duo investigates a shooting and discovers an unsettling personal connection. In The Crazy...

"For too long, African Americans have been left out of the story of the nation's founding, their voices absent from the memory and celebration of the creation of the American republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era--by far the richest and most expansive anthology of its kind ever assembled--restores these voices. The writings gathered here reveal the complexity and dynamism of African American life and culture in the period and show how the principles...