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Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
"One of the most celebrated and revered writers in the history of American literature gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. The...
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"On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet, at age twenty-two, to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Her inaugural poem, "The Hill We Climb," is now available to cherish in this special edition." --
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Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian's recounting of his experiences--in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory--reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help...
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"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their...
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Black History Month
Black History Month - Biographies
Black History Month 2023 (WPL-ADULT)
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Black History Month - Biographies
Black History Month 2023 (WPL-ADULT)
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In this book, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away, and unearths the well of emotions she experienced long afterward as a result. For the first time, she reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence, a presence absent during much of the author's early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old...
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Before there was Duncan Motors, there were the Duncan brothers: Sweet Lou, a lover of ladies and life ... and a man you did not want to cross; Larry, a screw-up as attracted to trouble as it was to him; and Lavernius, better known as LC, the soft-spoken college boy who simply wanted to sell cars. There was also the mysterious and seductive Chippy, a woman who saw a way out of her circumstances and dared to take it. Witness what changed the course...
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"Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir. Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence--into tumultuous relationships with his...
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Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice -- Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women...
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"The luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, her poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that...
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"Alice Walker, author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple--"an American novel of permanent importance" (San Francisco Chronicle)--crafts a bilingual collection that is both playfully imaginative and intensely moving. Presented in both English and Spanish, Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling...
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"National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew,"...
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Black History Month 2023 (WPL-ADULT)
Little Black Library
Mental Health Awareness Month - Nonfiction
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Little Black Library
Mental Health Awareness Month - Nonfiction
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In this stylish and complex memoir, Laymon, an English professor at the University of Mississippi and novelist (Long Division), presents bittersweet episodes of being a chubby outsider in 1980s Mississippi. He worships his long-suffering, resourceful grandmother, who loves the land her relatives farmed for generations and has resigned herself to the fact of commonplace bigotry. Laymon laces the memoir with clever, ironic observations about secrets,...
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"Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and...
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Surviving life's setbacks through her relationship with a man who helps restore her faith in God, Zoe Clark discovers A Lova' Like No Otha'. When thunder and lightning strike on the morning of Zoe Clark's wedding, her seemingly perfect world is turned upside-down as she loses her fiance to a pregnant girlfriend she never knew he had. With her engagement shattered, all her life's plans seem over. Unemployed, sinking deeply into depression, and...
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"Something's wrong with her perfect marriage, but Kiara Eason isn't sure what. Her ambitious husband, Rashad, is the last person who'd ever cheat--and she never imagined she'd stray. Still, why is she confiding so much in her handsome co-worker, Eddison? And why is she wondering what would happen if she put her marriage to the ultimate test--secretly setting Rashad up with a younger woman to see if he's tempted?...When Kiara decides to test Rashad...
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"Why? distills the conversations many children and adults are having about race, injustice, and anger in communities throughout our country, and gives them context that young readers can connect with. Heartfelt and deeply piercing illustrations from Shane W. Evans will leave a lasting impact on readers of any age. One that will hopefully lead to more conversations, change, and peace within our own communities and the world." --
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"She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in the New York of the 1930s--and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city's underworld, she was the only member...
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"Hurston and Hughes, two giants of the Harlem Renaissance and American literature, were best friends--until they weren't. Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Langston Hughes ('The Negro Speaks of Rivers,' 'Let America Be America Again') were collaborators, literary gadflies, and close companions. They traveled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural South collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone, and wrote...
19) Darius Jones
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Darius Jones is living the good life. He's got a chance to become the league's MVP, he's crazy in love with his wife, and his relationship with his mom has never been better. Then a drunk driver slams into his car, leaving his wife in a coma; and the mother of his son files for and is granted custody. Heartbroken, Darius lets a stalker groupie convince him to escape his sorrows for just one night. Now Darius must gamble all he's worked for to save...
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"A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction. Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies...
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