Showing results for "Black" in Authors

After the birth of her first child in 2006, Turkish writer Elif Shafak suffered from postpartum depression that triggered a profound personal crisis. In this elegantly written memoir, she retraces her journey from free-spirited, nomadic artist to dedicated but emotionally wrought mother. As she intersperses her own experience with the lives of prominent authors such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Ayn Rand and Zelda Fitzgerald, Shafak looks for a solution to the inherent conflict between artistic creation and responsible parenting.

Following an obsessive mind trying (and failing) to find relief, The Black Pool is a gripping thrill-ride through violent, chaotic underworlds. Tracing the roots of an illness through the failures of youth and adolescence and finally back to childhood, it's about all the wrong places where addicts look for transcendence - from work, to relationships, to writing, to anger.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world – a “home” – for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.

In five short essays, the award-winning writer dissects the nervous condition of being not only Black, and not only a woman, but also quote-unquote "postcolonial". Weaving together the experiences, events, intersections and negotiations of her multifaceted identity, Dangarembga offers a powerful vision of Black liberation.

One of our most visceral and important memoirs on race in America, this is the story of Nathan McCall, who began life as a smart kid in a close, protective family in a black working-class neighborhood. Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.

Private investigator Charles Maddox is surprised when he is approached by Edward Tulkinghorn for help. The feared and shadowy attorney offers Charles a handsome price he can't refuse to do some sleuthing for a client. Charles learns that Sir Julius Cremorne has been receiving threatening letters, and now Tulkinghorn wants him to find and stop whoever is responsible. But what starts as a simple open-and-shut case swiftly escalates into something bigger and much darker. As he cascades toward a collision with powerful forces, Charles will need all the assistance he can get…

The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.

Novela, memorias, retrato de época, microensayo, crónica social, diario íntimo, registro científico, desnudo, crítica, mapa: de la magistral mixtura de géneros a las fronteras entre Plaza Miserere y Barrio Norte, o a los parecidos entre Emilio, el mozo que le alcanza la cartera cuando tropieza hacia la vereda, y Georges, el barman del Ritz que ante Hemingway ignora a Scott Fitzgerald.

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her...

Over a three-decade period that began in 1919, Oscar Micheaux wrote, directed, edited, produced, and distributed over 40 films nationally and internationally. These films usually featured all-Black casts. They spanned a silent film period and a talkie period (sound films). Given such a background and the period in American history into which he was born, Micheaux's achievements were extraordinary and his legacy is a study of survival, persistence, and bold determination to develop a new era in Black films.

With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost. Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry...

A look back at the cultural and political force of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, in celebration of her hundredth birthday Artist–Rebel–Pioneer Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the great American literary icons of the twentieth century, a protégé of...

Finalist, 2025 Frances Fuller Victor Award in General Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards Honorable Mention, 2024 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers...

In 1966, just as the American military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive, a working-class 22-year-old from Chicago was drafted into the army. Larry Heinemann served one year of combat duty, most of it in the vicinity of Cu Chi. It was the most horrific and consequential year of his life, and it served as the raw material for his two classic war novels. This memoir chronicles a 1992 railway journey Heinemann took from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers' Association.

Examines firsthand the lives of legendary Black writers who made a way out of no way to illuminate a road map for budding creators desiring to follow in their footsteps Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a...

Spend an evening with famous southern writer Rick Bragg, listening to him as I did, then wonder as I did, why there wasn't a black face in the house. Maybe there isn't a reason. Maybe there is. Rick Bragg says that no writer tells the whole truth. I tried to...As I saw it. That didn't go over to well...With a special someone in Rick's life. As you will see.

An African American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in 21st-century America.