When Yvonna's ghetto fabulous would is rocked after the brutal murder of her high school sweetheart Bilal Santana, at the hands of her father, she learns a lot about the people around her. Behind her back they conceal a sultry secret involving her best friend and deceased boyfriend.Unable to move past her anger, which eventually causes her to get into a major car accident; she leaves D.C., fleeing only to Baltimore. There she remains nourishing the hate she feels inside.Four years later, angrier and crazier than ever, she decides to return home to one by one exact revenge on those who made what she affectionately refers to as her "Shyt List". From defecating on a gravesite, to murder, she reigns supreme at completing her mission of destroying their lives. That is until she reaches the last name on the list. With him her plans are difficult to carry out. Will the love she feels for him prevent her from following through with her plan? Or will old memories push her to go even further? In the end all will be revealed, and you'll be blown away!

    . . Hoping Del Rio Bay High will live up to her greatest expectations, Mina has big plans for infiltrating the school's social glitterati. After all, she's been mad popular for as long as she can remember--and she isn't about to go from Middle School Royalty to High School Ambiguity. But Del Rio Bay is a big school, so it'll take some plotting to avoid getting lost in the crowd. Good thing she isn't afraid of a little hard work and that her playground peeps--Lizzie, Michael, and JZ--have got her back. But it isn't long before Mina's big plans for securing her social status take a back seat to some drama that was so not expected. Lizzie's scored an invite from the beautiful people that Mina can only dream about, and not only is Michael tripping about being back in school, but now he's beefing with JZ. Worst of all, Mina's sociology class experiment to rid the world--or at least Del Rio Bay High--of prejudice is about to backfire. . .because it might just mean she'll have to rid herself of her very best friend. A novel about friendship, betrayal, and how far some will go for popularity, So Not the Drama takes a fresh and wickedly funny look at planet high school.

    Includes: The Color Purple * Hell No * Mysterious Ways * Push Da Button * Too Beautiful for Words * What About Love? * and more. The arrangements are standard piano/vocal format with the melody in the piano part.

    Nearly 200 selections, including poetry, essays, short stories, and plays, from over 75 cultural critics, writers, and political leaders, capture the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s. In his new introduction, Amiri Baraka reflects — nearly four decades later — on both the movement and the book.

    . . wants to explore the druidic function of art, the works of jazz musicians, painters, poets, and others who live imaginatively, expand reality, and make imagination free.”—Brenda Hillman, from the introductionTotem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is the debut of a poet who has been listening for decades. In his youth, Gregory Pardlo heard stories of factory hours and picket lines from his father; in the bars, clubs, and on the radio he listens to jazz and blues, the rhythms, beats, and aspirations of which all of which seep into his poems.A former Cave Canem fellow, Pardlo creates work that is deeply autobiographical, drifting between childhood and adult life. He speaks a language simultaneously urban and highbrow, seamlessly switching from art analysis to sneakers hung over the telephone lines. Deeply rooted in a blue-collar world, he produces snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.From “Vincent’s Shoes”:On the wall above my desk: a penand ink affair which I copiedfrom a print hanging in the sushibar down the block:inflected necks of pedestrians on a bridgein the rain and here I hungthe hightops from a power line.It was in me to do. I felt it in my gutthe way Vincent might have feltthe wheat fields and the smoking socketof the sun rattling, tweezed dayslate into the ear of an aluminum bowlGregory Pardlo teaches at Medgar Evers College, The City University of New York, and lives in Brooklyn.