Soon to be married off to Percy Hugo Milton to keep money circulating between black families, she realizes she’s stuck in a dead end relationship where he basically, “ain’t shit”. Money matters most, marriage is nothing but a business deal, and love is nonexistent in Percy’s eyes. Not to mention he finds her particularly boring, and uninspiring. Jasmine becomes desperate when she seeks the help of a spiritual guide. An eccentric witch named Delilah Skye who grants her three things she wants in life. Friendship, great sex, and true love. Yet, the reading doesn’t go as planned when Delilah informs Jasmine that everything she wants is hidden in the man she hates the most. Percy. After a wild drunken night in Atlanta a few years ago with some girl he never planned on seeing again, Homer Skye thought he had life figured out. He had the plans laid out to propose to his long time girlfriend Nasia Stewart, move her into a house, and start his family immediately. The all american dream. That is, until he runs into his one night stand, Pia Milton, and their two year old daughter he knew nothing about. With the Moon becoming full almost every night in Atlanta, things start to turn upside down as these two stories collide at the hands of black magic, family ties, and messy drama. Determined to find true love, Jasmine takes matters into her own hands by proposing a deal to her cheating fiancé. Pia has to come to terms with tolerating her child’s father, and the black magic that runs deep in his crazy family. While Homer struggles with the thought of this woman who lied about their daughter for two years, might just be the one he’s meant to be with all along. Fine Print: This story contains a little magic, belief in the impossible, and a few other random things and people that make up the story. Might be some hood shit in here too, I don’t know. I say, just read it.

    Seeing his torment, his wife, Izzy, prods him to explain. He tells of being a black child growing up in the racially charged 1960s. Inspired to overcome the racism and class status imposed on blacks, he dreams of a life bigger than that lived by most everyone he knows in the small Virginia town of Canaan. He is resented by friends and family for desiring a life better than theirs. Among the smartest in his class, Evan becomes a target of white kids threatened by the forced integration of their schools. Caught in a crossfire of hate from whites and his own people, who question whether he is black enough, Evan is often alone and bewildered. Only the love of his great grandmother, Mama Jennie, and his mentor, Bojack, keeps him on track. Together, they help Evan find perspective and peace.

    As Whitney French says in her introduction, Black Writing Matters “injects new meaning into the word diversity [and] harbours a sacredness and an everydayness that offers Black people dignity.” An “invitation to read, share, and tell stories of Black narratives that are close to the bone,” this collection feels particular to the Black Canadian experience.

    My dual mission has been to use my voice and experience to end throwaway culture, but also keep white women accountable by helping them see how unchecked privilege and relationships with power, privilege, and oppression affects the mental health of black and Indigenous women of color. What many well-meaning co-conspirators don’t realize is that starting the journey into anti-racism requires a deep examination into the self. A journey similar to the hero's journey, it allows you to deeply uncover the roots of who you are in hopes of showing up differently in the world. The hero's journey in ancestor culture often involves fables of a hero who goes on an adventure, struggles through existential crisis overcomes the crisis, and returns to victory all to begin a journey again. Through shared storytelling, these 5 friends share their most vulnerable journeys on how they are taking co-conspired action together.

    One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s place in her home, her neighborhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt.Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby’s working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the “white Carbys” and the “black Carbys,” including Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.Moving between Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

    HoodWitch tells the story of a young person who discovers that they are “something that can & will survive / a whole century of hunt.” Through a series of poems based on childhood photographs, Hicks invokes the spirits of mothers and daughters, sex workers and widows, to conjure an alternative to their own early deaths and the deaths of those whom they have already lost. In this collection about resilience, Hicks speaks about giving her child up for adoption, mourning the death of her fiancé, and embracing the nonbinary femme body—persevering in the face of medical malpractice, domestic abuse, and police violence. The poems find people transformed, “remade out of smoke & iron” into cyborgs and wolves, machines and witches—beings capable of seeking justice in a world that refuses them the option. ​Exploring the intersections of Christianity, modern mysticism, and Afrofuturism in a sometimes urban, sometimes natural setting, Hicks finds a place where “everyone everywhere is hands in the air,” where “you know they gonna push & pull it together. / Just like they learned to.” It is a place of natural magick—where someone like Hicks can have more than one name: where they can be both dead and alive, both a mortal and a god.

    Drawing on interviews with nationally recognized AIDS activists as well as over one hundred Chicago-based women living with HIV/AIDS, Celeste Watkins-Hayes takes readers on an uplifting journey through women’s transformative projects, a multidimensional process in which women shift their approach to their physical, social, economic, and political survival, thereby changing their viewpoint of “dying from” AIDS to “living with” it. With an eye towards improving the lives of women, Remaking a Life provides techniques to encourage private, nonprofit, and government agencies to successfully collaborate, and shares policy ideas with the hope of alleviating the injuries of inequality faced by those living with HIV/AIDS everyday.

    When he is angry, clouds darken. When he cries, rivers burst their banks. And when he touches a basketball, deities want courtside seats. Half Nigerian mortal, half Grecian God: Demi is the Half-God of Rainfall.His mother, Modupe, looks on with a mixture of pride and worry. From close encounters, she knows that Gods are just like men: the same fragile egos, the same subsequent fury, the same sense of entitlement to the bodies of mortals. The Gods will one day tire of sports fans, their fickle allegiances and their prayers to Demi.And when that moment comes, it won’t matter how special he is. Only the women in Demi’s life, the mothers, the Goddesses, will stand between him and a lightning bolt.

    In this collection of interviews and public talks, he reflects on the sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, urban rebellions, and anticolonial movements that have animated the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Kadalie demonstrates how the forms of direct democracy that have evolved through these freedom struggles present the promise of a future defined by social liberation as well as ecological healing.This concise, radical, and iconoclastic book connects Black liberation struggles to ecological activism in the era of climate change, calling on present and future generations of activists to reconnect with the spirit of past movements without lionizing individual leaders or lending legitimacy to any governments or politicians.

    A nearly blind woman is determined to venture out into the world alone, and must face the consequences of her travels. A woman estranged from her community ponders the meaning of hearsay and its devastating consequences. A middle-aged woman leaves the danger of the city only to find it lurking in her own backyard. And in the novella, “Into the Fire,” Mickelbury follows the life of a southern family as they strive for success amidst the violence and uncertainty of 1960s Detroit. In beautiful and exacting prose, Mickelbury gives voice to an often-overlooked coterie of women in this superb collection of fiction.

     However, when Caterrious is mistaken for a criminal on the run, it sets in motion a sequence of events that not only shakes his faith in the justice system but challenges legal precedent and turns the city against itself. More importantly, ‘The story of Caterrious Mitchell’ raises a question, if a persons’ life is legitimate danger, does he have a right to defend himself, even if that person wears a badge? “Every page of ‘Justified’ is so emotional and powerful that it will keep you salivating for just one more chapter”