Rez Road Follies: Canoes, Casinos, Computers, and Birch Bark Baskets


Jim Northrup - 1997
    The author relates his own life experiences to offer a view of contemporary Native American life.

The Cancer Journals


Audre Lorde - 1980
    Includes photos and tributes to Lorde written after her death in 1992."Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet." —Adrienne Rich"This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me." —Alice Walker"The forthrightness and ferocity with which Audre Lorde greeted every social injustice is in full force in this courageous exploration." —Amazon.com

On Lynchings


Ida B. Wells-Barnett - 1969
    The most virulent form of this ongoing persecution was the practice of lynching carried out by mob rule, often as local law enforcement officials looked the other way. During the 1880s and 1890s, more than 100 African Americans per year were lynched, and in 1892 alone the toll of murdered men and women reached a peak of 161.In that awful year, the twenty-three-year-old Ida B. Wells, the editor of a small newspaper for blacks in Memphis, Tennessee, raised one lone voice of protest. In her paper she charged that white businessmen had instigated three local lynchings against their black competitors. In retaliation for her outspoken courage a goon-squad of angry whites destroyed her editorial office and print shop, and she was forced to flee the South and move to New York City.So began a crusade against lynching which became the focus of her long, active, and very courageous life. In New York she began lecturing against the abhorrent vigilante practice and published her first pamphlet on the subject called Southern Horrors. After moving to Chicago and marrying lawyer Ferdinand Barnett, she continued her campaign, publishing A Red Record in 1895 and Mob Rule in New Orleans, about the race riots in that city, in 1900.All three of these documents are here collected in this work, a shocking testament to cruelty and the dark American legacy of racial prejudice. Anticipating possible accusations of distortion, Wells-Barnett was careful to present factually accurate evidence and she deliberately relied on southern white sources as well as statistics gathered by The Chicago Tribune. Using the words of white journalists, she created a damning indictment of unpunished crimes that was difficult to dispute since southern white men who had witnessed the appalling incidents had written the descriptions.Along with her husband she played an active role in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Due to her efforts, the NAACP launched an intensive campaign against lynching after World War I.Her work remains important to this day not only as a cry of protest against injustice but also as valuable historical documentation of terrible crimes that must never be forgotten. This new edition is enhanced by an introduction by Patricia Hill Collins, professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture


Ytasha L. Womack - 2013
    From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, the book’s topics range from the “alien” experience of blacks in America to the “wake up” cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves.

People Who Led to My Plays


Adrienne Kennedy - 1987
    Out of a sequence of deceptively spare statements emerges a complex portrait of the artist as a young woman as she examines the people and events that compelled her to be a writer.

Fates Worse Than Death


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1982
    Here we go again with real life and opinions made to look like one big, preposterous animal not unlike an invention by Dr. Seuss...--Kurt Vonnegut, from Fates Worse Than Death

The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir


Anna Joy Springer - 2011
    She later sang with The Gr'ups and Cypher in the Snow, and toured with Sister Spit, a raucous all-woman group of writers headed by Michelle Tea.The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts Springer's relationship with [Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she'd tested positive for HIV. Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.

Ugly Ways


Tina McElroy Ansa - 1993
    As the emotionally scarred Lovejoys prepare for their mother’s funeral, the spirit of the selfish and manipulative Mudear hovers above them, complaining about her daughters’ “ugly ways” in death as she did in life.

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays


June Jordan - 2002
    The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

This Is Woman's Work: Calling Forth Your Inner Council of Wise, Brave, Crazy, Rebellious, Loving, Luminous Selves


Dominique Christina - 2015
    While this task is important for everybody, Dominique says, "There is an urgency for women. When you have inherited a construct that names, describes, and practices an ideology that women are somehow less important, less necessary, then the work of defining yourself carries with it a kind of fury."Every woman is composed of many selves-archetypal players of the psyche who contribute their voices to her greater "I." This Is Woman's Work introduces us to our council of inner women, delving into the secret wisdom and gifts of the Willing Woman, the Rebel, the Shapeshifter, the Warrior, and more. Combining writing exercises with fresh and dynamic insights, Dominique helps us make an intimate connection with each inner woman-known and unknown, loved and feared-so we may integrate their voices, realize their wisdom, and open ourselves to our full expression and power

Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn


Karen McCarthy Brown - 1991
    She explores the importance of women's religious practices along with related themes of family and of social change. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her subjects in alternate chapters of traditional ethnography and ethnographic fiction, Brown presents herself as a character in Mama Lola's world and allows the reader to evaluate her interactions there. Startlingly original, Brown's work endures as an important experiment in ethnography as a social art form rooted in human relationships. A new preface, epilogue, bibliography, and a collection of family photographs tell the story of the effect of the book's publication on Mama Lola's life.

Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex


Marita Golden - 2004
    You’re going to have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children as it is.”In these words from her mother, novelist and memoirist Marita Golden learned as a girl that she was the wrong color. Her mother had absorbed “colorism” without thinking about it. But, as Golden shows in this provocative book, biases based on skin color persist–and so do their long-lasting repercussions. Golden recalls deciding against a distinguished black university because she didn’t want to worry about whether she was light enough to be homecoming queen. A male friend bitterly remembers that he was teased about his girlfriend because she was too dark for him. Even now, when she attends a party full of accomplished black men and their wives, Golden wonders why those wives are all nearly white. From Halle Berry to Michael Jackson, from Nigeria to Cuba, from what she sees in the mirror to what she notices about the Grammys, Golden exposes the many facets of "colorism" and their effect on American culture. Part memoir, part cultural history, and part analysis, Don't Play in the Sun also dramatizes one accomplished black woman's inner journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance and pride.

Alligator and Other Stories


Dima Alzayat - 2020
    There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of “Only Those Who Struggle Succeed,” the New York City children on the lookout for a place to play on the heels of Etan Patz’s kidnapping in “Disappearance,” and the “dangerous” women of “Daughters of Manāt” who struggle to assert their independence.The title story, “Alligator,” is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and intergenerational trauma, told in an epistolary format through social media posts, newspaper clippings, and testimonials, that starts with the true story of the lynching of a Syrian immigrant couple by law officers in small-town Florida. Placed in a wider context of U.S. racial violence, the extrajudicial deaths, and what happens to the couple’s children and their children’s children in the years after, challenges the demands of American assimilation and its limits.Alligator and Other Stories is haunting, spellbinding, and unforgettable, while marking Dima Alzayat’s arrival as a tremendously gifted new talent.

The Tears of Monterini


Amanda Weinberg - 2020
    1921. Yacobo Levi, an intellectual dreamer, works in the family bookshop. Angelo Ghione, a contadino, makes good wine by singing to the grapes. Lifetime best friends, their Jewish and Catholic families live side by side amidst a backdrop of village communal life, Etruscan tales and the growth of Benito Mussolini. Born on the same day, their children grow up and fall in love. When the 1938 racial laws are passed, the love between Bella and Rico thrives amidst and perhaps because of the fear and uncertainty. When Angelo discovers their liaison he suggests they marry but life is complicated and tensions simmer beneath the surface of love and friendship. When war is declared on the day of Bella's wedding to Michele a fellow Jew, the peaceful village they live in is torn apart, and the Levis find themselves displaced and fighting for their lives. Will life ever be the same again?The Tears of Monterini is a story of love and betrayal, loyalty and friendship. Inspired by true events in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, this beautifully written debut will appeal to readers interested in history, Italy, romance, family dynamics and conflict.

Three Impossible Wishes


Anmol Malik - 2020
    Her jugaad and privilege puts her directly in the path of a hardworking scholarship student– Vladimir Petrov, the vodka to her hot chocolate. Their tumultuous friendship is affected by global events, the landscape around them ever changing. And slowly, the Russian winter begins to melt for the Indian summer.Funny and endearing, Three Impossible Wishes is a heart-warming book about finding love and learning to love yourself.