As cartoonist Whit Taylor and her husband travel through semi-arid flatlands and sub-alpine mountains, Taylor reflects both on Montana's breathtaking beauty and the enduring toll of Manifest Destiny on its land and people. Balancing funny road trip anecdotes with thoughts on melting glaciers and the worrying prevalence of white nationalists, Montana Diary tells a slice of America's story, knowing that you can't separate its wonder from its tragedy.
Laetitia Ky is a one-of-a-kind artist, activist, and creative voice based in Ivory Coast, West Africa. With the help of extensions, wool, wire, and thread, Ky sculpts her hair into unique and compelling art pieces that shine a light on, and ignite conversation around, social justice. Through this celebration of women's empowerment, Ky extends a generous invitation to love ourselves, embrace our unique beauty, and to work toward a more just world.
Bassey Ikpi explores her life--as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist--through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our preconceptions of the mind and normalcy as Bassey bares her own truths and lies for us all to behold with radical honesty and brutal intimacy.
A heartfelt and funny graphic novel memoir from one of the first Black female cartoonists to be published in the New Yorker--how she navigated life in her predominantly white New Jersey town, overcame severe dyslexia through art, and found the confidence to pursue her passion. Funny and poignant, Liz captures the age-old adolescent questions of "who am I?" and "what do I want to be?" with pitch-perfect clarity and insight.
Unbound is the story of an inimitable woman's inner strength and perseverance, all in pursuit of bringing healing to her community and the world around her, but it is also a story of possibility, of empathy, of power, and of the leader we all have inside ourselves. In sharing her path toward healing and saying "me too," Tarana reaches out a hand to help us all on our own journeys.
Somebody's Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the threads between who she is and what she was born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.
The Yellow House is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure.
In the Technicolor glow of the early seventies, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of Greenwich Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day--luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her tribute to that fascinating social circle and their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other.
Miss Chloe Toni Morrison, born Chloe A Wofford, was a towering figure in the world of literature when she entered A.J. Verdelle's life. Their literary friendship was a young writer's dream--simultaneously exhilarating, intimidating, fulfilling, and challenging. In this pensive and intricately lyrical book, Verdelle honors Morrison among the cultural greats, while illuminating and celebrating the power of language, legacy, and genius.
2 Dope Queens star Phoebe Robinson is ready to share everything she's experienced in the hope that, if you can laugh at her topsy-turvy life, you can laugh at your own. Written in her trademark unfiltered, witty style, Robinson's latest essay collection is a call to arms. She tackles a wide range of topics, such as intersectional feminism, beauty standards, and toxic masculinity. A candid perspective for a generation that has had the rug pulled out from under it too many times to count.
In Constructing a Nervous System, Jefferson shatters herself into pieces and recombines them into a new and vital apparatus on the page, fusing the criticism that she is known for, fragments of the family members she grieves for, and signal moments from her life, as well as the words of those who have peopled her past and accompanied her in her solitude, dramatized here like never before.
Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school--in her sixties--to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived.
In Lead from the Outside, Stacey Abrams argues that knowing your own passion is the key to success, regardless of the scale or target. From launching a company, to starting a day care center for homeless teen moms, to running a successful political campaign, finding what you want to fight for is as critical as knowing how to turn thought into action.
When They Call You a Terrorist is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele's reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable. A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America--and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free.
In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of "victim" and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.
In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large. Whether she's writing about Sailor Moon; Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; or disabled black women in the context of the "Black Girl Magic" movement, Jerkins is compelling and revelatory.
From Samantha Irby, beloved author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, a rip-roaring, edgy and unabashedly raunchy new collection of hilarious essays. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with "tv executives slash amateur astrologers" while being a "cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person," "with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees," who still hides past due bills under her pillow. The essays in this collection draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby's new life.
A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing ventures through the physical and mythical landscapes of Mary-Alice Daniel's upbringing. Against the backdrop of a migratory adolescence, she reckons with race, religious conflict, culture clash, and a multiplicity of possible identities. Daniel lays bare the lives and legends of her parents and past generations, unearthing the tribal mythologies that shaped her kin and her own way of being in the world.
In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Emily Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town.
An intimate view of civil rights history in the making, Hope in the Struggle is a uniquely inspiring life story for these current dark and divisive times, a testament to how one determined soul can make the world a better place. A memoir about shouldering the cause of social justice during the darkest hours and brightest moments for civil rights in America--and, specifically, in Minnesota--Hope in the Struggle shines light on the difference one person can make.
When Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, "the pursuit of justice creates injustice." Coates's experiences show that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just.
A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" and provide a prosperous life for her family -- and how those sacrifices resonate over time.
In The Bold World, we witness Patterson reshaping her own attitudes, beliefs, and biases, learning from her children, and a whole new community, how to meet the needs of her transgender son. In doing so, she opens the minds of those who raised and fortified her, all the while challenging cultural norms and gender expectations. Patterson finds that the fight for racial equality in which her ancestors were so prominent helped pave the way for the current gender revolution.
"Just as I Am is my truth. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by his hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say." --Cicely Tyson
When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-seven, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her 'late' entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family - and considers how to take back one's American story.
In Manifesto, Evaristo charts her theory of unstoppability, showing creative people how they too can visualize and find success in their work, ignoring the naysayers. Both unconventional memoir and inspirational text, Manifesto is a unique reminder to us all to persist in doing work we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted. Evaristo shows us how we too can follow in her footsteps, from first vision, to insistent perseverance, to eventual triumph.
A stirring and powerful memoir from black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll recounting her painful struggle to overcome a completely white childhood in order to forge her identity as a black woman in America. Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Carroll's memoir explores the tension between the aching desire for her birth mother's acceptance, the loyalty she feels toward her adoptive parents, and the search for her racial identity. Ultimately, through the support of her chosen black family, she was able to heal.
Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors' journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California.
"In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn't always see me. I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get to some form of self-love." -- VIola Davis
In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.
From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to diagnosis with heart failure at age twenty-nine, Evette Dionne tracks her relationships with friendship, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image. Along the way, she lifts back the curtain to reveal the subtle, insidious forms of surveillance and control levied at fat women.
As a young Black woman falsely accused, prosecuted, and ultimately imprisoned, Keeda Haynes suffered the abuses of our racist and sexist justice system. But rather than give in to despair, she decided to fight for change. After her release, she attended law school at night, became a public defender, and ultimately staged a highly publicized campaign for Congress. At every turn of her unlikely story, she gives unique insights into the inequities built into our institutions.
In her brand-new collection, Phoebe Robinson shares stories that will make you laugh, but also plenty that will hit you in the heart, inspire a little bit of rage, and maybe a lot of action. That means sharing her perspective on performative allyship, white guilt, what happens when white people take up space in cultural movements, and how the dire state of mental health in America means that taking care of one's mental health usually requires disposable money.
“...I attended a panel discussion at Barnard College on trans women’s literature and stood witness as folks in the space, mostly white, basically dismissed the genre of trans memoir, as if it were so 2000 and late. As a lover of literature, of books and a writer who is working on a memoir that would be categorized as “trans memoir,” I was twitching in my seat hearing these shortsighted comments. What seemed to be glaringly missing from these comments was the fact that trans memoir has been dominated by a certain story, that of an older white trans person.”
“After that panel, I sought counsel from my dear sister reina gossett, who moderated the discussion and highlighted the workings of white supremacy and the fact that not all people, specifically trans women of color, are granted equal access to write, share and publish their stories. This unequal access to publishing has left a gaping hole in this genre and the imaginings of what we say is possible for trans people on the margins. Many trans folks have been able to hear their story told through other trans folk in literature who have represented them and resonated in some way. Yet the stories that have dominated this genre have nothing to do with me. I, a young, poor-raised, multi-racial trans women, did not have access to stories because the stories I craved did not exist, and the ones that did exist are consistently being erased. And because I didn’t have examples of women like me who made it through it was difficult to imagine a future beyond what I was living.”
“Some of our stories have yet to be told. Some of our stories aren’t just about gender. Some of our stories are about the shaming of our color, about the way the world views us as less valuable, about how we’re told to pull ourselves up and when we resort to the necessary acts of survival, we’re told to be quiet. Some of our stories are about how even in spaces of community we’re silenced.”
— Janet Mock, “The Gatekeeping of Trans Women of Color’s Stories in Publishing”;
emphasis added.
