Cultural & Regional

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine....

Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner Taraji P. Henson reads her inspiring and funny book about family, friends, the hustle required to make it from DC to Hollywood....

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

In Every Little Step, Brown will for the first time tell the full story of his life and set the record straight, particularly about his relationship with Whitney Houston....

"My name is 'J' and I'm awkward--and Black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be."....

Most of the world remembers Crazy Horse as a peerless warrior who brought the U.S. Army to its knees at the Battle of Little Bighorn....

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships - and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom....

Rabbit is an unflinching memoir of cinematic scope and unexpected humor that offers a rare glimpse into the harrowing reality of life on America's margins....

Jimmy O. Yang is a stand-up comedian, film and TV actor and fan favorite as the character Jian Yang from the popular HBO series Silicon Valley....

The Color of Water touches listeners of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son....

Raised in the ghetto, abandoned as a child, addicted to drugs and women all his life but still able to produce four consecutive number one hip-hop albums in a row...this is the life and times of the darkest and most dangerously introspective hip-hop artist ever....

Universally acclaimed as a musical genius, Miles Davis was one of the most important and influential musicians in the world. Here, Miles speaks out about his extraordinary life....

The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era....

The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship....

A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian-American consciousness and the struggle to be human....

Before she turned 20, Cupcake Brown survived the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, and much more....

There had been mythic sports figures before Cassius Clay, but when he burst upon the sports scene in the 1950s, he broke the mold....

From one of the greatest rappers of all time, the memoir of a life cut short, a revealing look at the dark side of hip hop’s Golden Era....  

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family....

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic....

In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s....

Richard Pryor journeys from his childhood in a family that worked in whore-houses and bars, through to his years in Hollywood - the money, the women, the drugs - and the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis....

As we confront questions of social inequality, there's no better time to revisit the lessons of the '60s and no better leader to learn from than Congressman John Lewis....

Sadia Azmat has many different sides to her, she is the good Muslim sister and the loud and proud comedian, she is the quiet and loving friend and the horny and outspoken one. So why does everyone put her in a box and expect her to choose between one or the other? In a life of ups and downs, swings and roundabouts, Sadia has learnt the hard way that she can embrace her sexuality and be a proud British-Indian Muslim.

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. The relationship crossed generations, spanned several cycles in life, exhibited high and low notes, reached and dipped and found its way. Like many women friends, these two writers imagined and built a relationship that was responsive, inventive, and engaged. 

Within the stoned soul picnic of Black music icons in the ’60s and ’70s, only one could bill himself without a blush as Moses, demanding liberation for Black men with his notions of life and self—Isaac Lee Hayes Jr., the beautifully sheen, shaded, and chain-spangled acolyte of cool, whose high-toned “lounge music” and proto-rap was soul’s highest order—heard on twenty-two albums and selling millions of records. 

Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a 19-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the fields of Central California. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa tells his amazing life story - from his impoverished childhood in the tiny village of Palaco, Mexico, to his harrowing border crossing and his transformation from illegal immigrant to American citizen and gifted student at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard Medical School. 

I Too Am America examines the promise and peril of Black men and boys in America by exploring the lives of two talented young men, one in Detroit and one in Oakland, who at once embody all that we want our boys to be while also illuminating the many uncertainties they face. The book delves into the story of CBMA founder Shawn Dove, who had to navigate similar waters of promise and peril decades ago as a Black boy in New York City. 

Together with My Cousin & Me: And Other Animals plus Wolves: Ryders in the Whirlwind, this book comprises a trilogy, I call The Land. They tell the epic story of four generations of a Celtic family battling the elements and the animals to scrape a living from a land with no fat and little lean. Ours was a wilderness farm in Central Ontario populated by animals, insects, and rocks. The early generations killed the animals and fought the land.

Simon Woolley is a member of the House of Lords, the first Black man to head an Oxbridge college and a policy changemaker who has the ear of prime ministers and the future king. But this is a lord who wants to shake up the establishment, an outsider who knows how important it is to bring underrepresented voices to the table. Raised by loving white foster parents on the impoverished St Matthew's Estate in Leicester, young Simon soon learnt about politics while in line at the barber's and about racism as one of the few Black children in the neighbourhood. 

From National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s 50 years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women’s activist, and intellectual.

Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart's life—what she wore, what she ate, what she thought—was controlled by the orders of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At 19, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she was married off to a man she barely knew. For the next 24 years, he would rule her life. Eventually, when her youngest daughter, Miriam, started to question why she wasn't allowed to sing, run or ride a bike, Julia reached her breaking point. 

 Leaving Aberdeen is the story of a young Southern girl's awakening during a turbulent time of racial reckoning, from reading torn textbooks in a one-room schoolhouse to attending a premier HBCU, from professional modeling to motherhood, and from accepting her "place" to supporting her husband's membership as a Black Panther.