African American Nonfiction

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

You gotta know the rules to play the game. Ball is life. Take it to the hoop. Soar. What can we imagine for ourselves? What if we were the star players, moving and grooving through the game of life? What if we had our own rules of the game to help us get what we want, what we aspire to, what will enrich our lives? The Playbook is intended to provide inspiration for kids ages 10 and up to help them succeed on and off the court.

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake". Activating multiple registers of "wake" - the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness - Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN)...

The #1 New York Times bestseller and a USAToday bestseller!A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism--and antiracism--in America This is NOT a history book. This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race. The...

“Thought-provoking—a must read for [everyone] seeking a firm grasp of accurate American history." —Kirkus (starred review) Brilliant, readable, and raw. Maj. (ret.) Danny Sjursen, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point, delivers a true epic...

Winner of the 2024 American Legacy Book Award in Christian Inspirational A critically acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller with more than one million copies in print and a major motion picture! Gritty with pain, betrayal, and brutality, this incredible true story also shines with an unexpected...

A new rip-roaring essay collection from the smart, edgy, hilarious, unabashedly raunchy, and bestselling Samantha Irby. Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a...

George Scott peered at the nearby Union fortress. Something miraculous was taking place! Three enslaved men had entered but had not been cast out. To Scott, the fortress must be a sanctuary. A place where the three would be safe from capture and harm—never to return to the Confederate South. But exactly why were they granted refuge?

Meet extraordinary black heroes throughout history—biographies for kids ages 8 to 12. You’re invited to meet ancient Egyptian rulers, brilliant scientists, legendary musicians, and civil rights activists—all in the same book! Black Heroes introduces you to 51 black leaders and role models from both history and modern times. This black history book for kids features inspirational biographies of trailblazers from the United States, Egypt, Britain, and more.

HIDDEN GENIUS Frank Mann The Black Engineer Behind Howard Hughes by H. T. B r y e r and Paul Bryer Frank Mann had the deck stacked against him from the very start. A Black child born to an unwed mother in 1908 Texas didn't have much hope of becoming a success in life. But in 1919, on a dusty Houston airfield, young Frank met a kindred soul—a boy named Howard Hughes. It was the start of a lifelong friendship, and together, these two men would help revolutionize the world with their unique inventions and designs. However, because Frank was Black, he did not always receive the credit he ...

In the wake of his deeply powerful viral videos ("Before You Call the Cops" and "Walking While Black"), Tyler Merritt shares his experiences as a black man in America with truth, humor, and poignancy. Tyler Merritt's video "Before You Call the Cops" has been viewed millions of times. He's...

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress. The companion book to the upcoming PBS series. For...

Hear Nikki Giovanni read two extraordinary collections of her own work! A singular listening experience! The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. She’s been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a healer, and a sage; a wise and courageous voice...

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.” — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? A New York...

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment.

* Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History * “Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became...

The incredible story of the first African American military pilot, who went on to become a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave...

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography “A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class, and disability to hide...