Showing results for title "Black" in Art & Literature

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol.

In this long-overdue celebration of Black women’s resilience and unheralded strength, the revered, trailblazing White House correspondent reflects on “The Year That Changed Everything”—2020—and African-American women’s unprecedented role in upholding democracy.

En 2008, cuando Jesús Lemus dirigía el periódico El Tiempo de La Piedad, Michoacán, publicó diversas notas que irritaron a las autoridades locales. La venganza de los poderosos no se hizo esperar: le fabricaron cargos criminales y lo enviaron al penal de máxima seguridad de Puente Grande. Después de varios años encerrado e incontables tribulaciones, Lemus consiguió la libertad. Gracias a la fuerza que el oficio de periodista le brindó, se decidió a contar su historia y la de aquellos hombres con los que compartió torturas y humillaciones.

The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.

Racial identity, pop culture, and delusions of perfection collide in an eye-opening and refreshingly frank memoir by fashion and beauty insider Danielle Prescod.

In 1948 most White people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous White journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a Black man in the Jim Crow South. Escorted through the South's parallel Black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic Black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local Black leaders, and families of lynching victims.

Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.

In 2015, an aspiring young journalist named Shiori Ito charged prominent reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi with rape. After meeting up for drinks and networking, Ito remembers regaining consciousness in a hotel room while being assaulted. But when she went to the police, Ito was told that her case was a “black box”—untouchable and unprosecutable. Upon publication in 2017, Ito’s searing account foregrounded the #MeToo movement in Japan and became the center of an urgent cultural and legal shift around recognizing sexual assault and gender-based violence.

In 1966, just as the American military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive, a working-class 22-year-old from Chicago was drafted into the army. Larry Heinemann served one year of combat duty, most of it in the vicinity of Cu Chi. It was the most horrific and consequential year of his life, and it served as the raw material for his two classic war novels. This memoir chronicles a 1992 railway journey Heinemann took from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers' Association.

A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young Black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than race - or, maybe and intriguingly, over sex.

When 28-year-old San Francisco Daily Morning Call reporter Mark Twain met Tom Sawyer at a local bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first novel. As Twain steamed, played cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, customs inspector, and local hero responsible for having saved 90 lives at sea), he had second thoughts about Shirley Tempest, his proposed book about a local girl firefighter, and began to envision a novel of wider scope.

An African American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in 21st-century America.

Over a three-decade period that began in 1919, Oscar Micheaux wrote, directed, edited, produced, and distributed over 40 films nationally and internationally. These films usually featured all-Black casts. They spanned a silent film period and a talkie period (sound films). Given such a background and the period in American history into which he was born, Micheaux's achievements were extraordinary and his legacy is a study of survival, persistence, and bold determination to develop a new era in Black films.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the great American literary icons of the 20th century, a protégé of Langston Hughes and mentor to a generation of poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Elizabeth Alexander. Her poetry took inspiration from the complex portraits of Black American life she observed growing up on Chicago's South Side - a world of kitchenette apartments and vibrant streets.

When Helena Andrews heard this declaration on Saturday Night Live, her first reaction was How daaare you? But after a commercial break and some thought, she decided to poke at the stereotype that says "successful" and "bitch" are synonyms. Unafraid and frank, she comes to realize that being a bitch is sometimes the best way to be—except, of course, when it's not.

Margarett Sargent was an icon of avant-garde art in the 1920s. In an evocative weave of biography and memoir, her granddaughter unearths for the first time the life of a spirited and gifted woman committed at all costs to self-expression.

Iconoclast. Contrarian. Pugilist. Artist. Throughout his life, shrewd self-promoter and creative genius Edgar Leeteg possessed many titles, astounding fans and antagonizing critics. Considered the “American Gauguin”, the rakish ladies’ man originated the modern technique of oil painting on black velvet. Once memorialized by James Michener as the original rascal in paradise, he redefined artistic success by pioneering a form of painting in the South Pacific that would forever change the world. 

Black Rainbow is the powerful first-person story of one woman's struggle with depression and how she managed to recover from it through the power of poetry. In 1997, Oxford graduate, working mother, and Times journalist Rachel Kelly went from feeling mildly anxious to being completely unable to function within the space of just three days.

How does an ordinary-colored-girl get her own talk show in 1973 covering Southern New England? Not by being a good girl. She wasn't always bad, she'd tell you. It wasn't until she met "him". The him was one of TV's most powerful behind-the-scenes star makers. If I Make You a Star: A Trailblazing Black TV Journalist’s Me Too Story by Theresa Brown is about love and hate, power and compromise, colorism, betrayal, mental illness, and moral injury. It's an insider's story of grooming, success, and the consequences of complicity taking place in the late '60s.

Novela, memorias, retrato de época, microensayo, crónica social, diario íntimo, registro científico, desnudo, crítica, mapa: de la magistral mixtura de géneros a las fronteras entre Plaza Miserere y Barrio Norte, o a los parecidos entre Emilio, el mozo que le alcanza la cartera cuando tropieza hacia la vereda, y Georges, el barman del Ritz que ante Hemingway ignora a Scott Fitzgerald.