Showing results by narrator "Allyson Johnson" in All Categories

Self-exile became Sira's only choice when she discovered how deeply she'd been betrayed by the leaders of her own people. Rather than allow them to continue to use her for their own ruthless purposes, Sira, the most powerful being ever born to the alien race known at the Clan, fled with the human telepath, Jason Morgan. Now, living on a distant world in an environment over which she has control, Sira is striving to carve out a new life for herself.

In a city full of police controversies, hippie artist punk houses, and overzealous liberals, Portland, Oregon, is a place where even its fiction blurs with its bizarre realities. Brand-new stories by: Gigi Little, Justin Hocking, Christopher Bolton, Jess Walter, Monica Drake, Jamie S. Rich (illustrated by Joelle Jones), Dan DeWeese, Zoe Trope, Luciana Lopez, Karen Karbo, Bill Cameron, Ariel Gore, Floyd Skloot, Megan Kruse, Kimberly Warner-Cohen, and Jonathan Selwood.

Six months ago her three daughters walked out and left Charlotte Rodgers to fend for herself in her small home in Murphy, Kansas. Charlotte is left resentful and bitter toward her children—Clarice, Connie, and especially Camille—for abandoning her when all she wanted was to return home, finally, to Denver and escape from the memories of her painful past. What Charlotte doesn’t know is that the past is hot on her trail and, to her horror, will soon catch up with her once again.

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, How Beautiful We Were tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made-and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back.

Pears is a divorced 40-something living with her mother in Queens when the unsexiest pandemic ever hits the country and smatters her potential love life. If her mother wasn’t enough to cock block her, this virus does a double cock block of trapping her in masks while dosing her in hand sanitizer.

The stage is set for a possibly cataclysmic confrontation in non-space-and the Speaker for the Clan Council and her human mate are about to find themselves in the heart of the conflict.

Getting a handle on personal finance can be confusing and stressful. Get unstuck and start saving now with this streamlined, holistic plan for financial wellness. Smart Money makes it simple to ditch debt and jump-start your wealth in nine practical steps. Learn how to avoid money pitfalls, correct any wrong turns, and save and spend the right way to build wealth.

In Black Utopias, Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking.

Lorna Forrester was to wed the half-witted heir to the Beau Repose estate. But the day before her wedding, she met Ramon Cazenove, a daring blockade runner, thus beginning an incredible adventure into danger and love--from the Civil War-torn South to the windswept Caribbean.

Despite all good intentions, the lure of the Talent to move through space using the M'hir dimension is too much for the Om'ray of Cersi to resist. As the awareness of this talent spreads, all those Om'ray who are capable converge on the settlement at Sona. To prevent the disruption of the Agreement and the destruction that it would unleash, the M'hiray, as they now call themselves, agree to leave Cersi forever and try to establish their own haven within the Trade Pact worlds - only to learn that not everybody wants peace.

Lilly Etta didn't know the men, but she knew those yellow chairs. They were Tanya's, and they were being taken out of her building. Tanya was being put out - Tanya, her mother, her six brothers and sisters. Their things would be piled on the sidewalk and left there to be had for the taking. It didn't matter if nobody else in the city cared; Lilly Etta did. She knew what friendship was, and she wasn't going to let her friend be thrown out without a fight.

Wren Matthews thought she’d outgrown nursery rhymes a long time ago. But that was before she knew that songs of twinkling little stars and four-and-twenty blackbirds were the key to an ancient, hidden magic. Wren’s discovery catapults her into a world of buried secrets, strange dreams, and a mountain fortress under an aurora-filled sky. But just as she starts to master her unique abilities, her new world begins to crumble around her...and only she can save it.

Lost in Language & Sound is a vibrant and vital collection that celebrates the three most important muses in the life and work of Ntozake Shange - language, music, and dance. In this deeply personal book, the celebrated writer reflects on what it means to be an artist, a woman, and a woman of color through a beautiful combination of memoir and essay. She describes where her love for creative forces began - in her childhood home, a place where imagination reigned and boredom wasn't allowed.

Phillis Wheatley was just another child kidnapped into slavery from Senegal, until she began to show enormous intellectual promise, eventually shocking a room of Boston scholars by translating Ovid at the age of 14. Wheatley would go on to become a major voice in the American literary scene and would pave the way for African American writers to come.

After being initiated into a neighbor's family by a solemn backyard ceremony, a young Russian-American girl and her African-American brothers determine to buy their gramma Eula a beautiful Easter hat. But their good intentions are misunderstood, until they discover just the right way to pay for the hat that Eula's had her eye on. A loving family story woven from the author's childhood.

This book provides a historical account of feminism, exploring its earliest roots as well as key issues including voting rights, the liberation of the '60s, and its relevance today. Margaret Walters touches on the difficulties and inequities that women still face more than 40 years after the "new wave" of 1960s feminism, such as how successful women are at combining domesticity, motherhood, and work outside the house. She brings the subject completely up to date by providing an analysis of the current situation of women across the globe.

With her youthful appearance and light skin, African-American high school counselor Patricia knows how it feels to be an outsider in her own world. And when a biracial 15-year-old boy becomes the target of neighborhood bullies, she's determined to help him. One of New York's most successful men, Morgan Baxter feels totally at home in a corporate boardroom. But being a single father to a troubled teenager is a far more daunting challenge. Patricia Gilbert seems to understand his son - and him.

As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as Black females. With a poet's eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child's acquisition of language and what to pack in a diaper bag.

What was the fate of the first generations of black women born after abolition in America? Struggle: to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape new forms of servitude, and to live as if they really were free. This book re-creates the radical imagination and wayward practices of these young women by describing the world through their eyes. Re-creating their fragmentary life stories using a combination of archival research and virtuosic literary imagination, a very different vision of the 20th century emerges, one that offers an intimate chronicle of black radicalism.

Nicole M. Joseph investigates factors that contribute to the glaring underrepresentation of Black female students in mathematics. Joseph's account calls attention to educational structures and practices that contribute to race- and gender-based stratification in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In her assessment of the intersectional difficulties facing this marginalized group, Joseph offers a critical view of the existing mathematics education research, practice, and policies that have neglected Black girls and women; and then provides suggestions for reform.