Collection: Shop Black

Spanish language edition.
Lola has a big smile on her face. Why? Because it's Tuesday--and on Tuesdays, Lola and her mommy go to the library. Join Lola in this cozy celebration of books and the people who love them.

A joint poetry collection from the virally popular and bestselling poets r.h. Sin and Robert M. Drake.

What are you hiding behind your smile? If those empty bottles that line the walls of your room could speak, what tales would they spill? So much of your truth is buried beneath the lies you tell yourself. There's a need to scream to the moon; there's this urge to go out into the darkness of the night to purge. There are so many stories living inside your soul, you just want the opportunity to tell them. And when you can't find the will to express what lives within your heart, these words will give you peace. These words will set you free.

"...to be revisited again and again...The candy-colored pages and straightforward stories are hard to resist..." -The New York Times

"...diverse collection of iconic figures...vibrantly illustrated...beautifully crafted volume..." -Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"...exuberant...exquisitely designed...a launching point for more discoveries." -School Library Journal, Starred Review

"A luminous and diverse tribute to black movers and shakers across the centuries." -Publishers Weekly

Meet 52 icons of color from the past and present in this celebration of inspirational achievement--a collection of stories about changemakers to encourage, inspire, and empower the next generation of changemakers. Jamia Wilson has carefully curated this range of black icons and the book is stylishly brought together by Andrea Pippins' colorful and celebratory illustrations.

Written in the spirit of Nina Simone's song "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," this vibrant book is a perfect introduction to both historic and present-day icons and heroes. Meet figureheads, leaders, and pioneers such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Rosa Parks, as well as cultural trailblazers and athletes like Stevie Wonder, Oprah Winfrey, and Serena Williams.

All children deserve to see themselves represented positively in the books they read. Highlighting the talent and contributions of black leaders and changemakers from around the world, readers of all backgrounds will be empowered to discover what they too can achieve. Strong, courageous, talented, and diverse, these extraordinary men and women's achievements will inspire a new generation to chase their dream...whatever it may be.

The 52 icons: Mary Seacole, Matthew Henson, Ava Duvernay, Bessie Coleman, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Cathy Freeman, George Washington Carver, Malorie Blackman, Harriet Tubman, Mo Farah, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jesse Owens, Beyonce Knowles, Solange Knowles, Katherine Johnson, Josephine Baker, Kofi Annan, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Brian Lara, Madam C.J. Walker, Yannick Noah, Maurice Ashley, Alexandre Duma, Martin Luther King, Jr., Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, Simone Biles, Stevie Wonder, Esperanza Spalding, Sidney Poitier, Oprah Winfrey, Pele, Nelson Mandela, Louis Armstrong, Rosa Parks, Naomi Campbell, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Muhammad Ali, Shirley Chisholm, Steve McQueen, Zadie Smith, Usain Bolt, Wangari Maathai, Mae Jemison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nicola Adams, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, and Misty Copeland.

If you like this book, check out Young, Gifted and Black Too, for 52 more inspiring icons! For younger readers, Baby Young Gifted and Black is perfect to introduce litte ones to these trailblazers who changed the world.

If you like this book, check out Step Into Your Power and Big Ideas for Young Thinkers, by the same author-illustrator team.

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - A one-volume selection of four novels in the legendary detective series--blistering, groundbreaking capers set in Harlem's criminal underworld--by master crime writer Chester Himes. With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author S.A. Cosby.

"[Himes] put a spin on crime fiction--emphasizing urban atmosphere, street smarts, and uptown carryings-on--unlike anything the genre had previously seen." --The Boston Globe

"Himes's Harlem saga vies with the novels of David Goodis and Jim Thompson as the inescapable achievement of postwar American crime fiction." --The New York Times

"His implacable drive to examine the Black experience, the disingenuous nature of the American Dream, the reality of pain and sorrow and what it does to the soul, that is what makes [Himes] the bard of the existential African American psyche." --S.A. Cosby, from his Introduction

Here in one volume is an exceptional selection from Chester Himes's acclaimed Harlem Detectives series. Winner of France's prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and lauded by Jean Cocteau as a "prodigious masterpiece," A Rage in Harlem introduces detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson in a searing escapade. In The Real Cool Killers, the duo investigates a shooting and discovers an unsettling personal connection. In The Crazy Kill, a man is found in a breadbasket, stabbed to death, leaving Himes's detectives to find out who among the many suspects did it. And in Cotton Comes to Harlem, the brazen robbery of a notorious con man running a back-to-Africa scam sets off a hunt for a bale of Southern cotton. These masterful novels exhibit Himes's evocative, baroque descriptions of Black life in Harlem and his famously blistering social commentary.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

"The best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler." --San Francisco Chronicle

In the vein of Hidden Figures comes a nonfiction picture book about the Green Book, a travel guide by Victor Hugo Green, a Black postal worker from Harlem, made to help African Americans stay safe while traveling during segregation.

As a mail carrier, Victor Hugo Green traveled across New Jersey every day. But with Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation since the late 1800s, traveling as a Black person in the US could be stressful, even dangerous.

So in the 1930s, Victor created a guide--The Negro Motorist Green-Book--compiling information on where to go and what places to avoid so that Black travelers could have a safe and pleasant time. While the Green Book started out small, over the years it became an expansive, invaluable resource for Black people throughout the country--all in the hopes that one day such a guide would no longer be needed.

Award-winning author Tonya Bolden and acclaimed illustrator Eric Velasquez shine a light on this little-known history of Victor Hugo Green and the deep impact of his incredible book on generations of Black families in America.

One of The New Yorker's "The Best Books We Read in 2020" picks

"Jones's great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them."--Anna Wiener, The New Yorker

The new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery.

A literary classic that remains vital to our understanding of the past, Corregidora is Gayl Jones's powerful debut novel, examining womanhood, sexuality, and the psychological residue of slavery. Jones masterfully tells the story of Ursa, a Kentucky blues singer, who, in the wake of a tragic loss, confronts her maternal history and the legacy of Corregidora, the Brazilian slave master who fathered both her mother and grandmother. Consumed and haunted by her hatred of the man who irrevocably shaped her life and the lives of her family, Ursa Corregidora must come to terms with a past that is never too distant from the present.

Selected, edited, and first edited by Toni Morrison, it is "the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women," (James Baldwin) and "a tale as American as Mount Rushmore and as murky as the Florida swamps." (Maya Angelou).

The Black Woods chronicles the history of Black pioneers in New York's northern wilderness. From the late 1840s into the 1860s, they migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new-worked land, they could meet the $250 property requirement New York's constitution imposed on Black voters in 1821, and claim the rights of citizenship.

Three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. Smith's suffrage-seeking plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black Adirondack settlement in the woods.

Smith's plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy. But when the response to Smith's offer fell radically short of his high hopes, Smith's zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen's Home, Blacksville and other settlements were forgotten. History would marginalize this Black community for 150 years.

In The Black Woods, Amy Godine recovers a robust history of Black pioneers who carved from the wilderness a future for their families and their civic rights. Her immersive story returns the Black pioneers and their descendants to their rightful place at the center of this history. With stirring accounts of racial justice, and no shortage of heroes, The Black Woods amplifies the unique significance of the Adirondacks in the American imagination.

The legendary Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award-winning author and illustrator John Steptoe shares the story of a baby who desperately wants to get his older brother's attention. Now in board book!

Spare text and lively illustrations tell the story of two brothers at opposite ends of a room. The older brother plays with blocks on the floor, while a curious baby boy watches intently from his crib.

After repeatedly trying to get his big brother's attention, Baby finally gets what he wants--but not before a few silly, giggle-inducing incidents occur!

This classic sibling story continues to entrance.

"Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., TIME

From the renowned author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth is brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise. With a new introduction by National Book Award-winning author and scholar Charles Johnson.

Here is Ellison, the master of American vernacular--the preacher's hyperbole and the politician's rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech--at the height of his powers, telling a powerful, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century.

"Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying senator Adam Sunraider to the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, the itinerant Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. His history encompasses camp meetings where he became the risen Lazarus to inspire the faithful; the more ordinary joys of Southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker; lovemaking with a young woman in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?

"We are a family on a journey to a place called wonderful" is the motto of Deza Malone's family. Deza is the smartest girl in her class in Gary, Indiana, singled out by teachers for a special path in life. But it's 1936 and the Great Depression has hit Gary hard, and there are no jobs for black men. When her beloved father leaves to find work, Deza, Mother, and her older brother, Jimmie, go in search of him, and end up in a Hooverville outside Flint, Michigan. Jimmie's beautiful voice inspires him to leave the camp to be a performer, while Deza and Mother find a new home, and cling to the hope that they will find Father. The twists and turns of their story reveal the devastation of the Depression and prove that Deza truly is the Mighty Miss Malone.

"[P]itch perfect, with wit, romance, and a lovable found family." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This smart and entertaining, magical heist novel hits all the right notes!" ―T.L. Huchu

NPR Best Book of 2022! Paste Best Fantasy Book of 2022!

"Never make a deal with shadows at night, especially ones that know your name."

Washington D. C., 1925: Clara Johnson can talk to spirits--a gift that saved her during her darkest moments, now a curse that's left her indebted to the cunning spirit world. So when a powerful spirit offers her an opportunity to gain her freedom, Clara seizes the chance, no questions asked. The task: steal a magical ring from the wealthiest woman in the District.

Clara can't pull off this daring heist alone. She'll need the help of an unlikely team, from a handsome jazz musician able to hypnotize with a melody to an aging actor who can change his face, to pull off the impossible. But as they race along DC's legendary Black Broadway, conflict in the spirit world begins to leak into the human one--an insidious mystery is unfolding, one that could cost Clara her life and change the fate of an entire city.

The Monsters We Defy is a timely and dazzling historical fantasy that weaves together African American folk magic, history, and romance.

A powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man--set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s.

The Village Voice called A Gathering of Old Men "the best-written novel on Southern race relations in over a decade."

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction

A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.

A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This 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. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

From the bestselling author of Curls, Glow, and Bloom comes a board book that joyfully celebrates skin tone self-love with a mirror for little ones.

I love mine (mine)
she loves hers (hers)
he loves his (his)
I love theirs

Show young readers how to see themselves and others with confidence and love with this beautiful rhyming board book toddlers and parents alike will love.

The year is 1889.

Set in a small Louisiana parish, deep in the segregated South, Rootwork follows school-age sisters, Betty, Ann, and Pee Wee during one life-changing summer when the three of them head off to stay with their hoodoo-practicing aunt, Theodora, a powerful woman feared by the local townspeople. She teaches the girls the secrets of her craft, like how to make "hot foot powder" and how to whip up some "goofer dust" to get back at an enemy. The girls delight in their harmless hoodoo adventures until a tragic event involving the town's racist sheriff promises to change their lives forever.

A story of love and redemption, Rootwork explores the strength of family and the darker side of the heart.

Winner of the Jane Addams Children's Book Award

A singular, richly illustrated picture book biography of Bayard Rustin, the gay Black man behind the March on Washington of 1963, by the acclaimed authors of Unspeakable: the Tulsa Race Massacre and Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag.

On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million activists and demonstrators from every corner of the United States convened for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was there and then that they raised their voices in unison to call for racial and economic justice for all Black Americans, to call out inequities, and ultimately to advance the Civil Rights Movement.

Every movement has its unsung heroes: individuals who work in the background without praise or accolades, who toil and struggle without notice. One of those unsung heroes was at the center of some of the most important decisions and events of the Civil Rights Movement.

That hero was a quiet man, a gay African American man. He was Bayard Rustin.

Carole Boston Weatherford and Rob Sanders's A Song for the Unsung, featuring illustrations from artist Byron McCray, is an inspiring story that answers one of our nation's greatest calls to action by honoring one of the men who made it happen.

"A splendid tribute to a true hero of the civil rights movement." -Booklist, starred review