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But it was as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender that Hughes chronicled the hopes and despair of his people. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose.

This is the first collection of Hughes's nonfiction journalistic writings. For readers new to Hughes, it is an excellent introduction; for those familiar with him, it gives new insights into his poems and fiction.

Both an instruction and a divination, Leap & Grow Feathers is an extraordinary transmission. In her third full-length collection, Yona Harvey listens — to her predecessors, her instincts, and her environment — gleaning sense from the static fraying our nerves, knowing the personal and the historical travel along the same frequency. Responding to the physical disruption and emotional disassociation of of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poet argues that the societal insistence on returning to “business as usual” reflects an institutional, academic, and political ineptitude to provide either physiological healing or social repair, a structural denial that erodes our humanity. As authoritarianism and ecological devastation progressively encroach on our lives, these poems prioritize hoodoo, spirit, intuition, and ancestral conversations in their readings, invoking the carekeeping and persistence of Harriet Tubman, Nikki Giovanni, and the countless forbears, unnamed and named, who traveled the Middle Passage and the Kalunga Crossing. This book channels the power and promise of that legacy as well as the full emotional range of sisterhood, the heartache and borrowed strength and shared laughter. Its humor, whitespace, sparseness, and longform narratives elicit reader participation and, in turn, enduring consideration. "This float. This bob. This drown. This rock. // (This Rock. This Rock.) // This Great Goddamn." What do we find in this vastness, the simultaneity of the ever expanding time that lies ahead and full presence of history consolidating here now? An invitation to join Harvey in her vow: “May I never pretend, / May eye be I.” This collection unveils our vision so we can see it all, not only yesterday’s “Nina Simone lyric / Spun out over a newborn Sunday” in this very moment but also the music unfurling over each incipient morning of the future world we might build together. Leap & Grow Feathers describes and directs: everything we need to survive, to shelter one another, and to protect the Earth lives already in our bodies, our lineages, and our lore. 

Documents conversations between two southern writers and friends whose families were intertwined in slavery

Legacies of Slavery commemorates a story of racial reconciliation in the South.  Writers, educators, and friends Frye Gaillard and Myra Davis-Branic discovered a shared family history of slavery in Eutawville, South Carolina, where Davis-Branic’s family was enslaved by Gaillard’s family.

In 2024, the University of South Alabama’s Kern Jackson moderated three conversations with Davis-Branic and Gaillard in Mobile. These conversations are presented here in an edited format. Davis-Branic and Gaillard discussed their intertwined family history and what they each learned from research into their ancestors. They relay origin stories and the role of a key grandparent who greatly impacted their lives. They also talk about their own trajectories in a historical context, the issue of slavery in their families, and the legacy of slavery for their children and families. 

The book concludes with short excerpts, one from Davis-Branic’s book Cornbread My Soul: The Davis Family of Eutawville, South Carolina, and one from Gaillard’s family history, Lessons from the Big House: One Family’s Passage Through the History of the South, a Memoir. Legacies of Slavery stands as a powerful and unique documentation for all who are interested in how two southern families, bound by slavery in the past and now by friendship and a degree of understanding, have found some measure of redemption.
 

James Magruder’s collection of linked stories follows two gay cousins, Tom and Elliott, from adolescence in the 1970s to adulthood in the early ’90s. With a rueful blend of comedy and tenderness, Magruder depicts their attempts to navigate the closet and the office and the lessons they learn about libidinous coworkers, résumé boosting, Italian suffixes, and frozen condoms. As Tom and Elliot search for trusting relationships while the AIDS crisis deepens, their paths diverge, leading Tom to a new sense of what matters most. Magruder is especially adept at rendering the moments that reveal unwritten codes of behavior to his characters, who have no way of learning them except through painful experience.

Loss is sudden, the fallout portrayed with a powerful economy. In Tom and Elliott, readers come to recognize themselves, driven by the same absurd desires and unconscious impulses, subjected to the same fates.

The essential collection of African American voices that shaped the struggle for freedom, equality, and citizenship.

Lift Every Voice is a completely revised, updated, and expanded version of Philip Foner's 1972 classic Voice of Black America, which Library Journal hailed as "indispensable.""This well-edited and
richly inclusive work," wrote Benjamin Quarles, "unveils the full sweep of Black expression as found in platform addresses" by "men and women who join eloquence with reason in articulating their
grievances and their aspirations and in arousing their listeners with their ringing and prophetic challenges." This new collection includes over 60 additional texts and revised and expanded introductory essays that provide historical, biographical, and critical information for each speech.

For Americans of the 19th century, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, eloquent speeches were 'the shining lights of civilization' that both expressed and sought to improve the lives and communities from which they sprang. Through political speeches, sermons, lectures, oral testimonies, and ceremonial addresses, African Americans offered diverse responses to the issues and events of their times, including not only slavery and racial equality but also women's rights, education, religion, immigration, socialism, war, Indian policy, and labor organization, among others. The speeches in this
collection are among the most powerful expressions of African American opinions on these issues and were delivered on occasions and before audiences where the speakers believed their words might be transformative.

Containing more than 150 speeches, this anthology represents the most extensive and diverse collection of African American oratory of the 18th and 19th centuries ever published. Lift Every Voice makes readily accessible not only the classic orations of such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Booker T. Washington but also dozens of lesser-known but important speeches deserving greater recognition and study. Many of these speeches are previously unpublished, uncollected, or long out of print.

It is our everyday explorations—the small explosions within life, family, and “ordinary” survival—that make up Gregory Fraser’s fourth collection of poetry, Little Armageddon. Fraser writes at eye level, detailing the experiences of fatherhood, love, and the quiet of daily life, poised at the brink of abrupt upheaval.

These poems are an exercise in precision and reflection. Free verse and prose show readers the life within the landscape. In “My Daughter and the Lizard,” the speaker reflects on grace, meditating on the reptile his child is inspecting: “I scissor-jab three holes through the lid / of a Mason jar and tell her to be gentle, / ‘It’s a living thing,’ I say, ‘not a toy.’”

We are how we live. These poems balance imagination and truth telling with rich verse that brings the reader’s ear closer to the quiet—and how intense it truly is.

The lives built by Black Americans in a pair of summer resort towns

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter.

Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves. Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them.

Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto.

"Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought Blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.

An astounding collection of photographs from a renowned poet

Created during the tumultuous years of 2020 and 2021, Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices: Street Portraits and Poems intersects the lens of accomplished poet and photographer Marcus Jackson with his words. The focus: the Black experience and existence. Amid isolation, protest, and survival, Jackson is the aperture and scribe giving visual consciousness and breath to these human portraits. His camera strips the view of endless cycles of social and moral injustices, presenting a resonant collection of photographs that make space for the moments and the people whose beings represent the ongoing interplay between history, society, and the individual soul.

Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment “Best Book” Award from the East Texas Historical Association

In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.