African-American Studies: African American Read In

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic.

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement.

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.

"First there is a battlefield, a pressure-cooker, a time-bomb: the destructive potential that exists in racial bigotry, in color prejudice and in the tensions and sensitivities which such attitudes encourage. Woven into this pattern of violence, there is a theme that is gentle, wistful and poetic: this is Baldwin's apologia for homosexual love."

Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems, this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman.

Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple Stakes a Claim--have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers

This book brings welcome attention to Hughes's 1936 poem. "I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,/I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars./I am the red man driven from the land,/I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–/And finding only the same old stupid plan/Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak." Many will see parallels with today's society in this long but accessible poem that presents a broad, clear-eyed view of the American experience, which is sometimes bitter but never defeated or hopeless.

A milestone in American literature--a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.

First published anonymously in 1912, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” is James Weldon’s Johnson fictional account of a young biracial man living in America during the second half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century.

A true literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published—perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.

The most prolific African-American woman author from 1920 to 1950, Hurston was praised for her writing and condemned for her independence, arrogance, and audaciousness. This unique anthology, with fourteen superb examples of her fiction, journalism, folklore, and autobiography, rightfully establishes her as the intellectual and spiritual leader of the next generation of black writers.

Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature’s most compelling and influential authors.

This is the story of a young woman born in Chicago who came to New York, won fame with her play, A Raisin in the Sun--and went on to new heights of artistry before her tragic death.

Winner of the NY Drama Critic's Award as Best Play of the Year, it has been hailed as a "pivotal play in the history of the American Black theatre." by Newsweek and "a milestone in the American Theatre."

Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman.

Crane is the lovely and refined daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father who abandons Helga and her mother soon after Helga is born. Unable to feel comfortable with any of her white-skinned relatives, Helga lives in various places in America and visits Denmark in search of people among whom she feels at home.

Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books.

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille clifton's published collections with more than sixty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished works feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled Book of Days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems.

Drawing on personal relationships with Jordan's coaches; countless interviews with friends, teammates, family members, and Jordan himself; and decades in the trenches covering Jordan in college and the pros, Roland Lazenby provides the first truly definitive study of Jordan: the player, the icon, and the man.

An up-close look at young LeBron James when he was basketball's hottest prospect, poised at the brink of superstardom.

In this candid new autobiography, the four-time NBA champion and a three-time NBA Finals MVP discusses his colorful career, NBA victories, and his thoughts on major NBA names like Kobe Bryant, Phil Jackson, and Pat Riley.

John Coltrane created a new sound, a music that had nothing to do with anyone except himself. The path he chose was difficult and risky. Nevertheless, he persisted, and his recordings now stand among the greatest of all jazz achievements.

In this intimate and often moving personal account of Michael Jackson’s public and private life, he recalls a childhood that was both harsh and joyful but always formidable

In the New York Times bestseller From Pieces to Weight, rap mogul 50 Cent, lifts the veil on his complicated life, from the murder of his mother when he was twelve, to hustling on the streets.

In her heralded first novel, Gloria Naylor weaves together the stories of seven women living in Brewster Place, a bleak-inner city sanctuary, creative a powerful, moving portrait of the strengths, struggles, and hopes of black women in America.

On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces. A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense.

Her own powerful story up to 1972, told with warmth, brilliance, humor and conviction

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

“ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical.

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

Maya Angelou’s unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

Filled with bittersweet intimacies and ferocious courage, these poems are gems–many-faceted, bright with wisdom, radiant with life.

A moving memoir about the legendary author’s relationship with her own mother.

The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Published to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. This is the story of two sisters—one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South—who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence.

Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love.

With knowledge, spirit, good humor, and passion, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. brings to life a remarkable man whose thoughts and actions speak to our most burning contemporary issues and still inspire the desires, hopes, and dreams of us all.

"We've got some difficult days ahead," civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis's Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968. "But it really doesn't matter to me now because I've been to the mountaintop. . . . And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

This collection ranges from an early 1961 interview in which King describes his reasons for joining the ministry (after considering medicine), to a 1964 conversation with Robert Penn Warren, to his last interview, which was conducted on stage at the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, just ten days before King's assassination.

Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes twenty-three selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King’s revolutionary vision, underscoring his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism.