"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

Fanny Burney's renowned epistolary novel is a satirical tale detailing a young woman's journey through eighteenth-century London's fashionable society. Evelina is an early example of romanticism, sensibility, and the novel of manners. Evelina Anville is a beautiful young woman who falls into the wrong circles after leaving her secluded home for the first time. The story takes place in both London and Hot Wells, Bristol, in a series of letters....

"Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker Prize win was an historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite bookof the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers. Evaristo's astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a...

The author argues that Louisa's "Marmee," Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world--exploding the myth that her outspoken idealist father was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.

"Pop culture is the Pandora's Box of our lives. Racism, wealth, poverty, beauty, inclusion, exclusion, and hope -- all of these intractable and unavoidable features course through the media we consume. Examining pop culture's impact on her life, Nichole Perkins takes readers on a rollicking trip through the last twenty years of music, media and the internet from the perspective of one southern Black woman. She explores her experience with mental illness...

A beautiful, heartrending literary memoir about the tragic death of the author's beloved older sister and a tribute to their bond. When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born, determined to find answers and forced to reckon...

A memoir that examines rural poverty and the lingering strains of racism in the South from the viewpoint of the author, an African American woman who lost five young men dear to her through drugs, accidents and suicide. "Men We Reaped" explores the racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family relationships which ultimately led to the death of these young men and how it affected her life.

A black woman recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas teenage days in northern slums

"Donna Freitas has lived two lives. In one life, she is a well-published author and respected scholar who has traveled around the country, speaking about Title IX, consent, and sex on college campuses. In the other, she is a victim, a woman who suffered and suffers still because she was stalked by her graduate professor for more than two years. As a doctoral candidate, Freitas loved asking big questions, challenging established theories, and sinking...

"H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means-now-to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the...