In the years following her posthumous resurgence, Zora Neale Hurston has become regarded as the most famous Black woman writer to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. In contrast to her predominantly male peers at the time, her literary works often centered the perspective of Black women and girls, calling attention to both the joys and struggles of womanhood within the Black community. Her literature would go on to inspire several other Black women writers in the future, including Alice Walker, whose efforts to uncover Hurston’s gravesite and give it a headstone would ultimately play a pivotal role in bringing Hurston and her work back from relative obscurity.
Annie Nathan Meyer (1867-1951) was an American author, anti-suffragist, and promoter of women's education largely credited for the founding of Barnard College. Meyer was responsible for offering Hurston a scholarship to attend Barnard.
Alice Walker (1944) is an esteemed American author, poet, and activist renowned for her contributions to literature and the civil rights movement. Walker rose to prominence with her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple (1982), which explores themes of racism, sexism, and personal empowerment through the letters of its protagonist, Celie. Throughout her career, she has celebrated the voices of Black women and highlighted the struggles they face, drawing inspiration from historical figures like Zora Neale Hurston. - EBSCO Research Starters
Walker was deeply influenced by the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who at the time of Walker's introduction to her work, had faded into relative obscurity. In 1975, Walker would publish an article, "Looking for Zora" in Ms. magazine, documenting her efforts to find Hurston's unmarked grave and honor her with a tombstone. In the article, she states, “I realized that unless I came out with everything I had supporting her, there was every chance that she would slip back into obscurity”. "Looking for Zora" would play an essential role in reintroducing Hurston and her works to a larger audience.
The Color Purple
by
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.
Meridian
by
From Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner The Color Purple, comes Meridian, "a classic novel of both feminism and the Civil Rights movement" (Ms.). Meridian Hill is a young woman at an Atlanta college attempting to find her place in the 1960s revolution for racial and social equality. She discovers the limits beyond which she will not go for the cause, but despite her decision not to follow the path of some of her peers, she makes significant sacrifices in order to further her beliefs. Working in a campaign to register African American voters, Meridian cares broadly and deeply for the people she visits, and, while her coworkers quit and move to comfortable homes, she continues to work in the deep South despite a paralyzing illness. Meridian's nonviolent methods, though seemingly less radical than the methods of others, prove to be an effective means of furthering her beliefs. "A glowing affirmation of the possibility...of love and forgiveness--between men and women, black and white."--Baltimore Sun
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
by
In this groundbreaking classic essay collection, Alice Walker speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist on topics ranging from the personal to the political. This edition includes a new Letter to the Reader by Alice Walker. Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker's first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury. Throughout, Walker explores the theories and practices of feminism, incorporating what she calls the "womanist" tradition of black women--insights that are vital to understanding our lives and society today. "When I graduated from college, my father gave me Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. It was a beaten-up paperback in 1999, and it's even more battered now." --Jesmyn Ward
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was a writer and editor largely considered to be one of the greatest contemporary American novelists. Her novels largely focused on which examined interpersonal intimacies and portrayals of womanhood within the Black community. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for her fifth novel, Beloved, as well as the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, becoming the first Black female writer in history to be honored with the prize.
Beloved
by
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author. This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story" (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. "A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can't imagine American literature without it." --John Leonard, Los Angeles Times
The Bluest Eye
by
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.
Sula
by
Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom--a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma's girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime--until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula's anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness. One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?
Jesmyn Ward (1977-) is an award-winning novelist, nonfiction writer, and educator. She first gained national recognition in 2011, when her novel Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award for fiction. Ward sets her writings against the backdrop of her native Mississippi, exploring themes of rural poverty, addiction, and racial prejudice. As her characters engage in a constant struggle for physical survival, they must simultaneously grapple with profound feelings of alienation and despair, haunted by the enduring legacy of slavery and systematic oppression that has shaped the history of the region. - Gale
Sing, Unburied, Sing
by
*WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for FICTION *A TIME MAGAZINE BEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 OF 2017 *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize *Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal *Finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize *Publishers Weekly Top 10 of 2017 *Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a "tour de force" (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power--and limitations--of family bonds. Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn't lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won't acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister's lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children's father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an unforgettable family story.
Salvage the Bones
by
Winner of the National Book AwardThe National Book Award winning novel from the author of Let Us Descend and Men We Reaped--a gritty but tender story of family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
Let Us Descend
by
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * Instant New York Times Bestseller * Named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Time, The New Yorker, and more. "Nothing short of epic, magical, and intensely moving." --Vogue * "A novel of triumph." --The Washington Post * "Harrowing, immersive, and other-worldly." --People From "one of America's finest living writers" (San Francisco Chronicle) and "heir apparent to Toni Morrison" (LitHub)--comes a haunting masterpiece about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War that's destined to become a classic. Let Us Descend describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. A journey that is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, the novel is "[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours" (NPR). Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Annis leads readers through the descent, hers is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this "[s]earing and lyrical...raw, transcendent, and ultimately hopeful" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land--the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward's most magnificent novel yet.
Margaret Walker (1915-1998) was a poet, writer, and educator, notably a part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. In a career that spanned more than fifty years, Walker wrote several volumes of poetry, most notably the award-winning For My People, and an epic novel, Jubilee. Walker also wrote essays and scholarly articles, and was a professor of English literature at Jackson State where she founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. - Gale
For My People
by
An exploration of race and heritage, For My People is the first book by poet and novelist Margaret Walker (1915-1998) and the 41st volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Considered among the most important collections of poetry written by a participant in the Black Chicago Renaissance, For My People is a series of ballad poems with memorable characters, including the New Orleans sorceress Molly Means; Kissie Lee, a tough young woman who dies "with her boots on switching blades"; Poppa Chicken, an urban drug dealer and pimp; John Henry, killed by a ten-pound hammer; and Stagolee, who kills a white officer but eludes a lynch mob. The memorable title poem evokes the power of resilience not only for black people, but for all people.
Jubilee (50th Anniversary Edition)
by
The best-selling classic about a mixed-race child in the Civil War-era South that "chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage" (New York Times Book Review). Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the antebellum South in both its opulence and its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family's oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light in a novel that churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history. "A revelation."--Milwaukee Journal Includes a Foreword by Nikki Giovanni
On Being Female Black Free
by
These highly personal essays, written over the course of six decades, reveal the woman as well as the artist, capturing the independent creative spirit of this literary icon. In accessible and stirring prose, Walker speaks directly about her own experiences - such as growing up in a deeply religious home, living in the Jim Crow South, marrying and raising a family, and becoming a civil rights activist.
These essays also offer Walker's critical perspectives on a wide range of topics, from the role of the black woman artist to the distinctiveness of African American cultural life and to the importance of education in the fight for political change.
Maryemma Graham's introduction provides a historical context for the essays, placing Walker's work within the African American literary canon. Walker reflects on the numerous poets and writers she has known over the years, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Richard Wright. A work of broad general appeal, On Being Female, Black, and Free offers a powerful introduction to the work of an essential American literary figure.
June Jordan (1936-2002) was a writer and poet. Also a nationally renowned lecturer and activist, she produced an extensive and varied body of work, through which she strongly affirmed herself, her rights as a woman, her thoughts on black consciousness, and her ties to the African-American community. Though she was best known for her intimate, powerfully direct poetry, Jordan also wrote award-winning children's fiction, highly charged nonfiction pieces, plays, and songs. - Gale
In 1953, Jordan enrolled at Barnard, but would later drop out after becoming disillusioned as a result of the lack of diversity in the college's curriculum. In 1975, she would present Notes of a Barnard Dropout after jointly receiving The Reid Lectureship at Barnard alongside Alice Walker.
Civil Wars
by
A meditation on the private and public fault lines which divide American society. In Civil Wars, June Jordan's battleground is the intersection of private and public reality, which she explores through a blending of personal reflection and political analysis. From journal entries on the line between poetry and politics and a discussion of language and power in "White" versus "Black" English, to First Amendment issues, children's rights, Black studies, American violence, and sexuality, Jordan documents the very personal ways in which she meshes with the social issues of modern-day life in this country.
Affirmative Acts
by
Affirmative Acts: Political Essays marks the twenty-fifth book in the celebrated career of poet, essayist, activist, and professor June Jordan. The recipient of the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest and the PEN West Freedom to Write Awards, Jordan has created a widely influential and groundbreaking body of work over several decades.
With the same clear-sighted passion found in her classic essay collections Civil Wars and Living Room, in Affirmative Acts Jordan writes about controversial, critical, and timely issues that are currently at the center of American debate.
Directed by Desire
by
"Jordan . . . is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."--Alice Walker "Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan's work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress."--BOMB Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan's 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs. As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power--of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value. . . . She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality." From These Poems These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? June Jordan taught at the University of California Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her 28 books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children's books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. Her numerous awards include a PEN West Freedom to Write Award and a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers Conference. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.
Audre Lorde (1858-1942) was a poet, essayist, and lecturer whose works explored the pleasures and pain of being a Black lesbian woman in America. In writing her 1982 book, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde would create the genre known as biomythography, combines history, biography, and myth. Lorde was also member of the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization responsible for coining the term "identity politics" through their 1997 Combahee River Collective Statement. Her work bravely confronted some of the most important crises in American society: racism, homophobia, the insensitivity of the health care system, relations between the sexes, and parenthood. - Gale
Sister Outsider
by
"Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches by the pioneering feminist Audre Lorde, is one of my all-time-favorite books. It's always great to have an intersectional tome on hand." --Amanda Gorman "Sister Outsider's teachings, by one of our most revered elder stateswomen, should be read by everyone." --Essence Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature, with a foreword by Mahogany L. Browne. A New York Times New & Noteworthy book A Penguin Vitae Edition 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. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. The groundbreaking feminist's timely collection of nonfiction writings on race, gender, and LGBTQ issues is now for the first time in Penguin Classics as part of the Penguin Vitae series, with a foreword by poet Mahogany L. Browne. Penguin Classics launches a new hardcover series with five American classics that are relevant and timeless in their power, and part of a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from almost seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.
The Cancer Journals
Originally published in 1980, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals offers a profoundly feminist analysis of her experience with breast cancer & a modified radical mastectomy. Moving between journal entry, memoir, & exposition, Lorde fuses the personal & political & refuses the silencing & invisibility that she experienced both as a woman facing her own death & as a woman coping with the loss of her breast. After Lorde died of cancer in 1992, women from all over the U.S. & beyond paid tribute to her in essays & poems. Aunt Lute's special hardcover edition of The Cancer Journals gathers together twelve such tributes as well as a series of six photographs taken of Lorde by photographer Jean Weisinger. Tributes by: Margaret E. Cronin, Linda Cue, Elliot, Ayofemi Folayan, Jewelle Gomez, Margaret Randall, Adrienne Rich, Kate Rushin, Elizabeth Sargent, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, & Evelyn White.
Zami: a New Spelling of My Name
by
Zami: A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers "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. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page."--Off Our Backs "Among the elements that make the book so good are its personal honesty and lack of pretentiousness, characteristics that shine through the writing bespeaking the evolution of a strong and remarkable character."--The New York Times