February is Black History Month, and we're excited to share some amazing books about Black History, as well as literature by Black authors and poets. You can find all of these books (and more!) at the DSLCC Library.
A book display celebrating Black History Month can be found at the front of the library throughout the month of February.
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou: For the first time, the
complete collection of Maya Angelou's published poems-including "On the
Pulse of Morning"-in a permanent collectible, handsome hardcover
edition.
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton: Lucille Clifton, one of
America's most important and distinguished poets, employs brilliantly
honed language, stunning images, and sharp rhythms to address the whole
of human experience. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not
afraid to confront our most salient issues.
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pead: Poems and Not Quite Poems by Nikki Giovanni: Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea is
a tour de force from Nikki Giovanni, one of the most powerful voices in
American culture and African American literature today. From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in
2010, Giovanni’s poetry has touched millions of readers worldwide,
focusing a sharp eye on politics, racial inequality, violence, gender,
social justice and African-American life. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea,
Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and
offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well.
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes: Spanning five decades
and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared
in book form), 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. Here, for the
first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his
lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and
annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.
Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems
includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems
distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as
"Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed. Lyrical and pungent,
passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the
essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common
language.
Outlandish Blues by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers: Fierce and sensual, the
poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering
lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers sees
the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes, ''' as an important
intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various
African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part
Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty
honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This
movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated
here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical figures of Hagar and
Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic scene, a slave ship, or
Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak to the soul of experience. (A full-text version of this book is available at Ebook Central Academic Search Complete.)
Beloved by Toni Morrison: Sethe was born a slave
and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She
has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held
captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many
hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled
by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose
tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Sethe works
at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly
in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious
teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret
explodes into the present.
Combining the visionary power of
legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable
novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.
Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing by Stephanie Stokes Oliver: Spanning over 250 years of history, Black Ink traces
black literature in America from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates
in this masterful collection of twenty-five illustrious and moving
essays on the power of the written word.
Throughout American
history black people are the only group of people to have been forbidden
by law to learn to read. This unique collection seeks to shed light on
that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary
progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a
conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act
of resistance.
Organized into three sections, the Peril, the
Power, and Pleasure, and with an array of contributors both classic and
contemporary, Black Ink presents the brilliant diversity of black
thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers
within the greater context of the American literary tradition. At times
haunting and other times profoundly humorous, this unprecedented
anthology guides you through the remarkable experiences of some of
America’s greatest writers and their lifelong pursuits of literacy and
literature.
The foreword was written by Nikki Giovanni.
Contributors include: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T.
Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James
Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni
Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice
Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot
Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay,
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Colson Whitehead.
The anthology features a bonus in-depth interview with President Barack Obama.
In Search of Our Mother's Garderns: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker: In this, her first
collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman,
writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the
personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other
writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the
antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring
childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.
Legacy: Treasures of Black History by Donna Wells (Editor): From its Introduction by
the revered and distinguished John Hope Franklin to the bibliography
and extensive index that complete it, Legacy represents a major new
contribution to African-American history. The Black experience and its
impact on our nation's culture and character come alive in twelve
chapters that sweep from ancient Africa and the slave trade to such key
eras as the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction; the Harlem
Renaissance and the Jim Crow Era; and the modern Civil Rights and Black
Power/Black Arts movements.
The more than 150 historic items
showcased here include documents, letters, images, and artifacts, many
never before published. Readers will find 18th-century maps of Africa;
the pincushion of Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln's seamstress;
Depression-era images by Robert M. McNeil; and a Langston Hughes letter
in which he first shares his famous poem I, Too, Sing America. Rare
photographs show a unique daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass in profile
and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, circa 1880. Objects include a bell of
Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson's slave and companion, and NAACP
membership buttons from the 1960s. More than two dozen prominent Black
scholars and activists offer expert insights on the collection, on
subjects ranging from traditional African societies to 21st-century art
and politics, making this book as definitive as it is beautiful-a
priceless resource that will inform and fascinate serious students and
casual readers alike.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson: In this brilliant book,
Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon
in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched
narrative and stories about real people, how America today and
throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid
hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other
factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives
and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of
America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that
underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will,
bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about
people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a
single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many
others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is
experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial
systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why
the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those
in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the
surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and
the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she
points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and
destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common
humanity.
All book images and descriptions from Goodreads.com.
