A key figure in contemporary speculative fiction, Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson (b. 1960) is the first Black queer woman as well as the youngest person to be named a "Grand Master" of Science Fiction. Her Caribbean-inspired narratives-Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon's Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine-project complex futures and complex identities for people of color in terms of race, sex, and gender. Hopkinson has always had a vested interest in expanding racial and ethnic diversity in all facets of speculative fiction from its writers to its readers, and this desire is reflected in her award-winning anthologies. Her work best represents the current and ongoing colored wave of science fiction in the twenty-first century. In twenty-one interviews ranging from 1999 until 2021, Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson reveals a writer of fierce intelligence and humor in love with ideas and concerned with issues of identity. She provides powerful insights on code-switching, race, Afrofuturism, queer identities, sexuality, Caribbean folklore, and postcolonial science fictions, among other things. As a result, the conversations presented here very much demonstrate the uniqueness of her mind and her influence as a writer.

In this companion volume to her bestselling book "Acts of Faith, " bestselling author and star of "Iyanla: Fix My Life" discusses the "valleys" that cause stress and imbalance for women and explains how women can cleanse their minds and promote a healthy foundation for living in the modern world.""
"A Note from Iyanla Vanzant"
""Beloved friend,
When this little book was first published many years ago, it became a beacon of light for many people who found themselves time and time again in one valley or another. Valleys are nothing new for any of us. Some of you may be in a valley right now, or, since you never know what's around the corner, you may be on the brink of tottering into yet another valley. Or maybe you've just survived a valley that you swear you'll never revisit--but guess what? That's precisely the valley you'll probably see again. And again.
Being in a valley can be a lonely and bewildering experience. This book was written to help you feel less lonely by reminding you that you really aren't ever alone since God is always by your side, but more important, "you" are always by your own side. No matter how dire the situation may seem, no matter how dark and bleak the valley may be, you have all you need within you to survive the valley--any valley. Even though you may not know how you got into the valley in the first place, you do know, deep inside yourself, how to get through and out and free. You just need a little faith in yourself and a little guidance to find that faith within yourself.
When you are at your wit's end, take this little book and let it guide you toward the ever-present but often elusive light at the end of the tunnel. "Faith in the Valley" is designed to help you find the light when you need it most--when you're in that damn tunnel. When you're most confused and in the dark and clueless as to how you got there (again ) and when you're trying to figure out not just how to get out, but stay out. For good.
"Faith in the Valley" has helped so many through so much that we felt it only fitting to issue this lovely gift edition to acknowledge the special place it holds in many hearts. Please share it with a friend who has served as your beacon in the past, or offer it to yourself as a reminder of the strength and wisdom you possess and can offer to others.
Iyanla

From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924-2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County's NAACP. Known as the "Lady of Hats," coined by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, Pigee was a businesswoman, mother, and leader. Her book, The Struggle of Struggles, offers a detailed view of the daily grind of organizing for years to open the state's closed society. Fearless, forthright, and fashionable, Pigee also suffered for her efforts at the hands of white supremacists and those unwilling to accept strong women in leadership. She wrote herself into the histories, confronted misinformation, and self-published one of the first autobiographies from the era. Women like her worked, often without accolade or recognition, in their communities all over the country, but did not document their efforts in this way. The Struggle of Struggles, originally published in 1975, spotlights the gendered and generational tensions within the civil rights movement. It outlines the complexity, frustrations, and snubs, as well as the joy and triumphs that Pigee experienced and witnessed in the quest for a fairer and more equitable nation. This new edition begins with a detailed introductory essay by historian Francoise N. Hamlin, who interviewed Pigee and her daughter in the few years preceding their passing, as well as their coworkers and current activists. In addition to the insightful Introduction, Hamlin has also provided annotations to the original text for clarity and explanation, along with a timeline to guide a new generation of readers.

This innovative book examines how African Americans in the South made sense of the devastating loss of life unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation. During and after the war, African Americans died in vast numbers from battle, disease, and racial violence. While freedom was a momentous event for the formerly enslaved, it was also deadly. Through an investigation into how African Americans reacted to and coped with the passing away of loved ones and community members, Ashley Towle argues that freedpeople gave credence to their free status through their experiences with mortality. African Americans harnessed the power of death in a variety of arenas, including within the walls of national and private civilian cemeteries, in applications for widows' pensions, in the pulpits of black churches, around seance tables, on the witness stand at congressional hearings, and in the columns of African American newspapers. In the process of mourning the demise of kith and kin, black people reconstituted their families, forged communal bonds, and staked claims to citizenship, civil rights, and racial justice from the federal government. In a society upended by civil war and emancipation, death was political.

Scholar, reverend, politician, and perhaps aristocrat... James Arthur Stanley Harley was certainly a polymath. Born in a poor village in the Caribbean island of Antigua, he went on to attend Howard, Harvard, Yale and Oxford universities, was ordained a priest in Canterbury Cathedral and was elected to Leicestershire County Council. He was a choirmaster, a pioneer Oxford anthropologist, a country curate and a firebrand councillor. This remarkable career was all the more extraordinary because he was black in an age - the early twentieth century - that was institutionally racist. Pamela Roberts' meticulously researched book tells Harley's hitherto unknown story from humble Antiguan childhood, through elite education in Jim Crow America to the turbulent England of World War I and the General Strike. Navigating the complex intertwining of education, religion, politics and race, his life converged with pivotal periods and events in history: the birth of the American New Negro in the 1900s, black scholars at Ivy League institutions, the heyday of Washington's black elite and the early civil rights movement, Edwardian English society, and the Great War. Based on Harley's letters, sermons and writings as well as contemporary accounts and later oral testimony, this is an account of an individual's trajectory through seven decades of dramatic social change. Roberts' biography reveals a man of religious conviction, who won admirers for his work as a vicar and local councillor. But Harley was also a complex and abrasive individual, who made enemies and courted controversy and scandal. Most intriguingly, he hinted at illicit aristocratic ancestry dating back to Antigua's slave-owning past. His life, uncovered here for the first time, is full of contradictions and surprises, but above all illustrates the power and resilience of the human spirit.

The purpose of this book is to understand the lived experiences of Black women diversity practitioners at historically white higher education, healthcare, and corporate institutions before, during, and after the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and the racial reckoning of 2020. There is limited research on Black women's experiences in these positions outside of higher education. The stories and research provided in this book offers crucial information for institutions to look inward at the cultures and practices of their organizations that directly impact Black women diversity practitioners. In addition, implications for culture shifts and policy transformation would support Black women currently in these positions and women looking to break into the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a essential text for higher education staff and administration, CEOs, and leadership in corporate America and healthcare.

Discussions surrounding the bias and discrimination against women in business have become paramount within the past few years. From wage gaps to a lack of female board members and leaders, various inequities have surfaced that are leading to calls for change. This is especially true of Black women in academia who constantly face the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling represents the metaphor for prejudice and discrimination that women may experience in the attainment of leadership positions. The glass ceiling is a barrier so subtle yet transparent and strong that it prevents women from moving up. There is a need to study the trajectory of Black females in academia specifically from faculty to leadership positions and their navigation of systemic roadblocks encountered along their quest to success. Black Female Leaders in Academia: Eliminating the Glass Ceiling With Efficacy, Exuberance, and Excellence features full-length chapters authored by leading experts offering an in-depth description of topics related to the trajectory of Black female leaders in higher education. It provides evidence-based practices to promote excellence among Black females in academic leadership positions. The book informs higher education top-level administration, policy experts, and aspiring leaders on how to best create, cultivate, and maintain a culture of Black female excellence in higher education settings. Covering topics such as barriers to career advancement, the power of transgression, and role stressors, this premier reference source is an essential resource for faculty and administrators of higher education, librarians, policymakers, students of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

This book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration-a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South. Born in 1957 as a result of discussions between community activist Esau Jenkins, schoolteacher Septima Clark, and Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton, the CEP became a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961. The teachers, mostly Black women, gathered friends and neighbors in living rooms, churches, beauty salons, and community centers. Through the work of the CEP, literate black men and women were able to gather their own information, determine fair compensation for a day's work, and register formal complaints.Drawing on teachers' reports and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama's Black Belt. This book retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where local people discussed, organized, and demanded change. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

A TOP TEN NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Astonishing... A great work infused with love and honesty' Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple 'Deeply moving... it is magnificent' Sarah Winman, author of Still Life 'A remarkable work' Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish) 'Epic... It just consumed me' Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Book Club 'The kind of book that comes around only once a decade' Washington Post A breath-taking debut novel that chronicles the journey of generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade to our own tumultuous era The great scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called 'Double Consciousness,' a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle to feel like she belongs, made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women - her mother, her sister and a maternal line reaching back two centuries - that urge her to succeed in their stead. Ailey decides to embark on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors - Indigenous, Black, and white - in the deep South. In doing so she must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story - and the song - of America itself. Sweeping, compulsive and deeply moving, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers is set to be one of the most talked about books of the year. LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION * SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE * LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN LITERARY PRIZE New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year * Time 10 Best Books of the Year * Washington Post 10 Best Books of the Year * People 10 Best Books of the Year * Booklist 10 Best First Novels of the Year

According to George Jackson, black men born in the US are conditioned to accept the inevitability of being imprisoned.... Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortune that led so many black men to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments. As Jackson writes from his prison cell, his statement may seem to be only a product of his current status. However, history proves his point. Indeed, some of the most well-known and respected black men have served time in jail or prison. Among them are Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Frederick Douglass. This book is an examination of the various forms that imprisonment, as asocial, historical, and political experience of African Americans, has taken. Confinement describes the status of individuals who are placed within boundaries either seen or unseen but always felt. A word that suggests extensive implications, confinement describes the status of persons who are imprisoned and who are unjustly relegated to a social status that is hostile, rendering them powerless and subject to the rules of the authorities. Arguably, confinement appropriately describes the status of African Americans who have endured spaces of confinement, which include, but are not limited to plantations, Jim Crow societies, and prisons. At specific times, these spaces of confinement have been used to oppress African Americans socially, politically, and spiritually. Contributors examine the related experiences of Malcolm X, Bigger Thomas of Native Son, and Angela Davis.

Benevolent Orders, The Sons of Ham, Prince Hall Freemasonry-these and other African American lodges created a social safety net for members across Tennessee. During their heyday between 1865 and 1930, these groups provided members numerous perks, such as sick benefits and assurance of a proper burial, opportunities for socialization and leadership, and an opportunity to work with local churches and schools to create better communities. Many of these groups gradually faded from existence, but left an enduring legacy in the form of the cemeteries these lodges left behind. These Black cemeteries dot the Tennessee landscape, but few know their history or the societies of care they represent. To Care for the Sick and Bury the Dead is the first book-length look at these cemeteries and the lodges that fostered them. This book is a must-have for genealogists, historians, and family members of the people buried in these cemeteries.