Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

Here's your invitation to join a literary as well as a personal relationship with the deeply insightful and profoundly expressive perspectives of Regina Diane Jemison. As you encounter these soul-stirring pieces, you may imagine listening to one of God's own trombones. The poetry, prose and personality in "Soul Clothes," may rub up on a curious and compassionate place within you, a place of stark reality drenched in divine hope. Imagine a John Coltrane solo, with words instead of tenor sax.
Acclaim for "Soul Clothes"
""Soul Clothes" dances naked and unabashed across the page. Jemison's poetry connects spirit to spirit, stripping away masks and guiding us to divine adornments of grace, truth, faith."
--Aundria Sheppard Morgan, author "Cross My Heart and Hope to Die"
""Soul Clothes" is one poet's passionate expression of what it is to be human. Her poems encompass a vast expanse of emotions, from suffering and grief to love and celebration. While being real about the human experiences we all share, many of these poems also exalt the divine within us."
--Valerie Jean, author of "Woman Writing a Letter"
""Soul Clothes" reveals a collection of compelling, compassionate, daring, devoted, honest and unafraid poems with a spiritual undertone."
--Sweta Srivastava Vikram, author of "Kaleidoscope: An Asian Journey of Colors"
For more information see www.ReginaJemison.com
From the Reflections of America Series at Modern History Press
Poetry: African-American

Even though instant communications and strides in transportation have made it easier for individuals to travel and communicate, the great divide across global cultures continues. Nowhere is this more evident than between the cultures of China in the East and the United States in the West.

With China's elevation to global superpower status, it is vital for Americans to improve their understanding of the principles that are core to the way our friends and counterparts in China think and act. In "Confucius Says ... There Are No Fortune Cookies in China," authors Edward V. Yang, Kate Ou, and Dennis Smith discuss the customs, history, and business practices in China, with an eye toward enhancing relationships through a better understanding of the culture of the East through American eyes.

Yang, Ou, and Smith translate more than one hundred combined years of real-world living and working experience in China and across Asia into practical, everyday lessons intended for anyone wishing to build better business and personal relationships in China. This guide contains one hundred lessons, including common sayings, proverbs, idioms, quotes from ancient Chinese philosophers, and the authors' own experiences.

Yang shares fundamental lessons derived from his personal experience-knowledge gained through his upbringing, through his traditional Chinese and US education, through his work experience in Asia and the United States, and, most importantly, through his mistakes.

This study of what Brian Norman terms a neo-segregation narrative tradition examines literary depictions of life under Jim Crow that were written well after the civil rights movement. From Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, to bestselling black fiction of the 1980s to a string of recent work by black and nonblack authors and artists, Jim Crow haunts the post-civil rights imagination. Norman traces a neo-segregation narrative tradition one that developed in tandem with neo-slave narratives by which writers return to a moment of stark de jure segregation to address contemporary concerns about national identity and the persistence of racial divides. These writers upset dominant national narratives of achieved equality, portraying what are often more elusive racial divisions in what some would call a postracial present. Norman examines works by black writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, David Bradley, Wesley Brown, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Colson Whitehead, films by Spike Lee, and other cultural works that engage in debates about gender, Black Power, blackface minstrelsy, literary history, and whiteness and ethnicity. Norman also shows that multiethnic writers such as Sherman Alexie and Tom Spanbauer use Jim Crow as a reference point, extending the tradition of William Faulkner's representations of the segregated South and John Howard Griffin's notorious account of crossing the color line from white to black in his 1961 work Black Like Me.

Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenship has positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on 'inter-racial prejudice', Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity. Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the Negro Problem and the Yellow Question in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts - the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary - Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.

This book, edited by April Myung of Bergen County Academies in New Jersey, contains autobiographies of ten Korean teenagers, currently studying in American high schools. This historically significant volume contains writings by break-dancing Julius Im, who understands his Korean-American identity through this medium of African-American dance, to Rei Fujino Park of Flushing, New York, who explores her own dual identiy with a Korean father (who served in the elite Korean military special forces) and a Japanese mother. Rei Fujino describes her parents' marriage as a loving union of "enemies" given the history of Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-1945). Julie Oh describes the difficult situation of the children of Korean company workers for Samsung, LG, SK, Woori Bank, and other Korean companies, who come with a short-term working visa to the United States. The children of these "Joo-Jae-Won" have to go to Saturday school (in her case, "Woori School") in order to maintain the skill level of Korean high schools, in the case that their parents get recalled to South Korea - their children would have to apply for Korean universities and meet the requirements of Korean university entrance tests, which are vastly different from America's SAT, ACT, and AP tests. Andrew Hyeon shars his experience as a Korean Catholic, attending Hopkins School, an elite private school in Connecticut, where former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, a famous Korean, attended. Ruby Hong's autobiography is written as a fairytale account of her own life. The autobiographies in this book are not only creatively written as to capture the readers' interest, but they also provide valuable resources for Korean American Studies. (This book is the second in the Hermit Kingdom Sources in Korean-American Studies, whose series editor is Dr. Onyoo Elizabeth Kim, Esq.)

ARRIVING IN AMERICA - DESTINATION THE SOUTH captures Taylor's twenty-five year journey in unearthing the buried history of her maternal and paternal family, trekking the paths of her ancestors, before Emancipation (1863). This journey took her back several generations, from the North, South, East and West regions of Africa, to the thirteen colonies of the United States, and the Southern states of Louisiana and Mississippi. This emotion-filled journey travels down an intricate paper trail of federal, state, and local records combined with a collection of oral interviews that enabled Taylor to methodically place together her family puzzle, in five informative chapters. Lovers of sweeping generational epics will find much to rejoice in here. This is a personal saga, but one played out against the broad canvas of American History. Taylor chronicles the lives of her relatives who were once enslaved. She points out the contributions of European immigrants, with the labor of slaves that made this such a great nation. Taylor discusses intermarriages and intermixing between blacks and Indians, the mulatto children of the master, and how her enslaved family may have obtained their surnames. This book focuses on many unanswered questions, and leave the reader with a burning desire to begin their own journey. ARRIVING IN AMERICA - DESTINATION THE SOUTH is written in a narrative style to inspire, entice and propel readers into the fascinating world of genealogy and historical discoveries.

Surveys developments from the establishment of the Apartheid state to 1982 when it was being challenged in the mines, factories and townships. After the Soweto Revolt, the government slowly began to compromise and by 1982 the conditions were present for the formation of a new union for black mineworkers. Key Features include studies of: Recruitment, harsh working conditions and work-related deaths and injuries, including a detailed account of the Coalbrook Colliery disaster in 1960 when 437 were killed. A wave of dissent by black students and industrial workers arose in the 1970s. The Guardian newspaper conducted a successful wages campaign for black workers. Black mineworkers joined the protesters in 1973-1976 when more than 200 of them were killed. These protests were followed by the Soweto uprising, by township violence and by a state response that was both oppressive and conciliatory