In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

A QPB and BOMC selection. The author's previous novel, 1959, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Bird Kinkaid is an African-American woman who has recently been plagued by nightmares: It is a month after she witnessed Alex, her closest friend, plunge eight stories to her death on the sidewalk below and her grief has turned into obsession. Was Alex killed or was it a suicide? Was it an accident or did the white art critic and sometimes lover Frank Burton push her to her death? The two women had an intense friendship, their lives intertwined by shared space, history, friends (and occasionally lovers), and a passion for art. Alex's death shatters Bird, compelling her to search for answers to her friend's death amidst the disparate strands of Alex's quixotic life. When she locates a series of bizarre video tapes among Alex's belongings, in which she discusses her friends, her artwork, and her turbulent love life, Bird has the key to solving both the mystery of her friend's death and her own long-hidden demons.Alive with wit and sensibility, Maker of Saints is a fascinating and provocative novel about love, art, jealousy, and friendship in a funky, glitzy, New York demimonde.

Starting from a photograph and writings left by her grandmother, acclaimed African-American novelist Thulani Davis goes looking for the white folk" in her family, a Scots-Irish family of cotton planters unknown to her-and uncovers a history far richer and stranger than she had ever imagined. Her journey challenges us to examine the origins of some of our most deeply ingrained notions about what makes a family black or white, and offers an immensely compelling, intellectually challenging alternative.

Now back in print, this collection of Thulani Davis's poetry is a remarkable, galvanic experience reminiscent of the visionary beauty and fiery resolution of Sonia Sanchez or Ntozake Shange. These are poems of visceral impact, whether they speak of the shattering of a love, the violence of history or modern life, or the "whole body of God, weighing down on one nail." There are poems of passionate sensuality and stunning loss. This is the work, Ishmael Reed wrote, of "a formidable poet . . . inimitable . . . a serious artist who deserves serious readers."