Before Josh and Jordan Bell were streaking up and down the court, their father was learning his own moves. In this prequel to Newbery Medal winner The Crossover, Chuck Bell takes center stage, as readers get a glimpse of his childhood and how he became the jazz music worshiping, basketball star his sons look up to. A novel in verse with all the impact and rhythm readers have come to expect from Kwame Alexander, Rebound will go back in time to visit...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, his first work of prose: a deeply felt memoir of a family's bonds and a meditation on race, addiction, fatherhood, ambition, and American culture The Pardlos were an average, middle-class African American family living in a New Jersey Levittown: charismatic Gregory Sr., an air traffic controller, his wife, and their two sons, bookish Greg Jr. and musical-talent Robbie. But when "Big Greg" loses his job after...

Just around Midnight explores the interplay of popular music and racial thought in the 1960s by asking how, when, and why rock and roll music "became White." By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 the idea of a Black man playing electric lead guitar was considered literally remarkable in ways it had not been for Chuck Berry only ten years earlier: this book explains how this happened. By excavating an extraordinarily cosmopolitan aesthetic amidst a...

"A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro : The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father...

Mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir, an exploration of Alice Walker's critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple. Alice Walker made history in 1983 when she became the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the Jazz Age novel tells the story of racial and gender inequality through...

Paul Crump robbed the Chicago stockyards on March 20, 1953 with four other black men and shot one guard to death. He was tried and sentenced to die in the electric chair. William Friedkin met Crump in the Cook County Jail. Friedkin was impressed by the "model prisoner", Crump. Friedkin produced this documentary as an impassionate plea for Crump's return to society.

"In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others--along with original, previously unreleased essays--Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in doing so proves himself a bellwether for our times."--