Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that...

"Danny Goldberg's new book is a subjective history of 1967, the year he graduated from high school ... 1967 was the year of the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and of debut albums from the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, among many others. 1967 was also the year of the Summer of Love; the year that millions of now-illegal LSD tabs flooded America; Muhammad Ali was convicted of avoiding the draft;...

"Simon's memoir reveals her remarkable life, beginning with her storied childhood as the third daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, her musical debut as half of The Simon Sisters performing folk songs with her sister Lucy in Greenwich Village, to a meteoric solo career that would result in 13 top 40 hits, including the #1 song "You're So Vain." She was the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award,...

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...

"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...

In 1997, actor Morgan Freeman, a resident of the small town of Charleston, Miss., offered to pay for the senior prom at Charleston High School under one condition: the prom must be racially integrated. His offer was ignored. In 2008 he offered again, and the offer was accepted, changing the tradition of two separate proms for blacks and whites that had endured since the high school was integrated in 1970. Shows the problems and lessons learned as...

"An oral history of the first performances by an American orchestra in the People's Republic of China"--

"Tammy Wynette is literally referred to as "the first lady of country music," which speaks both to her importance in the genre as well as the way she has been partially defined by her marriage to singer George Jones. She had 20 number-one hits, the best-known being "Stand By Your Man." Steacy Easton believes Wynette was a complicated figure whose work plays with themes of domesticity, high femme armor, soft politics, pain, melodrama, sex, fame, tradition,...

The iconic Country Music Hall of Fame artist and 10-time Grammy winner shares the story of his personal life and career, from his early ambitions and indelible relationships through his bankruptcy and founding of Farm Aid.