""A masterpiece. . . . Farah Jasmine Griffin's magical words enchant and empower us like those of her towering heroes." -Cornel West. Farah Jasmine Griffin's beloved father died when she was nine, bequeathing her an unparalleled inheritance in closets full of remarkable books and other records of Black genius. In Read Until You understand-a line from a note he wrote to her-she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that framed the United States...

"In response to recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, National Book Award-winning writer Jesmyn Ward looked to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time for comfort and counsel. In the essay 'My dungeon shook,' Baldwin addresses his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. He writes: 'You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years...

"Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination"--

Mary Helen Washington recovers the vital role of 1950s leftist politics in the works and lives of modern African American writers and artists. While most histories of McCarthyism focus on the devastation of the blacklist and the intersection of leftist politics and American culture, few include the activities of radical writers and artists from the Black Popular Front. Washington's work incorporates these black intellectuals back into our understanding...

"Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan--a vaudeville term meaning 'dead face---across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing...

"Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? Unfortunately, not everyone regularly sees themselves in the pages of a book. In this timely anthology, Gloria Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all-regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability-have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature."--Page [4]...

"Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year...

"Available in book form for the first time, the FBI's secret dossier on the legendary and controversial writer. Decades before Black Lives Matter returned James Baldwin to prominence, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI considered the Harlem-born author the most powerful broker between black art and black power. Baldwin's 1,884-page FBI file, covering the period from 1958 to 1974, was the largest compiled on any African American artist of the Civil Rights era....