"Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and...

"A biography of African American writer, performer, and activist Maya Angelou, who turned a childhood of trauma and emotional pain to become one of the most inspiring voices of our lifetime. Includes afterword, author's note, and sources"--

An unusual and irresistible look at Maya Angelou's life as well as her myriad interests and accomplishments by the people who know her best--her longtime friends Marcia Ann Gillespie and Richard Long, and her niece Rosa Johnson Butler. Features over 150 sepia portraits, family photographs, and letters.

"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

Collection of 80 new poems and prose pieces including some about slavery, Rosa Parks, Hurricane Katrina, Emmett Till, Nina Simone, Dorothy Height, Mari Evans, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Richard Fewell, the Ishley Brothers, Jackie Robinson, librarians, and libraries.

In her first book of poetry since Why Don't You Sing? Maya Angelou, bestselling author of the classic autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, writes with lyric, passionate intensity that reaches out to touch the heart and mind. This memorable collection of poems exhibits Maya Angelou's unique gift for capturing the triumph and pain of being black and every man and woman's struggle to be free. Filled with bittersweet intimacies and ferocious...

Presents the life and works of the author of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and discusses her struggles as a woman, mother, and artist.

"From the New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist, a biography in verse and prose of science fiction visionary Octavia Butler. Acclaimed novelist Ibi Zoboi illuminates the young life of the visionary storyteller Octavia E. Butler in poems and prose. Born into the Space Race, the Red Scare, and the dawning Civil Rights Movement, Butler expereinced an American childhood that shaped her into the groundbreaking science-fiction...