I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of outsiders. I’m probably attracted to the topic because I come from a couple of misfits who reared me in a small town in the deeply conservative South. My mom is an irreverent, Socialist, Croatian immigrant with half a dozen kids, and my dad a curmudgeonly polyglot who loves books more than people. First as a journalist, then as a historian, I’ve long studied the economies and cultures created by those systematically marginalized or merely with a healthy disdain for the mainstream—enslaved people, queers, disenfranchised women, downtrodden artists, poor immigrants. The books here all capture things that make our society beautifully textured, diverse, and resilient.
This book shows how fashion can be a powerful political tool and how subcultures can effectively fight back against oppression. From the civil rights movement to anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s, Black women all over the world used elements of “soul style” to physically defend themselves and advocate for equality. Along the way, they forged a universal identity that helped create solidarity and refute ideologies of racial inferiority.
I personally value how Ford’s insight into the expressive power of fashion has cleared a sartorial path for cultural historians working in all areas. I also deeply admire her clear and captivating storytelling chops, which make this book feel perpetually relevant.
From the civil rights and Black Power era of the 1960s through antiapartheid activism in the 1980s and beyond, black women have used their clothing, hair, and style not simply as a fashion statement but as a powerful tool of resistance. Whether using stiletto heels as weapons to protect against police attacks or incorporating African-themed designs into everyday wear, these fashion-forward women celebrated their identities and pushed for equality.
In this thought-provoking book, Tanisha C. Ford explores how and why black women in places as far-flung as New York City, Atlanta, London, and Johannesburg incorporated style and beauty culture into…
Having read Girl, Woman, Other I was keen to learn more about this fascinating and inspiring author. Her personal story, thoughts, experiences and beliefs helped me reflect on myself as an author.
From the bestselling and Booker Prize–winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism
Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win was a historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers.
Evaristo’s astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant…
Anna Malaika Tubbs is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. She is also a Cambridge Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge Scholar. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a BA in Anthropology, Anna received a Master’s from the University of Cambridge in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies. Outside of the academy, she is an educator and DEI consultant. She lives with her husband, Michael Tubbs, and their son Michael Malakai.
This book powerfully expands our definition of mothers and the role of mothering and presents it as a path to transformation. You will leave this book with a radical new perspective of what mothering does for everyone in our society. It is anti-imperialist, inclusive, and as the title suggests - revolutionary. If everyone read this, we would all live in a better world!
An anthology that gives access to the voices of mothers of color and marginalized mothers
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines is an anthology that centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers’ voices—women who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day. Motivated to create spaces for this discourse because of the authors’ passionate belief in the power of a radical conversation about mothering, they have become the go-to…
I grew up in a large extended family in a rural district in Trinidad. Frequently, as a young boy, I sought escape in the forested area at the back of the house. There, I would craft childish stories and fantasize about becoming a writer. This wish was granted after I moved to Canada in the 1990s. As an immigrant writer here, most of my books are about movement, dispossession, and finding a home. So, in a sense, I have always been running away from, while at the same time, searching for a home. This tension has given birth to most of my books.
This travelogue is so exquisitely written it is possible to admire it simply for its lyricism. But it’s much more than a travelogue. Embedded in the book are familial narratives, personal accounts, musings about other writers – Coetzee, Naipaul, Walcott, Galeano, for instance – all with the intent to chart the black diasporic experience. It’s a deeply personal book, yet studded with brilliant observations on belonging. “Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.” This book is best read slowly, savouring its insight.
A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery.
Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.
The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and…
As an own voice author, it is incredibly important for me to write characters that look like me, but it is exceptionally healing to find novels where I feel represented. My inner child yearns for more books that remind me of my adolescent wish to be a main character, to have a fleshed-out story, to be the hero or overpowered creature of the night. Being a main character means being seen and being heard, and I think now is the time to branch into every genre I can to know that any story, no matter how big or small the pages, can be done and can be Black. Happy reading!
C.M. Lockhart did an incredible job with We Are the Origin. With this book, we get to navigate a world full of gods, vessels, assassins—there are several moments where I would forget the time while I read this novel, because the world building and character arcs are just that interwoven and well executed. In terms of diversity, it’s refreshing for our main character, Brandi, to be around people that look like her while also being unapologetically herself. This story is original, the characters are well-fleshed out, and I am patiently awaiting the sequel.
Forced into a life of serving the queendom before she was old enough to deny them, Brandi was a cultivator of death and the queen’s own blade, reserved only for the disloyal and the blasphemous. Crafted by the queendom and forged in blood, she was nothing more than a tool. She was never meant to have an opinion on whose blood she shed — never meant to question whose back she was pressed into or whose throat she was slipped across.
She was destruction.
But when Freya, the goddess of life and judger of souls, demands…
I’m an Afro-Caribbean-American filmmaker, photographer, author, and activist from Washington, DC. After graduating from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in French and Francophone Studies, I began pursuing a completely different career path: social activism through art and storytelling.
I capture personal stories and intimate moments centering on Black liberation, immigrant justice, and women’s rights. My work is grounded in radical love, joy, and the knowledge that a more just world is possible. My award-winning documentary DACAmented has been internationally recognized, and my book My Beautiful Black Hair has been featured in The Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, and NPR’s Strange Fruit, among others.
The narratives in this book from women in the United States, London, and Ghana--accompanied by gorgeous portraits--capture a slice of the Black hair diaspora and the place where it all started: West Africa. The title says it all and yet can’t begin to capture the gorgeous array of women, hairstyles, and lived experiences captured by Cunningham and Alexander.
Crowns photographer Michael Cunningham and author and journalist George Alexander have captured the marvelous trinity of black women, hair, and beauty salons in the glorious Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair.
Angela Garner says that “The beauty salon is the one great thing we get to share as African American women. It’s therapeutic.” Tisch Sims says that wearing fantasy hair makes her feel “like a goddess, a queen.”
From the afro to the ponytail to dreadlocks to braids to relaxed hair to fantasy hair; from “good hair” to bad hair days, in this stunningly designed book black…
I am a historian of race and slavery in the lower Mississippi Valley because the region is a fulcrum of United States history. I was always fascinated by the significance of the Mississippi River for American expansion, society, and culture. Ultimately, this region of the country is so deeply influenced by people of African descent that must be included in all histories, and I wanted to share their stories in a particular place during the colonial period. Telling these stories in places where they have commonly been less well represented is very rewarding and it opens more ways to understand the histories of places like Natchez along the Mississippi River.
Jessica Marie Johnson’s award-winning Wicked Fleshis a masterpiece of historical writing that takes an in-depth look at the stories of Black women in search for freedom. Connecting the lower Mississippi Valley to an Atlantic World dominated by slave trading, the intimate histories of Black women take center stage as Johnson chronicles the ways they sought to counter the power white men attempted to claim over their bodies.
The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures.
The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners,…
Anna Malaika Tubbs is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. She is also a Cambridge Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge Scholar. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a BA in Anthropology, Anna received a Master’s from the University of Cambridge in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies. Outside of the academy, she is an educator and DEI consultant. She lives with her husband, Michael Tubbs, and their son Michael Malakai.
This book is a beautiful combination of personal narrative and social commentary. McClain takes you through many of the complicated emotions of raising Black children in the United States while also leaving her reader with a sense of sisterhood and support. It’s a must when it comes to understanding the current landscape Black mothers are facing.
A warm, wise, and urgent guide to parenting in uncertain times, from a longtime reporter on race, reproductive health, and politics
In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust -- even hostile -- society. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than any other race; black mothers must stand before television cameras telling the world that their slain children were human beings. What, then, is the best way to keep fear at bay…
Brit Bennett was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Stanford University along with an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and in 2021, she was chosen as one of Time’s Next 100 Influential People. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
A fascinating exploration into the lives of three women ignored by history, the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. By tracing the intellectual, political, and emotional strands of each woman’s life, Anna Malaika Tubbs uncovers hidden complexities within black motherhood that illuminate our understanding of the past while also shedding light on the overlooked contributions of black women today.
'A fascinating exploration into the lives of three women ignored by history ... Eye-opening, engrossing' Brit Bennett, bestselling author of The Vanishing Half
In her groundbreaking debut, Anna Malaika Tubbs tells the incredible storIES of three women who raised three world-changing men.
Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, each fighting their own battles, born into the beginning of the twentieth century and a deadly landscape of racial prejudice,…
For too long, single life has been characterized as a lesser life. As a 70-year-old who has been happily single my whole life, I want that to end. As I said in my book, “In the enlightened world that I envision, every child will understand, as a matter of course, that living single is a life path that can be just as joyful and fulfilling as any other—and for some people, the best path of all. Every adult will forsake forever the temptation to pity or patronize single people and will instead appreciate the profound rewards of single life."
For years, I read memoirs by single women in search of people who would joyfully and unapologetically own their single lives. I found several who were insightful and engaging but ultimately disappointing. Typically, they hedged–sure, they would say, they were fine with being single, but they were not about to commit to staying single. Some were gobsmacked to discover that single life could be fulfilling as if that were the most amazing thing imaginable.
Then, Keturah Kendrick published this book. Kendrick knew who she was from an early age. She owns her singlehood and all her other choices about how to live her life, such as not having children. She brilliantly shatters stereotypes about single people, and her critiques of popular culture are skillful and searing.
Through eight humorous essays, Keturah Kendrick chronicles her journey to freedom. She shares the stories of other women who have freed themselves from the narrow definition of what makes a "proper woman." Spotlighting the cultural bullying that dictates women must become mothers to the expectation that one's spiritual path follow the traditions of previous generations, Kendrick imagines a world where black women make life choices that center on their needs and desires. She also examines the rising trend of women choosing to remain single and explores how such a choice is the antithesis to the trope of the sorrowful black…
