black books matter
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Cole Brown's Greyboy Illuminates the Intersection of Being Young, Wealthy and Black
Cole Brown has lived his entire 24 years of life at the intersection of privilege and Blackness. The son of a Fortune 100 exec and the grandson of the first female senator in Ethiopia, he was born into the Jack and Jill, exclusive private school, summering in Martha’s Vineyard African American elite. That might be…
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A Promised Land: The First of Barack Obama's Two-Volume Presidential Memoirs to Be Published in November
If you’ve never stopped longing for the simpler, kinder, more rational time and place that was Barack Obama’s presidency, you are far from alone—and can soon take a deeper dive into the beloved president’s remarkable rise from civic-minded civilian to the highest office in the land. On Thursday, Penguin Random House announced that Obama’s highly…
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Turning a New Page, the Schomburg Literary Festival Is Going Virtual—and Global—for 2020
OK, so let’s articulate the obvious: There will be no tents or stages at the Schomburg Literary Festival this year. There will be no road-tripping or traveling to New York City’s beloved Harlem or electric anticipation in the line for in-person author signings. There will be no flipping through the fresh, crisp pages of a…
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It Took Nearly 50 Years, but This Week, Octavia Butler Made the New York Times Best Sellers' List
“I write bestselling novels,” Octavia Butler wrote on the inside cover of a notebook in 1988. 32 years later, that affirmation has come to pass. As reported by LitHub, on Wednesday, Butler’s agent, Merrilee Heifetz, tweeted that the author’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, had made it onto the New York Times Best Sellers’…
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Netflix Announces Family Book Series Hosted by Marley Dias; Cast Includes Lupita Nyong'o, Marsai Martin, Tiffany Haddish and Common
Turn the page and get into this news! Netflix has announced it will debut Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices, a new young children and family series hosted by author and activist Marley Dias! The 2019 Young Futurist honoree and founder of 1000 Black Girl Books will also executive produce the 12-episode series, which will feature “prominent…
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Roxane Gay's Graphic Novel The Banks to Receive Film Adaptation
Dr. Roxane Gay is a woman of many talents, whose career my writin’ ass aspires to attain one of these days. Not only is she a talented, best-selling author whose work has been featured on various websites and in several publications, but she also served as an English professor at Purdue University until 2018 and…
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Oprah's Latest Book Club Pick Is Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: 'A New Way of Seeing Racial Inequality'
“This might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,” said Oprah Winfrey of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The Warmth of Other Suns was released on Tuesday on Apple Books, among other booksellers. The highly anticipated release…
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Pulitzer Prize Administrator Dana Canedy Named New Publisher of Simon & Schuster
Legacy publishing house Simon & Schuster just scored a prize: Pulitzer Prize-winning former journalist turned Pulitzer Prize administrator Dana Canedy has just been announced as the new senior vice president and publisher of its flagship imprint. Canedy’s former employer, the New York Times, where she spent two decades, reported the news on Monday morning, calling…
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No, Symone Sanders Won't Shut Up—and She Doesn't Think We Should, Either
Later this summer, Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden will announce his running mate—and it’s widely presumed he will choose one of the many dynamic Black women who have risen to the top of the political sphere (and its adjacent headlines) in recent years. But as anyone watching the Biden camp knows, he already has a…
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Safe Space: Black Imagination Offers a Necessary Respite From the Onslaught of Black Trauma
“A safe world, in my opinion, would be one where other humans are not an existential threat. Love and value would have to fall in line for such a world to exist.” — William Wallace III, Philadephia, Penn. text This is the sobering half-wish offered on page 57 of Black Imagination, an amalgamation of black…