By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered is an innovative compilation of poetry, sound, and substance. Featuring Jonathan Gross, Ph.D., a Professor of English at DePaul University, and musician “Mack” Jay Jordan, who played with Ramsey Lewis and Nat King Cole during a decades-long career that took him around the world, this CD will appeal to jazz enthusiasts and educators, poets and poetry lovers, avid readers and admirers of all things Renaissance.

By Lee A. Daniels
Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin fleshes out this much-maligned group by focusing on two individuals whose lives as much as any in the small black haute-bourgeoisie that existed from the 1860s to the 1950s embodied the groups’ remarkable status.

By Lee A. Daniels
Why is there so much focus on the “heroism” of Atticus Finch in confronting the racism of the town’s (and region’s) legal system and so little discussion of the fact that he lost.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Damon Wayans, the second-eldest son in one of Black Hollywood’s most successful family dynasties has written the perfect summer beach read novel with surprising insights into and empathy for a demographic very different than his own.

By Janet Singleton
Throughout much of her childhood Deborah Lacks had no idea what became of her mother. Yet her mother even then, in the 50s and 60s, was famous. Random readers, undergrad science students, and ordinary lab technicians knew of HeLa: a still-growing cell line obtained from the cancerous cervical tumor of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died from the malignancy in 1951.

By Lee A. Daniels
Lessons provides the important benefit of understanding, in full measure, the spirit that drove thousands of black Americans from the most ordinary of circumstances to forcefully but nonviolently confront white southerners’ threats and use of physical and economic reprisals

By Imani Perry
Khalil Gibran Muhammad introduces his book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race Crime and the Making of Modern America, with a contemporary lens. He cites the dire reality that “Nearly half of the more than two million Americans behind bars are African American…” and describes the commonplace of associating blackness with crime in the contemporary United States.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
As we digest and debate the results of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards—including the racial aspects of various wins and nominations—Hollywood insider Valerie Joyner’s debut novel, Hollyhood, has special resonance and relevance.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
In her debut collection of poetry, Arc & Hue, Tara Betts articulates deeply-felt human emotion in a lyrical, beautiful way. Betts is a poet for the people.

By Paula L. Woods
A Wish After Midnight is written with a lyrical grace that many authors of what passes for adult literature would envy as it examines universal themes of finding lost love, belief in one’s dreams and the power of friendship.