By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
In many ways, James Gavin’s book tells the story of black America from the last lights of the Harlem Renaissance to the shining star that is the nation’s first black president. By focusing on Lena Horne, the trailblazer / activist / singer / actor/ dancer / icon, her rough road from the indignities of the segregated Cotton Club to an Upper East Side home is made clear.

By Lee A. Daniels
Writing with an easy command of a mountain of material that encompasses six decades of enormous changes in America, Sullivan shows how critical the NAACP, now celebrating its centennial, was to the Civil Rights Movement’s ultimate legal and legislative victories that made the United States a democracy in fact not just in rhetoric.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
In 1998, Ron Kavanaugh founded Mosaic, a literary magazine that celebrates the work of contemporary African-American and Latino writers. Ten years later, Mosaic still publishes reviews of literary work, interviews with important writers, and art that folk can dig. Recent covers include first time novelist Marlon James, Dark Room Collective Co- Founder Thomas Sayers Ellis, and author of The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

By Pamela Newkirk
Senna’s characters are not the stuff of fiction, but are drawn from her real life. From shards of truths, half-truths, legend, and a searing search into her personal history, Senna reveals a larger truth of America’s character of racial mixing, undue pride and shame, and unreconciled identities.

By Jay Mathews
This year, David Levin and his friend Mike Feinberg are close to becoming the most famous teachers in the country. They have founded the nation’s most successful network of public charter schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP).

By Imani Perry
Sag Harbor is the first-person narrative of teenaged Benji Cooper and his relationship to the place and people of his summers: Sag Harbor, New York.

By Imani Perry
God Says No is a sensitive, heart-wrenching, and insightful novel about a protagonist, Gary Gray, who experiences the conflicting pressures of his sexual orientation, his responsibilities as a son, father, and husband, and his religious beliefs.

By Stacey Patton
Some years ago, I was a personal fitness trainer at the New York Sports Clubs Sheridan Square location at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 12th Street. One evening, a well-scrubbed young gay white guy named Alan meandered into the free weights section with bad posture, low eyes, and all kinds of insecurities shut up in his bones.

By Farah Jasmine Griffin
An exquisite jewel of a book, Paule Marshall’s memoir, Triangular Road, is a welcome work of nonfiction by one of our greatest writers. Neither tell-all nor confessional, Triangular Road does tell the story of a writer in motion, a self-described “traveling woman,” one who has devoted her life to creating complexly rendered novels and stories about the historical, psychological and political dimensions of the African Diaspora.

By Pamela Newkirk
The fleeting tradition of letter writing was in part the inspiration for Letters from Black America, a collection of more than 200 letters that traces the footprints, large and small, of a people from bondage to self-determination; from the Civil War to the War in Iraq; and from dusty plantations to the glistening White House.