Black History Month
The Black Angels : the untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis
Smilios, Maria, author
2023
When tuberculosis was killing one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York's largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses. This story follows the intrepid young women, the "Black Angels," who, for twenty years, risked their lives working under dreadful conditions - yet these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the centre of this riveting story celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.
Black cake
Wilkerson, Charmaine, author
2022
In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett's death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child, challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage, and themselves.
The Black Church : this is our story, this is our song
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., author
2021
"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black Church as a foundation of Black life and driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America." --Jacket.
Black Women Taught Us An Intimate History of Black Feminism.
Jackson, Jenn M.
A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like—from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue.
“Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.”—Imani Perry, author of South to America
This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us.
Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women’s freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers’ lessons?
A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women’s intellectual and political work at the center of today’s liberation movements.
Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.
For a new generation of movement orga
Can you hear me now? : how I found my voice and learned to live with passion and purpose
Caesar-Chavannes, Celina, 1974- author
2021
The come up : the oral history of the rise of hip-hop
Abrams, Jonathan P. D., 1984-, author
2022
The music that we would later know as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it's the most popular genre in America and its electric impact on contemporary music is likened to that of jazz on the first half of the twentieth century. And yet, despite its tremendous influence, the voices of many of hip-hop's pioneers have never been thoroughly catalogued-and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop's rise, told in the voices of the people who made it happen.
Goliath
Onyebuchi, Tochi, author
2022
In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked.
My mother's daughter : a memoir of struggle and triumph
Felicien, Perdita, 1980- author
2020
Decades before Perdita Felicien became a World Champion hurdler, she carried her mother Catherine's dreams. In 1974, Catherine is pregnant with her second child and just scraping by in St. Lucia. She accepts an offer to go to Canada to become a nanny. Within a few years, she would find herself pregnant a third time - this time in her new country with no family to support her, and this time, with Perdita. Together, in the years to come, mother and daughter would experience racism, domestic abuse, and even homelessness, but Catherine's will would always pull them through.
No bootstraps when you're barefoot : my rise from a Jamaican plantation shack to the boardrooms of Bay Street
Hall, Wes, author.
2022
Wes Hall spent his early childhood in a zinc-roofed shack, one of several children supported by his grandmother. Yet Wes Hall went on to become a major entrepreneur, business leader, philanthropist and change-maker, working his way up from a humble position in a law firm mailroom by way of his intelligence, his curiosity, and his ability to see opportunities that other people don't. Wes shows how he fostered a resolve in himself, exploring his childhood and the milestone successes and failures of his career in order to share not only how he stopped himself from falling, but survived and thrived.
Ordinary notes
Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth, author.
2023
A singular achievement, Christina Sharpe explores with immense care profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that gather meaning as we read them, Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. A deeply moving, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life.
Rehearsals for living
Maynard, Robyn, author.
2022
When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson began writing each other letters -- a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here. Rehearsals is a captivating book, part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers convening on what it means to get free as the world spins into some new orbit.
Saga Boy : my life of blackness and becoming
Downing, Antonio Michael, 1975- author
2021
Musician, writer, and activist Antonio Michael Downing's memoir of creativity and transformation is a startling mash-up of memories and mythology, told in gripping, lyrical prose. This is an enthralling, deeply personal account of a young immigrant's search for belonging and black identity amid the long-lasting effects of cultural dislocation.
Sisters in arms : a novel of the daring Black women who served during World War II
Alderson, Kaia, author
2021
Grace Steele and Eliza Jones may be from completely different backgrounds, but when it comes to the army, specifically the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), they are both starting from the same level. Not only will they be among the first class of female officers the army has even seen, they are also the first Black women allowed to serve.
The skin we're in : a year of Black resistance and power
Cole, Desmond, 1982- author
2020
Both Desmond Cole's activism and journalism find vibrant expression in his first book - puncturing once and for all the bubble of Canadian smugness and naìˆve assumptions of a post-racial nation. Cole chronicles just one year - 2017 - in the struggle against racism in this country. In a month-by-month chronicle, Cole locates the deep cultural, historical, and political roots of each event so that what emerges is a personal, painful, and comprehensive picture of entrenched, systemic inequality.
Smoke Kings
Mayfield, Jahmal.
"A fresh and fierce new voice to crime fiction...a stunning book that takes the reader on an intense and harrowing journey that is truly unforgettable. Consider me a big fan." — Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel, The Force and City on Fire
In the vein of Get Out and Razorblade Tears, a feast of noir fiction and probing social commentary that asks us to consider what would happen if reparations were finally charged and exacted.
Nate Evers, a young black political activist, struggles with rage as his people are still being killed in the streets 62 years after Emmett Till. When his little cousin is murdered, Nate shuns the graffiti murals, candlelight vigils, and Twitter hashtags that are commonplace after these senseless deaths. Instead, he leads 3 grief-stricken friends on a mission of retribution, kidnapping the descendants of long-ago perpetrators of hate crimes, confronting the targets with their racist lineages, and forcing them to pay reparations to a community fund. For 3 of the group members, the results mean justice; for Nate – pure revenge.
Not all targets go quietly into the night, though, and Nate and his friends' world spirals out of control when they confront the wrong man. Now the leader of a white supremacist group is hot on their tail as is a jaded lawman with some disturbingly racist views of his own.
As the 4 vigilantes fight to thwart their ruthless pursuers, they’re forced to accept an age-old truth: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves."
Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.
Some of my best friends : essays on lip service
Isen, Tajja, eauthor
2022
"A fearless and darkly comic essay collection about race, justice, and the limits of good intentions"-- Provided by publisher.
Son of elsewhere : a memoir in pieces
Abdelmahmoud, Elamin, author
2022
Professional wrestling super fandom, Ontario's endlessly unfurling 401 highway, late nights at the convenience store listening to heavy metal - for writer and podcast host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, these are the building blocks of a life. This memoir charts that life in wise, funny, and moving reflections - yearning to belong in a time and place where expectation and assumptions around race, faith, language, and origin make such belonging extremely difficult, but it's also a story of the surprising and unexpected ways in which connection and acceptance can be found.
They said this would be fun : race, campus life, and growing up
Martis, Eternity, author
2020
Eternity Martis thought going away to university would help her discover who she really is. When she heads out to the predominantly white college town of London, Ontario, Eternity discovers an entitled culture of racism and sexism. What follows is a memoir of struggle about the difficulty of navigating through white spaces as a young woman of colour. Most of all, it's a story of perseverance and discovery. What we're left with is a portrait of the work students of colour must do to fight for themselves in spaces where they are supposed to be safe to learn and grow.
Toufah : the woman who inspired an African #MeToo movement
Jallow, Toufah, author
2021
In 2015, nineteen-year-old Toufah Jallow dreamed of a scholarship to produce and tour a play about how to eradicate poverty in The Gambia. She entered a presidential competition and won. When Toufah turned down marriage proposals from the dictator of The Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, he drugged and raped her. In July 2019, Toufah Jallow became the first woman in The Gambia to make a public accusation of rape against him. This is her story of the path to reclaim the future that Yahya Jammeh had tried to steal from her.
