In the Jim Crow South, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., who can see ghosts, is sent to The Reformatory where boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, while his sister Gloria rallies everyone in Florida to get him out before it's too late.

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...

In the future, a Black girl known only as Inmate Eleven is kept confined--to be used as a biological match for the president's son, should he fall ill. She is known as a Blue, for the color of her sadness. She lives in a small room with her dog, who is going wolf--he's pacing and imagining he's free. Inmate Eleven wants to go wolf, too. She wants to know what is beyond her room. In the present, Imogen lives outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. The...

Kanzi, the immigrant girl of The Arabic Quilt, has come to feel welcome in her American school--that is, until an entire shelf of books about Black, brown, and immigrant children suddenly disappears from the school library. But Kanzi's classmates, with their teacher's help, take action against the school district's ban.

When sixteen-year-old Sadie, a Black bisexual recluse, develops agoraphobia the summer before her junior year, she relies on her best friend, family, and therapist to overcome her fears.

"On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick...

For as long as she can remember, Chelsea has tried everything she can think of to distance herself from her father's work as a "paranormal removal expert," a hard task when he's advertising proudly all over New Orleans! This year, she's all grown up and finally friends with the popular crowd at her fancy high school. Things are looking up--until a night on the town backfires spectacularly, landing her in hot water at home. Her punishment? Working...

Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic...

"An epic love story that explores the American Dream between the monolith of Jim Crow, the inflexible world of the original Black upper class, and the violence of 1920s Chicago"--

As a mother and daughter watch a bird take flight, the young girl feels a trembling in her arms and a lightness in her feet. Her mama shares that once, long ago, their ancestors could actually fly. Every night they would slip away and soar through the skies, searching for safety, looking for the promised land. Mama feels in her bones that her daughter is meant to follow those old ways, like her grandmother before her. So Mama grabs hold of her hand,...