| May, 2006
 The
Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau
Publisher: Picador USA
Price: $10.78
About the book
In exhilarating prose, The Professor's Daughter traces the borderlands
of race and family, contested territory that gives rise to rage,
confusion, madness, and invisibility. This astonishingly original
voice surges with energy and purpose.
About the author
Emily Raboteau is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago
Tribune's Nelson Algren Award and a New York Foundation of the Arts
Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches creative
writing at the City College of New York.
Related Links
The Professor's Daughter Book Club Guide
June, 2006
 Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani
Publisher: Akashic Books
Price: $9.20
About the book
Tough, spirited, and fiercely independent Abigail is brought as
a teenager to London from Nigeria by relatives who attempt to force
her into prostitution. She flees, struggling to find herself in
the shadow of a strong but dead mother. In spare yet haunting and
lyrical prose reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, Abani brings to life
a young woman who lives with a strength and inner light that will
enlighten and uplift the reader.
About the author
Chris Abani is an Associate Professor at the University of California,
Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award,
the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California
Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award & the PEN Hemingway
Book Prize.
His prose includes the novels The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007)
GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005), Masters of the Board (Delta,
1985) and the novellas, Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006) and Song
For Night (Akashic, 2007). His poetry collections are Hands Washing
Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's
Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001).
Related Links
Chris Abani's page
Other books by Chris Abani
July, 2006
 Bone Black
by bell hooks
Publisher: Owl Books
Price: $13
About the book
Stitching together girlhood memories with the finest threads of innocence, feminist
intellectual bell hooks presents a powerfully intimate account of growing up
in the South. A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding
of female creativity and one strong-spirited child’s journey toward becoming
a writer.
Related Links
bell
hooks unofficial page
Other books by bell hooks
August, 2006
 Third Girl From The Left by Martha Southgate
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Price: $18.72
About the book
My mother believed in the power of movies and the people in them
to change a life, to change her life.” So explains Tamara,
daughter of Angela, granddaughter of Mildred—the three women
whose lives are portrayed in stunning detail in Martha Southgate’s
accomplished third novel, Third Girl From The Left.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1970 is not a place a smart black girl wants
to linger in long. For Angela, twenty years old and beautiful, the
stifling conformity is unbearable. She heads to L.A. just as blaxploitation
movies are pouring money into the studio and lands a few bit parts
before an unplanned pregnancy derails her plans for stardom.
About the author
Martha Southgate was born and raised in Cleveland Ohio. She graduated
from Smith College with a BA in anthropology and went on to work
as a community organizer before finding her way to the Cleveland
Edition, a free local weekly. From there she attended the Radcliffe
Publishing Procedures Course and went on to work in the magazine
industry in New York City. Among the publications she either wrote
or edited for were Essence, The New York Daily News
and Premiere.
Related Links
Martha
Southgate 's page
Other
books by Martha Southgate
September, 2006
 Purple
Hibiscus
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Anchor Books
Price: $10.40
About the book
Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls
and frangipani trees of her family compound. Her wealthy Catholic
father, under whose shadow Kambili lives, while generous and politically
active in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious
at home.
About the author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria. Purple Hibiscus won
the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the Hurston/Wright
Legacy award. It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta
and the Iowa Review, among other literary journals, and she received
an O. Henry Prize in 2003. She is a 2005/2006 Hodder fellow at Princeton
University and divides her time between the U.S. and Nigeria.
Related Links
Chimamanda's page
Chimamanda publisher's page
Other books by Chimamanda
October, 2006
 No
Disrespect by Sister Souljah
Publisher: Vintage
Price: $11.16
About the book
Rapper, activist, and hip-hop rebel, Sister Souljah possesses the
most passionate and articulate voice to emerge from the projects.
Now she uses that voice to deliver what is at once a fiercely candid
autobiography and a survival manual for any African American woman
determined to keep her heart open and her integrity intact in 1990s
America.
About the author
Born in Bronx, New York, raised in the projects, Souljah is a fighter
who came up from the bottom. A graduate of Rutgers University, she
earned a degree in American History and African Studies. She also
attended the Cornell University Advanced Placement Studies, and
studied abroad in Europe at the University of Salamanca.
Related Links
Sister Souljah's page
Sister Souljah publisher's page
Other books by Sister Souljah
November, 2006
 Yellow Black by Haki Madhubuti
Publisher: Third World Press
Price: $12.44
About the book
Haki Madhubuti weaves this painful and uplifting story in the only way he knows
how: through the music of words. Madhubuti uses prose, poetry and
the beautiful free jazz flow of words to include the memorable events, people
and places that were a part of his early life.
About the author
Haki R. Madhubuti is a poet, essayist, editor and publisher of Third
World Press. He is a professor of English and the founder and director
emeritus of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University.
Related Links
More about Haki Madhubuti
Haki Madhubuti publisher's page
Other books by Haki Madhubuti
December, 2006
 Mirror
to America
by John Hope Franklin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Price: $17.25
About the book
From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a petition
calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, to his
1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the President's Initiative
on Race, and continuing to the present, Franklin has influenced with
determination and dignity the nation's racial conscience. Whether
aiding Thurgood Marshall's preparation for arguing Brown v. Board
in 1954, marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against
Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has
pushed the national conversation on race towards humanity and equality,
a life-long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times revelatory,
Mirror to America chronicles Franklin's life and this nation's racial
transformation in the 20th century, and is a powerful reminder of
the extent to which the problem of America remains the problem of
color.
About the author
John Hope Franklin is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History
at Duke University. He has received dozens of major awards including
the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his life-long commitment to
Civil Rights.
Related Links
John
Hope Franklin publisher's page
Other
books by John Hope Franklin
January, 2007
 All
Aunt Hagar's Children
by Edward P. Jones
Publisher: Amistad
Price: $17.13
About the book
In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been
published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition
is firmer than ever.
Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book,
Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people
who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power
brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women,
and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations
that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands,
emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country
folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries
of education behind them.
In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person rhythms
of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran investigates
the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny seems inextricable
from his mother's own violent Southern childhood. In "In the
Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly married
couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to pursue lives
of urban promise only to be challenged and disappointed.
About the author
Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics
Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the
Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur
Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of short stories, Lost in
the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the
National Book Award. He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities,
including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Related Links
Edward's
Web site
Other
books by Edward
February, 2007
 Black,
White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
by Rebecca Walker
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Price: $11.25
About the book
The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer
Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was
born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or
an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of
love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely
only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow
further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented.
In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself
as a soul instead of a symbol—and offers a new look at the
challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique
and truly universal.
About the author
Rebecca Walker is a best-selling author, an acclaimed speaker and
teacher, and an award-winning visionary and activist in the fields
of intergenerational feminism, multi-cultural identity, enlightened
masculinity, and transformational human awareness. When she was just
twenty-five, Time Magazine named her one of the fifty most influential
future leaders of America—an award which has since been followed
by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from
the League of Women Voters, the Champion of Choice Award from CARAL,
and the Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of
University Women.
In 1995 Rebecca published To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing
the Face of Feminism, an anthology that remains in print after more
than ten years. Hailed a "foundational text of Third Wave feminism,"
To Be Real is taught in Women's Studies programs around the world.
In 2002, Rebecca's memoir, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography
of a Shifting Self, became an international bestseller and won the
Alex Award from the American Library Association. People Magazine
called Black, White, and Jewish, "A heartbreaking tale of self-creation,”
adding, “Walker masterfully illuminates differences between
black and white America." A second anthology, What Makes a
Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future, was published in 2004 to similar
acclaim: "Walker has done society at large a great service
by bringing forth these voices, these views." (Booklist)
read more
Related Links
Rebecca
Walker's Web site
Other
books by Rebecca
March, 2007
 The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
by Eudora Welty
Publisher: Harvest Books
ISBN: 0156189216
Price: $10.88
About the book
There are forty-one stories in all, including the earlier collections
A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride
of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories. With
a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.
About the author
Welty is the twentieth-century master of her subject, and the century’s
most gifted and radical practitioner of the short story. She won
most of the major literary prizes during her career, including the
Pulitzer Prize and the French Légion d’Honneur. Only
the Nobel Prize eluded her, and many believe this to be one of that
committee’s great oversights. Even a generic description of
Welty’s oeuvre—four collections of stories, five novels,
two collections of photographs, three works of non-fiction (essay,
memoir, book review), and one children’s book—shows
Welty’s wide scope as an artist, and reading through her work
reveals an astonishing tonal range in subject and style, the most
expansive of any twentieth-century American writer.
The simple facts of Eudora Welty’s life, however, obscure
for some readers her radical experiments in subject and form. Those
facts are well known from essays and interviews published throughout
her life and from Welty’s best-selling account of her writing
life, One Writer’s Beginnings (1983). Born April 13, 1909,
Welty spent what she describes as an idyllic childhood in Jackson,
Mississippi with her two brothers, Edward and Walter, and their
doting parents, Chestina, a schoolteacher, and Christian, an insurance
executive. Welty lived in her familial homes in Jackson for most
of her ninety-two years—one, on Congress Avenue near the center
of town (she walked through the state Capitol on her way to grammar
school), and a second on Pinehurst Street, where she lived until
her death in 2001. Sojourns from Jackson included two years at Mississippi
State College for Women (1925-27), several years at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison, and a year in New York City, studying advertising
at the Columbia University business school. Her father’s untimely
death in 1931 brought her home from New York, and she worked at
a local radio station and wrote about the Jackson social scene for
the Memphis, Tennessee, Commercial Appeal, a newspaper circulated
throughout Northwest Mississippi. From 1933-36 she served as a publicity
agent for the Works Progress Administration throughout rural Mississippi,
where she also took her most memorable photographs (published in
1989). She began to publish fiction in 1936, was on staff of the
New York Times Book Review in 1944, and traveled to France, Italy,
England and Ireland in 1949-50, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship.
During her writing life she held extended residences at a number
of universities, including Oxford and Cambridge (she was the first
woman to enter Peterhouse College).
read
more
Related Links
Eudora
Welty Foundation
Other
books by Eudora
April, 2007
 Collected Poems 1947 - 1997
by Allen Ginsberg
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0061139742
Price: $26.37
About the book
Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published
verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant
work from one of America's great poets. The chief figure among the
Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating
it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal,
spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of
Walt Whitman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and
William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg's classics Howl, Reality Sandwiches,
Kaddish, Planet News, and The Fall of America led American (and
international) poetry toward uncensored vernacular, explicit candor,
the ecstatic, the rhapsodic, and the sincere—all leavened
by an attractive and pervasive streak of common sense. Ginsberg's
raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze
a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our
cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular
song and speech, but also our view of the world.
About the author
Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, a son of
Naomi and lyric poet Louis Ginsberg. As a student at Columbia College
in the 1940s, he began a close friendship with William Burroughs,
Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, and he later became associated with
the Beat movement and the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.
After jobs as a laborer, sailor, and market researcher, Ginsberg
published his first volume of poetry, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956.
Howl defeated censorship trials to become one of the most widely
read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two
languages, from Macedonian to Chinese, a model for younger generations
of poets from West to East. Ginsberg was a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier
de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture,
was a winner of the National Book Award (for The Fall of America),
and was a cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in
the Western world. He died in New York City in 1997.
Related Links
The Allen Ginsberg Trust
Other books by Allen Ginsberg
May, 2007
This month’s selection:
 Reading Like a Writer
by Reading Like a Writer
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0060777044
Price: $26.37
About the book
In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by
her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the
masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky,
Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers
why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent
sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac
Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in
George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for
a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor
for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and
Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture
to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention
to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
About the author
Francine Prose is the critically acclaimed bestselling author of
more than twelve novels, including the National Book Award finalist
Blue Angel. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including
a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, Francine Prose is a Director's Fellow
at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.
Related Links
Other books by Francine Prose
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