Black by Popular Demand
Black by Popular Demand
Books by Black authors releasing each week!
The official season of autumn is just around the corner. Find your books by Black authors to cuddle with from Cafe Con Libros.
Happy Reading!
Something, Someday
You're told that
This won't work,
But how will you know
If you never try?
Presidential inaugural poet and #1 New York Times bestselling author Amanda Gorman and Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Honor winner Christian Robinson have created a timeless message of hope.
Sometimes the world feels broken. And problems seem too big to fix. But somehow, we all have the power to make a difference. With a little faith, and maybe the help of a friend, together we can find beauty and create change.
With intimate and inspiring text and powerfully stunning illustrations, Something, Someday reveals how even the smallest gesture can have a lasting impact.
(Children’s)
Black Girls: A Celebration of You!
In an upbeat and rhythmic ode, Dominique Furukawa and Erika Lynne Jones celebrate Black girls in all their beauty and joy. Black Girls uplifts girls of every shade, size, and walk of life, reminding them that they are perfectly designed.
Whimsical, earnest, charming, full, bright, and beautiful, this picture book anthem deftly explores the diversity of Black girlhood.
Black girls, Black girls, rising still.
Shouting loud and proud and free,
that being a Black girl, Black girl
is a wondrous thing to be.
(Children’s)
The Quality of Mercy
Everyone saw Emil Coetzee drive into the bush the day the ceasefire was announced. Beatrice, busy consoling her friend Kuki over the loss of her son and marriage. Dikeledi, the postwoman who refuses to lean. Tom, the drunk who makes his living impersonating Emil in backroads bars. Vida de Villiers, stuck in a coin-toss choice. Saskia, the feisty reporter determined to ruin Emil's name. Marion, the enigmatic lover he left behind. Mrs. Louisa Alcott, the lonely farm wife reading Mills & Boon romances in her best dress, waiting for her life to begin. But nobody saw him drive out of it. So begins the investigation of Spokes Moloi, the first black chief inspector in the City of Kings, who on the eve of his retirement is handed one final crime: the possible murder of Mr. Coetzee, the notorious head of the Organization of Domestic Affairs, who disappeared on the same day the country's independence beckoned. In investigating Emil's disappearance, Spokes' path collides with an assortment of witnesses with the best and worst of intentions--including a pair of corrupt investigators with an eye towards framing the guerrilla icon Golide Gumede for Emil's murder, and the insatiable public, infatuated with Emil and unable to come to terms with the fact that the future they had so long anticipated had, at last, arrived.With a nation in flux and his beloved wife Loveness forever present in his mind, Spokes' investigation leads him back to the very beginning-- and gives him one last chance to solve the twenty-year-old murder case that determined both the path of his life and destiny of his country.
(Fiction)
See You on the Other Side
This is not goodbye, sweet child.
I'll see you on the other side. . . .
Simple, rhyming text and evocative illustrations offer comfort to children who may be grieving, or coming to terms with the idea of loss or change. The universal message opens the door to our collective healing, and the everlasting connection of love.
Actress, dancer, and singer Rachel Montez Minor wrote this book to help children and their families process big life changes. With illustrations from Mariyah Rahman, Minor's soothing and poetic words are a balm for the spirit.
(Children’s)
The Most Secret Memory of Men
In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer in Paris, discovers a legendary book from the 1930s, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. No one knows what became of its author, once hailed as the "Black Rimbaud," after the book caused a scandal. Enthralled by this mystery, Diégane decides to search for T.C. Elimane, going down a path that will force him to confront the great tragedies of history, from colonialism to the Holocaust.
Alongside his investigation, Diégane becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. Together they talk, drink, make love, philosophize about the role of exile in artistic creation. Diégane grows particularly close to two women: the seductive Siga, who holds so many secrets, and the photojournalist Aïda, impossible to pin down.
The Most Secret Memory of Men is an astonishing novel about the choice between living and writing, and the desire to transcend the divide between Africa and the West. Above all, it is an ode to literature and its timelessness.
(Literary)
The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal
Trauma surgeon and professor Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all: gunshot wounds, stabbings, and traumatic brain injuries. In The Bodies Keep Coming, Williams ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass.
As a Harvard-trained physician, Williams learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow the rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, Williams tried to save the lives of police officers shot in Dallas in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11. Thrust into the spotlight in a nation that loves feel-good stories about heroism more than hard truths about racism, Williams came to rethink everything he thought he knew about medicine, injustice, and what true healing looks like.
Now, in raw and intimate detail, Williams narrates not only the events of that night in 2016, but the grief and anger of a Black doctor on the front lines of trauma care. Working in the physician-writer tradition of Atul Gawande and Damon Tweedy, Williams diagnoses the roots of the violence that plagues us. He draws a through line between white supremacy, gun violence, and the bodies he tries to revive, and he trains his surgeon's gaze on the structural ills that manifest themselves in the bodies of his patients. What if racism is a feature of our healthcare system, not a bug? What if profiting from racial inequality is exactly what it was designed to do?
Black and brown bodies will continue to be wracked by all types of violence, Williams argues, until something changes. Until we transform policy and law with compassion and care, the bodies will keep coming.
(Nonfiction)
Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics
While we can all recall images of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin.
This was far from Rustin's first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King by helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolent resistance. Rustin's legacy touches many areas of contemporary life--from civil resistance to violent uprisings, democracy to socialism, and criminal justice reform to war resistance.
Despite these achievements, Rustin was often relegated to the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. With expansive, searching, and sometimes critical essays from a range of esteemed writers--including Rustin's own partner, Walter Naegle--this volume draws a full picture of Bayard Rustin: a gay, pacifist, socialist political radical who changed the course of US history and set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from LGBTQ+ Pride to Black Lives Matter.
(Nonfiction)
The Unsettled
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.
Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger.
Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living.
Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance.
As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.
(Literary)
The Longest Night in Egypt: (The Shadow Prince #2)
The Shadow Prince saga continues as Ash and his heroic friends rush to save Ra from the belly of Apep and bring light back to an Egypt that has been plunged into darkness.
Back at his evil tricks, Set, the devious god of chaos has rid Egypt of the sun god Ra and plunged the kingdom into never-ending night. He's even managed to trap the rest of the gods in a palace chamber without the use of their magic. Now demons run amok in the city, filling it with chaos and destruction.
But hope is not lost! Ash, Prince Khufu, Seret, Gilli, and two new friends, Thea and Iset, must brave the depths of the Duat--the spooky, cavernous Egyptian underworld--to rescue Lord Ra. Numerous demons fly about them in the darkness. Deadly peril awaits them around every craggy corner. They must fight, trick, sneak, and solve riddles to pass through each successive gate. If Team Shadow Prince can manage to get through all that, they will still have to face a demon like none they've seen before: the fierce, wily, enormous, god-eating serpent, Apep.
Will the kids prevail? Can Ash and his friends reunite Ra's magic with the sun and bring power and light back to the kingdom? Or will Egypt remain in darkness forever?
(Middle Grade)
