Black by Popular Demand
Your introduction to the artist Sam Gilliam, a Haitian YA, and more this week!
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Happy Reading!
When the Mapou Sings
Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream--a gift from the Mapou--tells Lucille to go to her village's section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life and her family's at risk.
Forced to flee her home, Lucille takes a servant post with a wealthy Haitian woman from society's elite in Port-au-Prince. Despite a warning to avoid him, she falls in love with her employer's son. But when their relationship is found out, she must leave again--this time banished to another city to work for a visiting American writer and academic conducting fieldwork in Haiti. While Lucille's new employer studies vodou and works on the novel that will become Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lucille risks losing everything she cares about--and any chance of seeing her best friend again--as she fights to save their lives and secure her future in this novel in verse with the racing heart of a thriller.
(Young Adult)
Beautiful Broken Love
It's been months since her dreams of forever were brutally shattered. Seven long months since her husband and soulmate, Lew, died in her arms, leaving her to carry on. Alone. And Davina Klein-Roberts still isn't sure how to move forward.
To escape her anguish, Davina throws everything into work, pushing Golden Oil Co., her self-built skin care line, to become a viral success. Now she's poised to clinch a major endorsement deal too. But it's bittersweet without Lew by her side.
A meeting with Deke Bishop, the hot NBA star she's courting for her brand, leaves Davina flustered. With his dimpled smile and warm handshake, Deke's a natural pitchman. And he's clearly interested--not only in her lotions.
Davina soon discovers that Deke's more than just another player and carries his own pain. But as her feelings for him grow, so does her guilt. Will the pain of a future already lost keep her from embracing hope for a new one?
(Romance)
Sam Gilliam
An African American artist in the nation's capital at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Sam Gilliam blazed a trail with his singular artistic vision. Gilliam emerged from the Washington, DC art scene in the mid 1960s with works that disrupted established artistic norms and styles.
Relentlessly experimental and inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, Gilliam's lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.
This book, made in close collaboration with the Sam Gilliam Foundation, is the first to comprehensively survey the breadth of his extraordinary career, and features never-before-seen archival materials an insightful newly commissioned texts that shine light on the artist, his life, and his work, together with examples of Gilliam's work spanning five decades.
(Art)
Power Moves Study Guide: What the Bible Says about How You Can Reclaim and Redefine Your God-Given Power
In the Power Moves Study Guide, Sarah Jakes Roberts shares what the Bible says about how followers of Jesus can reclaim and redefine their God-given power. God's original intention for humankind was for them to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. He instructed Adam and Eve to "rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground" (Genesis 1:28). But the first humans allowed the enemy to talk them into giving up this authority and ended up undermining their mission in the world. We have been living with the repercussions ever since.
But this is not the way it was supposed to be--and this is not the way it has to be. We do not have to buy into the enemy's lie that we are powerless. We can reclaim the power that God intends for us to have. We can allow His strength to move in us, through us, and work for us so that we can stand against the schemes of the enemy and make a positive impact for God in this world. As Paul wrote, we can "put on the full armor of God" so we can "stand against the devil's schemes" (Ephesians 6:10).
The Bible states that God created us to be a force in this world. We no longer have to accept that we have no power to change our situation. We can rediscover God's power and allow it to move in us.
(Nonfiction)
