Ocean State Libraries

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. But why? As she began to write about living through all the dying, Jesmyn realized the truth -- and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle....

This fourth autobiographical work by Maya Angelou tells of her entry into New York's circle of black artists and writers, her involvement in the civil rights movement, and changes in her personal life.

"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal comes an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming of age. Powerful, disturbing, and stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Jamaica Kincaid...

Charity Lavender Evans, a national best-selling author, finds her life spinning wildly out of control when her sister Lynzee files a civil suit against her and her husband files for divorce, which forces her to define her life as a wife, mother, sister, and writer.

The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than...

"Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing encompasses the broad spectrum of Black speculative writing, including science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and Afrofuturism, all by Black women writers. Editors Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle have gathered the voices of twenty emerging and established writers in speculative fiction and poetry; writers who've imagined the weird and the wondrous, the futuristic and...

""[Suzan-Lori Parks'] dislocating stage devices, stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous."--Time "An original whose fierce intelligence and fearless approach to craft subvert theatrical convention and produce a mature and inimitable art that is as exciting as it is fresh."-August Wilson Named one of the "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave" by Time magazine, Suzan-Lori Parks...

"Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist. This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and...

Reluctantly agreeing to masquerade as his wife to help her friend Eli Grayson, Jewel suddenly finds herself in the position of a real marriage when their ruse is uncovered and discovers an unexpected passion in Eli's arms.