Catalog Search Results
1) Becoming
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"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon look her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...
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The critically acclaimed novel about four women who learn how to carry on while leaning on each other from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back and It's Not All Downhill From Here.When the men in their lives prove less than reliable, Savannah, Bernadine, Gloria, and Robin find new strength through a rare and enlightening friendship as they struggle to regain stability and an identity they don’t have to share...
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"The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian-who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray. In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. Pierpont Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books,...
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Celebrate Black History: J & YA Nonfiction Books
NYT - Children’s Middle Grade Paperback
Women's History Month
NYT - Children’s Middle Grade Paperback
Women's History Month
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"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...
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"The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions"--
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"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...
10) Passing
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Restless Classics presents the ninetieth anniversary edition of an undersung gem of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen's Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, self-invention, class, and race set amidst the pealing boisterousness of the Jazz Age.
When childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry cross paths at a whites-only restaurant, it's been decades since they last met. Married to a bigoted white man who...
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In 1989, Gayle Saunders Hilliard is living a nightmare. Her husband, Ramsey, a compulsive gambler, has committed suicide, leaving Gayle, her young daughter and her widowed mother destitute. Pressed to add to her income as a receptionist, Gayle, who is African American, takes a part-time job as a maid at a suburban New York hotel, where she encounters her childhood best friend, Pat Reid, a polished executive for an ad agency. Pat, who was taken in...
12) Beloved
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Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...
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"Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduing companions. In this accessible and inspiring...
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Nineteen-year-old Candy Raye Montana, an ex-drug runner for the Gabriano crime family, finally achieves her dream of becoming a famous hip-hop singer only to realize she has sold her soul and her body to Junius "Hurricane" Jackson, the sexually perverted CEO of the House of Homicide recording studio. Contains adult content.
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"A wildly original, incendiary story about race, redemption, the dangerous imbalances that continue to destabilize society, and speaking out for what's right. One could argue the story begins the night Allegra Douglass is awarded Distinguished Chair in Philosophy at her top-tier university in New York--the same night her grandmother dies--or before that: the day Allie left Birmingham and never looked back. Or even before that: the day her mother disappeared....
18) Michelle Obama
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Profiles the First Lady, covering her childhood, time in law school, and charity work.
19) Lavina
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Lavina traverses the near present, in the 1990's and the segregated South of the 1960's. It is the story of Mary Jacob, a children's book author who has virtually no memory of her early life. Billy Ray, Lavina's son and a musical genius, remembers all too well what happened to them on a hot August day in 1963 when their lives changed forever. When the two of them meet again in their hometown, it propels them back to their childhoods. In the second...
20) Take my hand
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"A searing and compassionate new novel about a young Black nurse's shocking discovery and burning quest for justice in post-segregation Alabama, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench. Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she hopes to help women shape their destinies, to make their own...
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