Central Kansas Library System

Since the 18th century, African Americans have been contributing important works to American literature. However, their writing has been treated differently than those produced by white authors. Readers discover the challenges black authors have faced in having their work published and being taken seriously by critics and readers alike. Engaging sidebars and detailed photographs augment this comprehensive overview of the racism that still persists...

"Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and...

"First edition."

Sunny tries to shine despite his troubled past in this third novel in the critically acclaimed Track series from National Book Award finalist Jason Reynolds. Ghost. Patina. Sunny. Lu. Four kids from wildly different backgrounds, with personalities that are explosive when they clash. But they are also four kids chosen for an elite middle school track team--a team that could qualify them for the Junior Olympics. They all have a lot to lose, but they...

The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums. "Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother...

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever." The story tells of a Black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances...

Angelou's fourth autobiographical volume proceeds from her departure from California with her son, Guy, through her early years in Harlem and the civil-rights movement, to London and Cairo and the breakup of her marriage.

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...