"A god will return when the earth and sky converge under the black sun in the holy city of Tova... The winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose...

From folktales retold to futuristic societies, this collection of stories centers on Black women and gender nonconforming individuals dealing with love and betrayal, strength and resistance. In all of them, the heroines shine brightly-- characters in which you cannot help but see yourself reflected. -- adapted from jacket

"Black Utopias posits a concept of utopia made possible by black people's exclusion from the human and expressed through the ecstatic practices, community creation, speculative fiction and music. Jayna Brown explores the practices and works of 19th century black women mystics as well as 20th century musicians and speculative fiction writers including mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and writers...

"In How I Resist, readers will find hope and support through voices that are at turns personal, funny, irreverent, and instructive. Not just for a young adult audience, this incredibly impactful collection will appeal to readers of all ages who are feeling adrift and looking for guidance." --

"Explores the cultural valence of Afrofuturism. It examines works by a wide range of authors, including Phyllis Wheatley, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and N.K. Jemisin"--

A vivid portrait of what it means to be a teenage girl in America today. Teenage girls today live their life in words--in text and instant messages, on blogs and social network pages. It's how they conduct their friendships and present themselves to the world, but they are also creating a formidable body of personal written work. This generation's unprecedented comfort level with the written word has led to a fearless new American literature. These...

"The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks's original. An array of writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates, have written poems for this...