Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that Zora Neale Hurston collected on her travels through the Gulf States in the late 1920s.

The bittersweet and often hilarious tales -- which range from longer narratives about God, the Devil, white folk, and mistaken identity to witty one-liners -- reveal attitudes about faith, love, family, slavery, race, and community. Together, this collection of nearly 500 folktales weaves a vibrant tapestry that celebrates African American life in the rural South and represents a major part of Zora Neale...

Edited by the critically acclaimed Terry McMillan, the award-winning author of five previous novels and recipient of the Essence Award for Excellence in Literature, this is a striking collection of works from contemporary African-American authors, both established and emerging.
This is the first original anthology of African-American writing in over a decade. Featuring works by over fifty African-American writers and a preface by John Edgar Wideman, this amazing anthology showcases some of our best contemporary writers, including: Terry McMillan, Clarence Major, Wanda Coleman, Ntozake...

By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that rests lightly on its carefully foundation.

Once a prominent radio reporter, Mumia Abu-Jamal is now in a Pennsylvania prison awaiting his state-sactioned execution. In 1982 he was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner after a trial many have criticized as profoundly biased. Live From Death Row is a collection of his prison writings--an impassioned yet unflinching account of the brutalities and humiliations of prison life. It is also a scathing indictment of racism and political bias in the American judicial system that is certain to fuel the controversy surrounding the...

From the first writer to win the PEN/Faulkner Award twice comes this redemptive, healing love story that celebrates the survival of an endangered urban black community and the ways in which people redeem themselves.

This multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, and race is Wideman's first nonfiction work since his National Book Award finalist, "Fatheralong." Bringing "a touch of Proust to the blacktop" ("Time"), "Hoop Roots" tells of Wideman's love for a game he can no longer play.

The first story collection in more than a decade from one of the most celebrated African-American authors of modern-day literature contains stories that move from the intimate to the political, from shock to transcendence.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction. Over the past twenty years judges such as Robert Penn Warren, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Alice McDermott, and Frank Conroy have selected the best collections from the hundreds submitted annually by up-and-coming writers.
"20" represents the best of the best one story from each of the prize-winning volumes. Chosen by acclaimed author John Edgar Wideman, the selections cover a broad range of inventive and original characters,...

Plumpp's new poems show his extraordinary sense of the movement of speech and the poetic line, his dazzling metaphors, and his ability to turn language inside out and upside down by looking within the words and rhythms of what we commonly say without thinking. In his poetic versions of the blues, he brings something new into American poetry both technically and spiritually.
Plumpp's blues narratives are a poetic form and a dialogue between poet and subject--they are unlike anything else in American poetry: a vital, passionate, haunting poetry meant to be read and spoken and sung.

A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France during World War II but later against France in Algeria's war for independence. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, inspired leaders of diverse liberation movements: Steve Biko in South Africa, Che Guevara in Latin America, the Black Panthers in the States. Wideman's novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary African American novelist, Thomas, who...