"Andrew Carnegie funded fifty-nine public libraries in Kansas in the early 20th century, but it was frontier women who organized waffle suppers, minstrel shows, and women's baseball games to buy books to fill them. Now, a century later, Angelina returns to her father's hometown of New Hope to complete her dissertation on the Carnegie libraries, just as Traci and Gayle arrive in town, Traci as an artist-in-residence at the renovated Carnegie Arts Center...

"Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker Prize win was an historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers. Evaristo's astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a...

"In the aftermath of World War II, the world shudders for a number of years. People try to find their way back to homes that are no longer there, or on to an uncertain future across the ocean. Some run from their deeds, and most get away. Among the millions across Europe looking for a new home is Elisabeth Åsbrink's father, a ten-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy in a refugee camp. The year 1947 marks a turning point in Europe, the Middle East, South...

"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES. The shelf has everything Rose could...

A literary biography of a seminal figure of 20th century American literature, Margaret Walker, who established one of the first Black Studies centers in the nation, and mentored the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. For My People: The Life and Writing of Margaret Walker gives the long-overdue recognition to one of the seminal figures of American literature. Margaret Walker has been described by scholar Jerry Ward as "a national treasure" and by Nikki...