Dec 1999

Title: She
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Author: Saul Stacey Williams
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Publisher: Simon and Schuster Inc.
Date Published: June 1999
Format: Paperback And CD - $9.60 (plus shipping and tax)

"...the all time best selling book of poetry on AALBC.com. Who says "poetry does not sell?"" -- Troy Johnson AALBC.com

She is a fascinating and unique collection of interconnected poems by this multi-talented star -- and marks the beginning of an incredible and totally original artistic career.

Title: And All These Roads Be Luminous; Selected Poems 1969-1993
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Author: Angela Jackson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Date Published: November 1997
Format: Trade Paper

Drawing from earlier works contained in the chapbooks VooDoo/Love Magic, The Greenville Club, Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E, and The Man with the White Liver, And All These Roads Be Luminous is filled with an impressive variety of characters engaged in compelling explorations of identity, creativity, spiritual experience, and the rites and rituals of race and sexuality. Jackson moves with ease from the personal to the historical: filled alternately with wonder, righteous anger, tenderness, and a tangible intensity, Jackson's is rich and passionate verse brimming with poetic surprises.

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#3

Title: Some Love, Some Pain, Some Time: Stories
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Author: J. California Cooper
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Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated
Date Published: September 1996
Format: Trade Paper

Employing her characteristic themes of romance, heartbreak, struggle, and faith, this collection by the award-winning author of Homemade Love offers inspiration, laughter, instruction, and pure enjoyment. "(Cooper's) power comes from sticking to her instinct, which is to tell a story, plain and simple."--The Washington Post.

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#4

Title: Giovanni's Room
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Author: James Baldwin
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Publisher: Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated
Date Published: November 1973
Format: Trade Paper

Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart.

"A young American involved with both a woman and a man... Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity." -- The New York Times

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#5

Title: Africana; The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience
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Author: Henry Louis Gates (Editor), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Editor)
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Publisher: Basic Books
Date Published: October 1999
Format: Trade Cloth

In 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois dreamed of editing an "Encyclopedia Africana" filled with all that scholars knew of the history, literature and art of the great continent and its diaspora. Such a tome, Du Bois hoped, would, like Diderot's Encyclop die, serve as a springboard for future scholarship and a bulwark against racist misconceptions. At the century's close, editors Appiah and Gates -- an African and African-American respectively -- have fulfilled Du Bois's vision with aplomb. For this accessible, fascinating volume, the two Harvard professors have commissioned and condensed more than 3000 articles by more than 400 scholars.

Though the bulk of the entries are devoted to the African continent and its descendant cultures in Latin America, the Caribbean and North America, the encyclopedia also addresses the African presence in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world (each article is color coded for easy reference). Entries range from a paragraph on Abaku s, "all-male secret societies created by African slaves living in Cuba during the mid-19th century," to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's six-page essay on "Women and the Black Baptist Church." The selections, which run the gamut from the Middle Passage, Rastafarians, the Montgomery bus boycott, rap and every African country, are notable for their clear presentation of facts and their cogent, fair-minded analysis. Some entries, such as John Burdick's "Myth of Racial Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Interpretation," are really treatises on significant social issues. And the many minibiographies of accomplished artists--such as actor Paul Robeson, singer Diana Ross and saxophonist Charlie Parker--highlight the tremendous impact African-Americans have had on North American culture. Bursting with information and enhanced by contributions from its illustrious advisory board, which includes Jamaica Kincaid, Nell Irvin Painter, Cornel West and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, this book belongs on every family's reference shelf. - Publishers Weekly

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#6

Title: The Creation
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Author: James Weldon Johnson, James E. Ransome (Illustrator)
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Publisher: Holiday House, Inc.
Date Published: September 1995
Format: Trade Paper
A poem based on the story of creation from the first book of the Bible.

Ages 5 to 9
This is an illustrated version of James Weldon Johnson's poem based onthe book of Genesis. It was written in 1919 but later appeared "in God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse {BRD 1927}. In the poem, Mr. Johnson tells the biblical story of God's creation of the world, from the first night andday to the shaping of a lump of clay to form a human being."

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#7

Title: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/when the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem
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Author: Ntozake Shange
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Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Date Published: August 1997
Format: Trade Paper

"For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf is a dauntlessly provocative and forceful play about the difficulties of being black and female in the twentieth century. It is a ôchoreopoemö a form invented by its author, Ntozake Shange. It consists of a series of twenty poems spoken by seven women, each of whom is dressed in a different color: red, orange, yellow, green, purple, and blueùthe six colors of the rainbowùand brown, a neutral color that represents the earth and flesh. The women speak the poems as monologues and occasionally as a chorus; they also sing and dance. Through their poems, the women share stories of the joy, pain, suffering,strength, and resilience of black women from an exclusively feminist perspective. Their poems use potent and often profune language to throw a spotlight on destructive relationships with black men and on the healing power that women find among one another."
-- from Sacred Fire

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#8

Title: Flyy Girl
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Author: Omar Tyree, Designed by Deirdre C. Amthor
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Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Date Published: October 1997
Format: Trade Paper

The dialog in this coming-of-age African American story by Tyree, who self-published two books before getting his big break, is some of the best this reviewer has read in a long time. Tyree has a way making each phrase of every conversation true to life, whether spoken by a child or an adult. The story begins at Tracy Ellison's sixth birthday party. We follow her through her parent's shaky marriage to grade school and high school. Although the story does not venture much beyond Tracey's boy-chasing escapades and an occasional side plot about her next-door-neighbor, Raheema, the book is an entertaining diversion. Tyree writes so well that readers will put up with Tracey, who is selfish and often unkind. The author captures growing up in the Eighties with a subtle and finely rendered backdrop of songs and mischief reminiscent of the era. This should be enough to keep folks reading to the mildly rushed ending while hoping that the nasty little "flyy girl," Tracy, learns a few lessons along the way.
-- Recommended for large collections.Shirley Gibson Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich. (Library Journal)

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#9

Title: No More Sheets; The Truth about Sex
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Author: Juanita Bynum
Publisher: Pneuma Life Publishing
Date Published: March 1998
Format: Trade Cloth

There has hever been a more needed message to reach people who have suffered with their ability to maintain virtuous relationships. Many sincere, well-meaning Christians secretly wrestle with their sexuality and lust. This personal issue has trapped many of us, but God longs to heal what we've been afraid to reveal. Juanita Bynum pulls the covers off this powerful struggle. This message is your breakthrough to wholeness and holiness.

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#10

Title: Single Mom
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Author: Omar Tyree
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Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Date Published: September 1998
Format: Trade Cloth

After more than ten years of raising her two sons alone, Denise Stewart finds herself again involved with both of her sons' fathers as well as in a relationship with a new man.

Jimmie, the father of her older child, suddenly wants a major role in his son's life. After being an absent father for thirteen years, he discovers his teenager is a top basketball prospect. That's when Jimmie decides to make some time to spend with his son.

Walter, the father of Denise's second son, is trying to gain custody of his twelve-year-old. After attending the Million Man March in Washington, Walter believes he should assume full responsibility for his son instead of just for two weekends out of each month.

And truck driver Dennis is failing in love with Denise, and is fond of her boys. Although he is uncertain whether he wants the burden of a ready-made family, he also feels insecure in an intimate relationship with a white-collar woman who earns more than he does.

All this as Denise runs her own thriving business, co-chairs a single mothers' organization with her best friend Camellia, and struggles to keep faith in her family. Suddenly, for this single mom, success takes on an all-new meaning in her increasingly complex life.

Omar Tyree offers a provocative look at the emotional lives of three black men as they grapple with their roles and changing views as fathers and lovers. And, at the center of this compelling novel, Tyree creates a single mother of striking character and independence.

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