New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe sweeps readers back to the streets, porches, and parlors of civil rights-era Ohio to bring to life the first steps of an enduring friendship between two girls from opposite sides of the track. . . Annette Goode is a shy, awkward, overweight child with a terrible secret. Frightened and ashamed, Annette withdraws into a world of books and food. But the summer Annette turns thirteen, something incredible happens: Rhoda Nelson chooses her as a friend. Dazzling, generous Rhoda, who is everything Annette is not--gorgeous, slim, and worldly--welcomes Annette into the heart of her eccentric family, which includes her handsome and dignified father;her lovely, fragile "Muh'Dear;" her brooding, dangerous brother Jock;and her colorful white relatives--half-crazy Uncle Johnny, sultry Aunt Lola, and scary, surly Granny Goose. With Rhoda's help, Annette survives adolescence and blossoms as a woman. But when her beautiful best friend makes a stunning confession about a horrific childhood crime, Annette's world will never be the same. "A coming-of-age journey depicted with wit, poignancy and bite." --Publishers Weekly

This volume features in-depth, oral interviews with eleven incarcerated women, each of whom offers a narrative of her life and her reading experiences within prison walls. The women share powerful stories about their complex and diverse efforts to negotiate difficult relationships, exercise agency in restrictive circumstances, and find meaning and beauty in the midst of pain. Their shared emphases on abuse, poverty, addiction, and mental illness illuminate the pathways that lead many women to prison and suggest possibilities for addressing the profound social problems that fuel crime. Framing the narratives within an analytic introduction and reflective afterword, Megan Sweeney highlights the crucial intellectual work that the incarcerated women perform despite myriad restrictions on reading and education in U.S. prisons. These women use the limited reading materials available to them as sources of guidance and support and as tools for self-reflection and self-education. Through their creative engagements with books, the women learn to reframe their own life stories, situate their experiences in relation to broader social patterns, deepen their understanding of others, experiment with new ways of being, and maintain a sense of connection with their fellow citizens on both sides of the prison fence.

From the author of The Sistahs' Rules and her husband comes a Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus for African Americans.Denene Millner's sassy, shrewd reaction to The Rules became a bestseller. The Sistahs' Rules spent six months on the BlackBoard list. Then, proving the value of her own advice about dating and mating, Denene married Brother Mr. Right, Nick Chiles. Once she'd laid claim to his heart, she took a really long look at his head to find out what his words and actions really meant. Together they decided to go boldly where few couples dare: inside the minds of a sistah and a brotha to reveal the real deal on what Black men think of commitment, monogamy, and other mysteries--and what sistahs know about staying true to themselves. What Brothers Think, What Sistahs Know is the first book for African Americans that decodes the inscrutable ways of the opposite sex. In this funny, honest, provocative book, Millner and Chiles step across the great divide to create--once and for all--real understanding between sistahs and brothers. They give the real deal on: * The perfect date * Why brothers think all sistahs are angry * Why so many men could run down Michael Johnson in an effort to escape commitment * Whether it's fair for sistahs to scream when brothers chase white girls * Why good sex matters What Brothers Think, What Sistahs Know covers everything from first dates to lasting commitments, from myths and misunderstandings between brothas and sistahs to the kind of communication that fosters love and respect. It reveals, for the very first time, the motivations and fears coursing through that warm-blooded animal on the other side of the bed.

"A fascination study of the richest vein of black folk music in America." --

"In Wisteria, Kwame Dawes finds poignant meaning in the landscape and history of Sumter, a small town in central South Carolina. Here the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century - teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk - unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The poems move with the narrative of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths. These are poems of beauty and insight that pay homage to the women who told Dawes their stories, and that, at the same time, find a path beyond these specific narratives to something embracingly human. Few poets have managed to enter the horror of Jim Crow America with the fresh insight and sharply honed detail that we see in Dawes's writing. With all good southern songs of spiritual and emotional truth, Dawes understands that redemption is essential and he finds it in the pure music of his art. Dawes, the Ghanaian-born, Jamaican poet is not an interloper here, but a man who reminds us of the power of the most human and civilizing gift of empathy and the shared memory of the Middle Passage and its aftermath across the black diaspora. These are essential poems."--Publisher's website.