Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers
A Newbery Honor Book
A Caldecott Honor Book
A Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
A Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book
An Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award Book
An Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Honor Book
A Society of Illustrators Gold Medal Book

Named one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, the Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Horn Book Magazine, the News & Observer, BookPage, Chicago Public Library, and more

The barbershop is where the magic happens. Boys go in as lumps of clay and, with princely robes draped around their shoulders, a dab of cool shaving cream on their foreheads, and a slow, steady cut, they become royalty. That crisp yet subtle line makes boys sharper, more visible, more aware of every great thing that could happen to them when they look good: lesser grades turn into As; girls take notice; even a mother's hug gets a little tighter. Everyone notices.

A fresh cut makes boys fly.

This rhythmic, read-aloud title is an unbridled celebration of the self-esteem, confidence, and swagger boys feel when they leave the barber's chair--a tradition that places on their heads a figurative crown, beaming with jewels, that confirms their brilliance and worth and helps them not only love and accept themselves but also take a giant step toward caring how they present themselves to the world. The fresh cuts. That's where it all begins.

Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut is a high-spirited, engaging salute to the beautiful, raw, assured humanity of black boys and how they see themselves when they approve of their reflections in the mirror.

Educational resources for Crown can be found here.

The free-standing successor and next novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Last Thing You Surrender, Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s 54 Miles launches forward twenty years to the fateful weeks of March 1965--from the infamous Bloody Sunday march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 7th to the triumphant entry into Montgomery on the 25th that climaxed the voting rights campaign--and the families who find themselves confronting the past amid another flashpoint in American history.

Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents' home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time--and in the cruelest way imaginable--of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South she both hates and fears, and to a reckoning that may result in an incalculable loss.

Meanwhile, Thelma's brother Luther is also spiraling, but in a different way. Forty-two years after his parents were lynched before his eyes, and twenty years after the man who led the lynch mob walked out of court a free man, Luther has just made a shocking discovery. He's found the murderer, Floyd Bitters, helpless and enfeebled in a rest home--unable to move or even to speak. The old man is literally at Luther's mercy. And Luther, who has never overcome this trauma that defined his life, is suddenly forced to relive it all again as he grapples with the awful question of what justice now demands.

As the judge starring on the hit nationally syndicated television show Divorce Court, Lynn Toler witnesses, en masse, the thematic mistakes made in American marriages. She herself has also been wed for 22 years and has seen both the highs and lows of matrimony in her own marriage as well as the marriages of those close to her. While the national divorce rate hovers around the 50% threshold, there is a lot of chatter that marriage as we know it is an outdated institution--that we are too selfish, too unwilling to make sacrifices, and too misguided by elevated expectations of happiness to make marriage work.

While these points may hold some validity, a lot of this chatter is nothing new. So what's causing so many divorces and, perhaps even more importantly, what are we to do about it if we want marriage to survive? Drawing from both her professional career and personal life, Toler sees that the biggest impediment to marriage these days is that couples decide to take the plunge based almost entirely on the most irrational criteria: falling in love.

Making Marriage Work doesn't suggest that love has nothing to do with marriage at all; rather, Toler says that love by itself is simply not enough to make marriages survive. This book is a logical and simple guide to reintroducing some of the practicality of marriage that has leaked out of it over the years.

Marriage, Toler says, is a job, and it needs to be treated like one. However, the makeup and consistency of this job has changed so much over the past few decades that the old rules no longer apply. Making Marriage Work is an updated manual to help get the job of marriage done right in this day and age. It suggests specific procedures that should be put in place to bridge the gap between head over heels and happily ever after. It explains how to phrase things in order to span the great hormonal divide men and women often fall into when trying to talk to one another. It also discusses the very new and real challenges to marriage created in a culture often overwhelmed by the emphasis on (and ability to attain) instant gratification.

Replete with simple, no-nonsense rules, Divorce Court anecdotes, and stories about Judge Toler's own union, Making Marriage Work contains invaluable information couples can use today to secure their marital tomorrow.

In this unique, profoundly inspirational memoir, Divorce Court star Judge Lynn Toler shares her mother's wisdom for learning to conquer anger and become immune to insult.

Toler credits her mother's rules for life - a life that saw her grow up the daughter of a poor teen mother and endure a husband who suffered mental illness and alcoholism - with providing the grounding for her own success and happiness. Toler shows how the mindset of a black woman who knew how to make things work taught her the power of knowing how to manage one's emotional business--lessons that this book offers in wrenching stories written in spare and graceful prose.

My Mother's Rules is an unforgettable book that will captivate readers with its illustrations of how to rise above the most difficult circumstances and find peace and success in life.

The newest, most updated book on Prince available today--now updated with information about the afterlife of his work following his untimely death.

Famously reticent and perennially controversial, Prince was one of the few music superstars who remained, largely, an enigma--even up to his premature death on April 21, 2016. A fixture of the pop canon, Prince is widely held to be the greatest musician of his generation and will undoubtedly remain an inspiring and singular influence throughout our culture.

This revised and updated second edition of this meticulously researched biography is the most comprehensive work on Prince yet published. Unlike other Prince books, this one eschews speculation into the artist's highly guarded private life and instead focuses deep and sustained attention exactly where it should be: on his work. Acclaimed British novelist and critic Matt Thorne draws on years of research and dozens of interviews with Prince's intimate associates (many of whom have never spoken on record before) to examine every phase of the musician's 35-year career, including nearly every song--released and unreleased--that Prince has recorded. Originally released in the UK in 2012, this revised and updated second US edition of Prince includes updated content regarding work released and made available after the artist's death..

This astonishingly rich, almost encyclopedic biography is a must-have for any serious fan of Prince.

An inspiring collection of pithy, easy-to-recall one-liners and quotable short passages from historic and contemporary thought leaders throughout the African Diaspora.

Famous Black Quotations, first published in 1986, has long been the go-to resource for the eloquent words of Black history makers. In this new, expanded edition, Famous Black Quotations for the Twenty-First Century, editor Janet Cheatham Bell includes the words of people who have come to prominence in recent decades, such as Barack and Michelle Obama, Alicia Garza, John Legend, Colin Kaepernick, Kamala Harris, and Nikole Hannah-Jones. Bestselling author Bell has curated more than five hundred quotes along with dates, sources, and biographical information of the people quoted. This guide to significant events in the experiences of people of African descent can be used to educate and inspire. Much has changed in the past few decades as Black Americans speak out to demand fair treatment and equal opportunity, and Famous Black Quotations for the Twenty-First Century has been updated and repackaged to inspire a new generation.

Could you find the courage to do what's right in a world on fire?

Pulitzer-winning journalist and bestselling novelist (Freeman) Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s new historical page-turner is a great American tale of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United States.

An affluent white marine survives Pearl Harbor at the cost of a black messman's life only to be sent, wracked with guilt, to the Pacific and taken prisoner by the Japanese . . . a young black woman, widowed by the same events at Pearl, finds unexpected opportunity and a dangerous friendship in a segregated Alabama shipyard feeding the war . . . a black man, who as a child saw his parents brutally lynched, is conscripted to fight Nazis for a country he despises and discovers a new kind of patriotism in the all-black 761st Tank Battalion.

Set against a backdrop of violent racial conflict on both the front lines and the home front, The Last Thing You Surrender explores the powerful moral struggles of individuals from a divided nation. What does it take to change someone's mind about race? What does it take for a country and a people to move forward, transformed?

He Never Came Home is a collection of 22 personal essays written by girls and women who have been separated from their fathers by way of divorce, abandonment, or death. The contributors to this collection come from a wide range of different backgrounds in terms of race, socioeconomic status, religion, and geographic location. Their essays offer deep insights into the emotions related to losing one's father, including sadness, indifference, anger, acceptance--and everything in between.

This book, edited by Essence magazine's West Coast editor Regina R. Robertson, is first and foremost an offering to young girls and women who have endured the loss of their fathers. But it also speaks to mothers who are raising girls without a father present, offering important perspective into their daughter's feelings and struggles.

The essays in He Never Came Home are organized into three categories: Divorce, Distant, and Deceased. With essays by contributors such as Emmy Award-winning actress Regina King, fitness expert and New York Times best-selling author Gabby Reece, and television comedy writer Jenny Lee, this anthology illustrates the journey of the fatherless, and provides a space for these writers to express their pain, hope, and healing--minus any judgments and without apology.

Sing Her Name follows two musically gifted women whose lives overlap across the boundaries of time. This third novel by Rosalyn Story, whose critically acclaimed books treat the central role of Black people in American music, is her best and most rewarding yet.

Beautiful and brilliantly talented Celia DeMille is a nineteenth-century concert artist who has garnered fame, sung all over the world, and amassed a fortune. But prejudice bars her from achieving her place in history as one of the world's greatest singers, and she dies in poverty and obscurity.

In 21st-century New Orleans, Eden Malveaux, a thirty-something waitress with a beautiful but untutored voice, is the sole guardian of her 17-year-old brother. Motherless for most of their lives, she has struggled for years to make ends meet as she fights to keep the promise she made to their dying father: to protect her wayward brother and raise him as if he were her own child. After a hurricane displaces them to New York City, Eden seeks safe refuge--not only from the ensuing flood, but also to hide her brother from the law, while she works to divert him from a path of crime, prison, or worse.

Months into their New York stay, Eden's estranged Great Aunt Julia summons her back to New Orleans for a brief visit, and the older woman gives Eden something that alters the course of her life: a box she found in the midst of flooded rubble containing a hundred-year-old scrapbook and a mysterious and valuable gold pendant necklace belonging to one of the greatest singers in history--Celia DeMille.

Eden returns to New York, but as she explores the artifacts of Celia DeMille's extraordinary life, curiosity grows into obsession, then into an inspiration that propels Eden into a world she never dreamed. With the help of new friends, and buoyed by the diva's story, Eden's new life in New York takes a dramatic turn toward unimagined success.

But just as she is poised to make her mark on the world stage, her brother's dangerous choices catch up with them, and Eden must confront buried secrets from her complicated childhood. To face the promise of her future, Eden must first reconcile years of regrets and leave behind the guilt of the past--and perhaps even the brother she loves.

Winner of the 2020 Midwest Book Award in Autobiography/Memoir, The Color of Love is an unforgettable memoir about a mixed-race Jewish woman who, after fifteen years of estrangement from her racist great-aunt, helps bring her home when Alzheimer's strikes.

In 1970, three-day-old Marra B. Gad was adopted by a white Jewish family in Chicago. For her parents, it was love at first sight--but they quickly realized the world wasn't ready for a family like theirs.

Marra's biological mother was unwed, white, and Jewish, and her biological father was black. While still a child, Marra came to realize that she was a mixed-race, Jewish unicorn. In black spaces, she was not black enough or told that it was OK to be Christian or Muslim, but not Jewish. In Jewish spaces, she was mistaken for the help, asked to leave, or worse. Even in her own extended family, racism bubbled to the surface.

Marra's family cut out those relatives who could not tolerate the color of her skin--including her once beloved, glamorous, worldly Great-Aunt Nette. After they had been estranged for fifteen years, Marra discovers that Nette has Alzheimer's, and that only she is in a position to get Nette back to the only family she has left. Instead of revenge, Marra chooses love, and watches as the disease erases her aunt's racism, making space for a relationship that was never possible before.

The Color of Love explores the idea of yerusha, which means inheritance in Yiddish. At turns heart-wrenching and heartwarming, this is a story about what you inherit from your family--identity, disease, melanin, hate, and most powerful of all, love. With honesty, insight, and warmth, Marra B. Gad has written an inspirational, moving chronicle proving that when all else is stripped away, love is where we return, and love is always our greatest inheritance.

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair. Ashe is a fresh, new voice that addresses the importance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an accessible, humorous, and literary style sure to engage a wide variety of readers.

After leading a far-too-conventional life for forty years, Ashe began a long, arduous, uncertain process of locking his own hair in an attempt to step out of American convention. Black hair, after all, matters. Few Americans are subject to snap judgements like those in the African-American community, and fewer communities face such loaded criticism about their appearances, in particular their hair. Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles makes the argument that the story of dreadlocks in America can't be told except in front of the backdrop of black hair in America.

Ask most Americans about dreadlocks and they immediately conjure a picture of Bob Marley: on stage, mid-song, dreads splayed. When most Americans see dreadlocks, a range of assumptions quickly follow: he's Jamaican, he's Rasta, he plays reggae; he stinks, he smokes, he deals; he's bohemian, he's creative, he's counter-cultural. Few styles in America have more symbolism and generate more conflicting views than dreadlocks. To read dreadlocks is to take the cultural pulse of America. To read Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles is to understand a larger story about the truths and biases present in how we perceive ourselves and others. Ashe's riveting and intimate work, a genuine first of its kind, will be a seminal work for years to come.
Supplemental educator materials are available from the publisher.

Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam--a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army--decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all belonged.

At the same time, Sam's wife, Tilda, is being forced to walk at gunpoint with her owner and two of his other slaves from the charred remains of his Mississippi farm into Arkansas, in search of an undefined place that would still respect his entitlements as slaveowner and Confederate officer.

The book's third main character, Prudence, is a fearless, headstrong white woman of means who leaves her Boston home for Buford, Mississippi, to start a school for the former bondsmen, and thus honor her father's dying wish.

At bottom, Freeman is a love story--sweeping, generous, brutal, compassionate, patient--about the feelings people were determined to honor, despite the enormous constraints of the times. It is this aspect of the book that should ensure it a strong, vocal, core audience of African-American women, who will help propel its likely critical acclaim to a wider audience. At the same time, this book addresses several themes that are still hotly debated today, some 145 years after the official end of the Civil War. Like Cold Mountain, Freeman illuminates the times and places it describes from a fresh perspective, with stunning results. It has the potential to become a classic addition to the literature dealing with this period. Few other novels so powerfully capture the pathos and possibility of the era particularly as it reflects the ordeal of the black slaves grappling with the promise--and the terror--of their new status as free men and women.

Harold Washington was one of the most spellbinding and irresistible characters I have encountered in my 40 years in journalism and politics. Part philosopher, part street brawler and always entertaining, Harold was as big and ebullient as the town he came to lead. --David Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Barack Obama

Harold, the People's Mayor is the authorized biography of Chicago's first black mayor, written by the late civil rights activist and prolific author Dempsey Travis, a man whose personal friendship with Washington spanned more than 50 years. Travis drew on recollections, notes, and several hundred hours' worth of interviews with Washington and his close associates in order to craft a portrait of Washington that spans his childhood, military years, political career, and death. Travis gained deep insights into Washington during the years he knew him, both as a boy and a man, and those combined with his encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago politics have resulted in an essential work of political biography and Chicago history.

Published to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Washington's untimely passing, this is a firsthand personal account of the life and career of one of the country's most significant big-city mayors and influential African American politicians, a man who former President Barack Obama credits as an inspiration.

Moving, comprehensive, and well-researched, Harold, the People's Mayor is required reading for anyone interested in 20th-century big-city politics and in this remarkable figure and how he lived, worked, and rose to transform the political landscape of Chicago.

Justice While Black is a must-read for every young black male in America--and for everyone else who cares about their survival and well-being. This is a first-of-its-kind essential guide for African-American families about how to understand the criminal justice system, and about why that system continues to see black men as targets--and as dollar signs.

The book provides practical, straightforward advice on how to deal with specific legal situations: the threat of arrest, being arrested, being in custody, preparing for and undergoing a trial, and navigating the appeals and parole process. The primary goal of this book is to become a primer for African Americans on how to avoid becoming ensnared in the criminal justice system.

While the precarious safety of black males has received renewed interest in the past year because of the deaths of teenagers Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, the fact is that this group has always been under threat from the armed guardians of the white social order. The tactics have been modernized, but the impact is still devastating--we are witnessing an epic criminalization of the African-American community at levels never before seen since the end of slavery.

From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freshwater Road has been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights Movement. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting this era.

When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer.

By summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her--about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that--more than ten years after first appearing in print--continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction.

This powerful novel of three generations of black men bound by blood -- and by histories of mutual love, fear, and frustration -- gives author Leonard Pitts the opportunity to explore the painful truths of black men's lives, especially as they play out in the fraught relations of fathers and sons. As 50-year-old Mo tries to reach out to his increasingly tuned-out son Trey (who himself has become an unwed teenaged father), he realizes that the burden of grief and anger he carries over his own estranged father has everything to do with the struggles he encounters with his son. Part road novel, part character study, and part social critique, and written in compulsively readable prose, Before I Forget is the work of a major new voice in American fiction. Pitts knows inside and out the difficulties facing black men as they grapple with the complexities of their roles as fathers.

Like the other women of her island, Lana expected to become a diver, harvesting jewels from a native fish. But during her initiation dive, she finds a blood-red jewel that marks her as someone with power. Though she hides the jewel, the mark it represents will drive her away from her home island and into an apprenticeship with a one-armed witch. Alaya Dawn Johnson has created an unforgettable coming-of-age story set in a world where wielding the power of magic requires understanding the true meaning of sacrifice.

In The Burning City, Alaya Dawn Johnson continues the trilogy begun with her debut, Racing the Dark, delving deeper into the world of magic wielded by women who understand the dark trade-offs of power and sacrifice. Lana, the heroine, has become the black ange l --a harbinger of destruction unheard of in the islands for 500 years. Nui'ahi, the sleeping volcano of the great city Essel, has erupted. In the chaos, the city is reshaping itself and violence threatens from all corners. A rebel movement has formed in the destroyed heart of the city, determined to oust Kohaku, the mad Mo'i of Essel. Lana wants no part of the rebels' cause -- the death spirit still chases her, and the great witch Akua has kidnapped Lana's mother. But the more Lana looks for her mother, the more she is drawn into the city's political conflicts. As Kohaku descends deeper into madness, determined to subdue the city by any means necessary, his wife has run away to the fire temple, where she too is slowly converted to the rebel's cause. When long-running tensions spill over into civil war, Lana must make her hardest decision yet: her mother's life, or a city's freedom?

Story weaves this tale of family ties and secrets back and forth between past and present, using finely drawn characters, jazz settings, and taut emotions to build tension toward reconciliation. The book's powerful evocation of love and family should appeal to a wide cross section of readers. --Booklist

When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, chef and widower Simon Fortier knows how he plans to face the storm--riding it out inside his long-time home in the city's Treme neighborhood, just as he has through so many storms before. But when the levees break and the city is torn apart, Simon disappears. His son, Julian, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, rushes home to a New Orleans he left years before to search for his father.

As Julian crisscrosses the city, fearing the worst, he reconnects with Sylvia, Simon's companion of many years; Parmenter, his father's erstwhile business partner and one of the most successful restaurateurs in New Orleans; and Velmyra, the woman Julian left behind when he moved to New York. Julian's search for Simon deepens as he finds himself drawn into the troubled history of Silver Creek, the extravagantly beautiful piece of land where his father grew up, and closer once again to Velmyra. As he tries to come to grips with his father's likely fate, Julian slowly gains a deeper, richer understanding of his father and the city he loved so much, while unraveling the mysteries of Silver Creek.

A sweeping love story about how long-buried family secrets devastate the marriage of a brilliant musician and his wife. Homeless L.J. Tillman is a jazz saxophonist whose life has been torn apart. When the painful secret that L.J. had kept all his life had finally been revealed, it shattered his marriage to Olivia, a promising singer who works as a beautician. More Than You Know is the elegantly crafted story of how this troubled couple rescues their marriage: shaken to the core, they discover that truth conforms to its own rules, and that love can endure even the most profound injuries. Rosalyn Story, herself a successful musician, has created a lyrical, emotionally consuming page-turner that delves deeply into the mysteries of love, family, and marriage.