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Author
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English
Description
The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than...
A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this book, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away, and unearths the well of emotions she experienced long afterward as a result. For the first time, she reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence, a presence absent during much of the author's early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old...
Author
Language
English
Description
Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice--Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women...
Author
Language
English
Description
Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian's recounting of his experiences--in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory--reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help...
Author
Language
English
Description
The author grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard", hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other side by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common law. This is the author's powerful...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Medfield Juneteenth Display 2024
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Memoir Book Club Picks
More Lists...
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Memoir Book Club Picks
More Lists...
Description
The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.
"Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
[Lasell] LGBT+
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
STO: Stonewall Awards
Stonewall Awards
Medfield Memoirs for Adults - Critically Acclaimed
STO: Stonewall Awards
Stonewall Awards
Description
"Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir. Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence--into tumultuous relationships with his...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"From Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most important African American writers of the twentieth century, comes her riveting autobiography--now available in a limited Olive Edition.First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston's candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography--an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural south to a prominent place among the...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Award-winning journalist Herb Boyd, author of Sugar Ray Robinson's biography Pound for Pound, combines impeccable research with astute literary criticism in Baldwin's Harlem. Packed with telling anecdotes, this concise volume illuminates Baldwin's diverse views and his impressions of the community that would remain a consistent presence in virtually all his writing.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"She was brilliant, ambitious, and unafraid to break barriers. As the only member of a squad of twenty high-powered lawyers who was not a white male, she devised the strategy that in the 1930s sent Mafia chieftain Lucky Luciano to prison. She achieved so much--but what could she have accomplished if not for barriers of race and gender?..."--back cover.
"She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker's first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury. Throughout, Walker explores the theories and practices...
Author
Language
English
Description
The author describes her odyssey to Ghana in the 1960s, meant as a return to her African roots. Over a few years she transformed herself by learning to speak Fanti, dressing in Ghanian style and delving in politics. But after encountering racial prejudice and losing her son in a car crash, she returned to America.
Author
Publisher
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
In the biting, hilarious vein of What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life comes Ben Philippe's candid memoir-in-essays, chronicling a lifetime of being the Black friend in predominantly white spaces. From cheating his way out of swim tests to discovering stray family members in unlikely places, he finds the punchline in the serious while acknowledging the blunt truths of existing as a Black man in today's world....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this third self-contained volume of her autobiography, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou moves into the adult world, and the white world as well, as she marries, enters show business, and tours Europe and Africa in Porgy and Bess. As the book opens, Maya, in order to support herself and her young son, gets a job in a record shop run by a white woman. Suspicious of almost any kindness shown her, she is particularly confused...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Zora Neale Hurston is regarded as one of the pillars of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as one of the most important and influential African American writers of the past century. Here, Plant offers a biography of the literary master that takes her spirituality into account in both her life and her works in order to shape a fuller picture of the woman, the writer, and the philosopher that animated this gifted American author.
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