Catalog Search Results
1) Swing time
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Summary
Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either --
Author
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"Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this extraordinary novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her...
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"Lou, a young Black woman, wakes up in an alley in 1930s Los Angeles, nearly naked and with no memory of how she got there or where she's from, only a fleeting sense that this isn't the first time she's found herself in similar circumstances. Taken in by a caring foster family, Lou dedicates herself to her education while trying to put her mysterious origins behind her. She'll go on to become the first Black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times,...
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Series
Brown sisters volume 2
Summary
Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown, and an occasional roll in the hay to relieve all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. Romantic partners, whatever their gender, are a distraction at best and a drain at worst. So Dani asks the universe for the perfect friend-with-benefits--someone who knows the score and knows their way around the bedroom. When big, brooding security...
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Series
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"A young black British woman with a popular student radio show that dishes out relationship advice finds her show and her reputation on the line after she makes out with a man she publicly denounced"--
Sharp-tongued (and secretly soft-hearted) Kiki Banjo has just made a huge mistake. As an expert in relationship-evasion and the host of the popular student radio show Brown Sugar, she's made it her mission to make sure the women of the African-Caribbean...
Author
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Summary
"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath...
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"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...
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''I have more privilege than any person in my family. And I'm still screwed." From award-winning author Olivia Wenzel comes a captivating and unsettling literary debut about race, politics, feminism, motherhood, nationality and enduring love. A young woman attends a play about the Berlin Wall coming down and is the only Black person in the audience. She is sitting with her boyfriend by a bathing lake and four neo-Nazis show up. In New York, she witnesses...
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In Singapore, three very different women--Dara, a workaholic lawyer from the UK; Amaka, a sharp-tongued banker from Nigeria; and Lillian, a pianist turned "trailing spouse" from the United States--find their lives inexplicably intertwined upon the arrival of a handsome and mysterious man from Geneva who brings their worlds crashing down.
12) Maame
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""An utterly charming and deeply moving portrait of the joys--and the guilt--of trying to find your own way in life." --Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author "Meeting Maame feels like falling in love for the first time: warm, awkward, joyous, a little bit heartbreaking and, most of all, unforgettable." --Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi but in my case, it means...
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Wend Kuuni is a landmark in African filmmakers' attempts to "return to the sources" of their culture, to recover a "usable" African past to solve the problems of the African present. Filmmaker Gaston Kaboré adapts the measured rhythms of traditional African storytelling to create an authentically African cinematic language. He retells an ancient fable about a mute, memoryless orphan, driven from his homeland, who is renamed Wend Kuuni ("God's Gift")...
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Jay is forced to continually cover for his sister, Nicole, who hangs out with the wrong crowd; however, Jay can't deal with it any more. Soon after, Nic fails to return home. When she's deemed missing, the police barely bother to search for her; she's just another lost Black girl. Jay feels guilty and he thinks, "If I hadn't hung up on her that night, she would be home spending time with our grandma. If I was a better brother, she'd be finishing senior...
15) Assembly
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"The narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend's family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can't escape the question: is it time to take it all apart? Assembly is a story about the stories we live within--those of race and class, safety...
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Formats
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"In these eight ... explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and ... author of Lower Ed--embraces her ... role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society"--Dust jacket flap.
17) Back to natural
Summary
Documentary film that reveals the shocking truth about hair, politics, and racial identity in Black communities and beyond. Directed by New York City based clinical psychologist Gillian Scott-Ward, the film was inspired by the work she was doing in her clinical practice and her own drive to go natural. Back to Natural is a powerful call for healing that takes a grassroots approach to exploring the globalized policing of natural Black hair. Filmed...
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"Raised in sleepy English suburbia, Georgina Lawton was no stranger to homogeneity. Her parents were white; her friends were white; there was no reason for her to think she was any different. But over time her brown skin and dark, kinky hair frequently made her a target of prejudice. In Georgina's insistently color-blind household, with no acknowledgement of her difference or access to black culture, she lacked the coordinates to make sense of who...
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Cinnamon Haynes has fought hard for a life she never thought was possible--a good man by her side, a steady job as a career counselor at a local community college, and a cozy house in a quaint little beach town. It may not look like much, but it's more than she ever dreamed of or what her difficult childhood promised. Her life's mantra is to be good, quiet, grateful. Until something shifts and Cinnamon is suddenly haunted by a terrifying question:...
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With her success riding on her ability to keep her real identity secret, Zillah, an orphan from the slums of London who has achieved theatrical fame as The Great Amazonia, "a savage queen from darkest Africa," finds her planning upended when she is torn between two men--a mysterious black gentleman and her boss's friend who offers her the world