Toi Derricotte

"All my life I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness there, of remembering I am black. It may feel like emerging too quickly from deep in the ocean, or touching an electric fence, or like a deer paralyzed in the headlights of an oncoming car," writes Toi Derricotte, a light-skinned black woman and accomplished poet. This exquisitely written work began as sketchy journal entries over twenty years ago when Derricotte moved into an all-white neighborhood near New York City. "I wanted to capture the language of self-hate, the pain of re-emerging thought and buried memory and consciousness." The Black Notebooks is an intimate record of the author's encounters with family, neighbors, friends, students, and colleagues where she is forced to question what it means to be a black woman living in a racially divided world.

A literary sensation in Hungary now available in English, György Spiró's masterwork is at once a gripping page-turner, a magisterial historical epic, and a riotous road novel. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., Captivity recounts the adventures of Uri, a bookish, hapless young Roman Jew.

Features a collection of poems that describe such topics as her abusive father, family life, how the abuse affected her as an adult, and light-skinned blacks passing as whites.

"Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What's next for Black poetic expression?"--Back cover.