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Winner of the 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Shortlisted for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood from an award-winning author. Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decisi...
Two friends from the mountains of eastern Kentucky try to retain their friendship when one of them is invited to play the Apollo with a jazz group while the other sinks lower in her poor, backward, backwoods life.
There is a global crisis in maternal health care for black women. In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement. Mixing scholarly, activist, and personal perspectives, the book shows readers how they too can change lives, one birth at a time.
The residents of Water Street are hardworking, God-fearing people who live in a seemingly safe and insulated neighborhood within a small Kentucky town: "Water Street is a place where mothers can turn their backs to flip a pancake or cornmeal hoecake on the stove and know our children are safe." But all is not as it seems as the secret lives of neighbors and friends are revealed in interconnected tales of love, loss, truth, and tragedy. In this critically acclaimed short story collection, Crystal Wilkinson peels back the intricate layers that form the fabric of this community and its inhabitants -- revealing emotionally raw, multifaceted tales of race, class, gender, mental illness, and interpersonal relationships. The thirteen succinct stories offer fragmented glimpses of an overarching narrative that emerges, lyrical and fierce. Featuring a new foreword and a new afterword which illuminate Wilkinson's artistic achievement, this captivating work is poised to delight a new generation of readers.
Appalachia Now hops on the back of a motorcycle for a wild ride through the hills we know best�Vicco, Hazard, branches, mine access roads. Fiddle tunes and black lung and the photoelectric gleam of stars. But these haunting stories take us way beyond the familiar. They are as skillfully wrought with the visible world as they are with the luminous being in the hollow of a cupped hand. I couldn�t put this book down and when I did, my heart ached to step back inside the pages. Karen McElmurray
Twenty-one vivid, moving essays on caesarean birth “No one talks about C-sections as surgery,” writes SooJin Pate. “They talk about it as if it’s just another way—albeit more convenient way—of giving birth.” The twenty-one essays in My Caesarean add back to the conversation the missing voices of a vast, invisible sisterhood. Robin Schoenthaler reflects: “A C-section for us meant life.” And yet, women who don’t give birth vaginally—by choice or necessity—often feel stigmatized. “My son’s birth was not a test I needed to pass,” writes Sara Bates. “As if growing a human inside another human for nine months then caring for it the rest of its life isn’t enough,...
A debut novel told with humor, intelligence, and heart, a “funny but insightful look at teachers in the workplace…reminiscent of the TV show The Office but set in an urban high school” (The Washington Post), perfect for fans of Tom Perrotta and Laurie Gelman. Roxanna Elden’s “laugh-out-loud funny satire” (Forbes) is a brilliantly entertaining and moving look at our education system. Each new school year brings familiar challenges to Brae Hill Valley, a struggling high school in one the biggest cities in Texas. But the teachers also face plenty of personal challenges and this year, they may finally spill over into the classroom. English teacher Lena Wright, a spoken-word poet, can...
“The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.” —Claudia Rankine in the New York Times The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes. An array of writers—including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets. This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks’s daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks’s legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.
Is witchcraft or revenge to blame when men from a remote Hungarian village start dropping dead? Teenage Sari's smart, inquisitive nature would be enough to make her an outcast in her remote Hungarian village; add to that her knowledge of healing herbs, and she's widely considered a witch. When the men leave to fight World War I, however, everything changes. Without their oppressive and often abusive husbands and boyfriends, the women at last taste freedom and independence, and Sari makes friends. She and a number of other women in the village even begin relationships with injured Italian POWs housed nearby. Swept up in an intellectual and passionate love affair with a university professor, S...
In the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, the need for love is obsessive, self-destructive and unpredictable. It takes us to forbidden places, confronts us with gruesome truths, and leads us beyond our control. In the unsettling 'Strip Poker,' a reckless teenage girl must turn the tables on a group of threatening young men. Can she outplay them? In the award-winning 'Smother!' a daughter's nightmarish childhood memory brings trouble to the door of her bourgeois mother. Which of them will win? In 'The First Husband,' a jealous man discovers his wife lied about her first marriage, and plans a cruel revenge. Will he go through with it? In these and other powerful tales, children move beyond their parents' reach, wives and husbands wake up as strangers, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and lives hang in the balance. In ten razor-sharp stories, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.