Posted on: January 14, 2022
by Brandy Colbert
The Tulsa race massacre, which took place one hundred years ago in 1921, is a part of our American history that has escaped widespread attention until recently. After watching the pilot episode of HBO's Watchmen, which starts out...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: January 7, 2022
by Edward Bruce Bynum
This third edition demonstrates how all modern human beings, regardless of ethnic or racial categorizations, share a common deeper identity, both psychically and genetically - a primordial African unconscious. Edward Bruce Bynum, Ph.D...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: December 24, 2021
by Ibi Zoboi; illustrated by Loveis Wise
Poetic text by National Book Award Finalist Ibi Zoboi and expansive art by Loveis Wise bring the seven principles of Kwanzaa to life in The People Remember. Honoring the oral tradition of Black history being passed ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: December 17, 2021
by Clint Smith
The New York Times has just named this book to their list of the top ten books of 2021. We strongly agree with their choice; Americans urgently need to reckon with the legacy of slavery and with the many monuments to our slave-holding past. ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: December 10, 2021
by Bethany C. Morrow
Set in Portland, Oregon, this young adult novel centers on 16 year old Tavia and her best friend, Effie. Tavia and Effie are both Black girls and have to deal with normal high school things like exes and classmate rivalries. But Tavia ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: November 26, 2021
based on a television episode written by Kathy Waugh
This beginner-reader, based on the popular PBS Kids show, features an Alaskan Native kid named Molly. Molly is joined by her best friends Trini and Tooey on many adventures in beautiful Alaska. They are ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: November 19, 2021
by Patricia Romney
Congratulations to local author Patricia Romney, whose new book has received glowing advance reviews. From 1970 to 1980, the Third World Women’s Alliance was one of the earliest groups advocating for what came to be known as in...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: November 12, 2021
by Anton Treuer
In our antiracist efforts to dismantle white supremacy, we have to also look at this country's relationship with its Indigenous communities. Both Black and Indigenous people have suffered under white-led systems of power for centur...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: October 29, 2021
by Safiya Umoja Noble
Safiya Umoja Noble was selected in September as one of this year’s MacArthur (Genius) Award winners for her important work about the harm being done to society by search engines. Google and similar online tools may look neut...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: October 22, 2021
by Tiffany Jackson
Need a spooky read to get you in the mood for Halloween? Tiffany Jackson's latest young adult novel White Smoke will do the trick. High schooler Mari is not pleased that her family uprooted from California and moved her to some ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: October 15, 2021
by Nicole Hodges Persley and Monica White Ndounou
Racism is present in all types of employment, including acting. Here is an acting guide specifically for people who are nonwhite. The authors’ practical advice focuses on stage audition skills but...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: October 8, 2021
by Louisa Jaggar & Shari Becker, illustrated by Floyd Cooper
This engaging picture book biography tells the story of James Herman Banning, the first African American pilot to complete a flight across the country in 1932. Captivated by flight from child...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 24, 2021
by Varian Johnson
Varian Johnson's The Parker Inheritance is a masterpiece of a middle grade novel wrapping mystery, history, friendship, and family into one seamless narrative. Beginning with a simple premise - a summer, two friends, and the trea...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 17, 2021
by Tiya Miles
The story behind this heart-breaking book began when Rose, an enslaved woman in 1850s South Carolina, gave her young daughter, Ashley, a sack containing among other items a braid of hair and a handful of pecans on the eve of Ashley's...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 10, 2021
by Jason Reynolds
Last year, Jason Reynolds adapted his award-winning young adult novel in verse into a graphic novel beautifully illustrated by Danica Novgordoff. This short but powerful story takes you on an elevator ride down filled with ghosts and diff...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 3, 2021
by Natalie Baszile
Harvest season is a good time to explore Black people’s connection to the land, and this beautiful volume does just that, covering the years from Emancipation to the present. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farm...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 27, 2021
by Derrick Barnes illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton
Whether you're feeling excited, anxious, curious (or all three at once!) this empowering first day of school picture book will give readers a boost of confidence. From the moment he wakes up on the f...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 20, 2021
by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of the leading physicists of her generation, at work on the origins of spacetime at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics. She is also one of the fewer than one hundred Black w...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 13, 2021
by Dhonielle Clayton, et al.
This YA collection of short stories written by YA superstars such as Angie Thomas, Tiffany Jackson, Nic Stone, and Nicola Yoon is super charming. The stories sweetly entangle during a NYC summer heatwave as 6 pairs of Black tee...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 6, 2021
by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar
This charming and hilarious sister duo take on the challenging topic of racism. Older sister Lacey Lamar lives in Omaha; her younger sibling Amber left their hometown to become a comedy writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: July 30, 2021
by Yaba Blay
For generations in this country, a black person has been commonly recognized as someone with any known Black ancestry, the “one-drop rule.” This beautiful book explores whether the social and political landscape has changed in recent times. Si...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: July 23, 2021
by Kwame Mbalia
If you're seeking a page-turning adventure perfect for summer reading, look no further than Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia. From the eye-catching cover to the final page, the story of relatable protagonist...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: July 16, 2021
by Kwame Onwuachi
In 2019, Kwame Onwuachi received much praise for his food. Food & Wine magazine named him one of its Best New Chefs, the James Beard Awards christened him Rising Star Chef of the Year, and Esquire chose him as Chef of the Year, identi...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: July 2, 2021
by Yusef Salaam
Yusef Salaam was only 15 years old in 1989 when he and four other teens were falsely accused of the brutal rape of a Central Park jogger. He was imprisoned for seven years, but the Central Park Five were not exonerated until 2002 when one o...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: June 17, 2021
by Saeed Jones
During Pride Month, we celebrate great memoirs like this one by a highly regarded poet who was raised in the South by a single mother. In a home where sexuality was never discussed, Saeed Jones struggled to understand what it meant to be gay...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: June 11, 2021
by George Johnson
This 2020 memoir manifesto is the perfect coming-of-age read to celebrate pride this month. Johnson explores the meaning of blackness, queerness, and toxic masculinity and he does so with honesty and vulnerability. His casual narrative vo...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: May 28, 2021
by Megan Madison & Jessica Ralli; art by Isabel Roxas
Research has shown that children begin recognizing race a few months after birth, and that talking about issues like race and gender from the age of two helps children understand what they see, incr...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: May 14, 2021
by Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi
Tell Me Who You Are is a wonderful collection of stories gathered by two teens on their gap year before college. They traveled around the country and asked people how race, culture, and intersectionality had impacted their li...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: May 7, 2021
by Rebecca Carroll
Everyone interested in transracial adoption would be wise to read this new memoir. The author, a black cultural critic, recounts her story of being adopted as a young child by a white family from rural New Hampshire. She was raised in an...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: April 30, 2021
by James Avery Smith
Once only available to those visiting our Special Collections, this important book, published in 1999 by the New England Genealogical Society, can now be borrowed and read at home. Using tax lists, probate and land records, town record...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: April 23, 2021
by Trina Greene Brown
Parenting For Liberation was launched as a virtual platform in 2016 by activist-mama Trina Greene Brown. In her introduction to this guidebook she states that the blog and podcast were created to "...connect, inspire, and uplift ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: April 16, 2021
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
For National Poetry Month, we are pleased to highlight this volume of poetry written about Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Award-winning poet Jeffers spent fifteen years research...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: April 2, 2021
by Julian Bond
How lucky were the students at Harvard and other American universities who were able to take a class with Julian Bond. Along with being a famed civil rights activist, author, chairman of the NAACP, and Georgia state representative and senato...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: March 26, 2021
by Ashley Bryan
Based on an original estate-appraisal document from 1828, Ashley Bryan's poetry gives voices to 11 enslaved individuals, imagining not only their daily lives but their hopes for the future. While the document that inspired these po...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: March 19, 2021
by Breeshia Wade
The author, a Black end-of-life caregiver and chaplain, looks at the significance of grief to Black people. In particular she connects sorrow to the ongoing trauma of systemic racism. She encourages readers to attend to their grief so that...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: March 12, 2021
by Angie Thomas
Concrete Rose is the prequel to the number one New York Times best-seller, The Hate U Give. Set 17 years in the past, it follows Starr's father, Maverick, as he navigates growing up while raising an infant son and having to make di...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: February 25, 2021
edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
This bestseller marks a milestone in the study of African American history. It is the result of research conducted for the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: February 18, 2021
by Rita L. Hubbard; illustrated by Oge Mora
This picture book biography tells the inspiring story of Mary Walker, who learned to read at the age of 116. Born enslaved in 1848, Walker was emancipated as a teenager, and was gifted a Bible that she longed to ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: February 3, 2021
by Resmaa Menakem
Resmaa Menakem approaches the problem of racism from his perspective as a therapist. He explains that racism is embedded in the bodies of blacks and whites in this country. Blacks experience everyday threats and respond by fighting, fleei...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: January 26, 2021
by Julius Lester
On what would have been his 82nd birthday, we celebrate a distinguished Amherst author, civil rights activist, professor, musician, and photographer. Julius Lester wrote 31 award-winning children’s books as well as nonfiction and fiction f...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: January 8, 2021
by J. Drew Lanham
In honor of National Bird Day (January 5), we have chosen a remarkable memoir published in 2016 by an African-American birder and naturalist. The Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, J. Drew Lanham has writte...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: January 7, 2021
edited by Ibi Zoboi
This 2019 anthology of young adult short stories is a wonderful offering of modern Black voices. Featuring 16 excellent Black authors such as Nic Stone and Jason Reynolds, my favorite part of reading this was the diversity of stories to...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: December 28, 2020
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
This highly acclaimed new book is winner of the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: December 15, 2020
A Comprehensive List of What Not to Say to Black People, for Well-Intentioned People of Pallor by Adam Smyer
How do you write something humorous about racism in America? If you are Adam Smyer, an attorney, martial artist, and mediocre bass player,...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: December 15, 2020
by Kacen Callender
This bittersweet middle grade book takes us to the bayous of small town Louisiana where homophobia and racism are very real things that twelve year old Kingston James must deal with. Mourning the sudden death of his older brother, King s...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: December 1, 2020
by Michele Harper
The author of this eloquent memoir is an ER doctor and a practitioner of yoga and meditation. Here she recounts how she overcame racist colleagues, a background of domestic violence, and the trauma of seeing suffering people every day at ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: November 20, 2020
by Kamala D. Harris
The results of the presidential election are now acknowledged by most Americans, and for the first time a woman of color was on the winning ticket! Kamala Harris, the daughter of an economist from Jamaica and a cancer researcher from In...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: November 20, 2020
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; adapted by Jean Mendoza & Debbie Reese
In our antiracist efforts to dismantle white supremacy, we have to also look at this country's relationship with its Indigenous communities. Both Black and Indigenous people have suffered ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: November 4, 2020
by Ruha Benjamin
An African American Studies scholar turns a bright light on technology, illuminating how racism and inequality underpin its newest creations. From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to unders...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: October 29, 2020
by William A. Darity, Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen
Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. William Darity, an economist at Duke University and an Amherst native, and folklorist Kirsten Mullen toge...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: October 14, 2020
by N. K. Jemisin
Congratulations to N. K. Jemisin for being named one of this year’s MacArthur “geniuses!” The MacArthur Foundation describes her as “a speculative fiction writer exploring deeply human questions about structural racism, environmental crise...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: October 13, 2020
by Justina Ireland
This 2018 young adult historical fiction by Justina Ireland is the perfect spooky October read to get you in the mood for Halloween. Why? Because there are zombies! Zombies! Set just after the Civil War, this is a fun and action-packed s...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 29, 2020
by Leah Penniman
At a time when Americans are closely examining all aspects of our society for racism, those of us interested in food issues would do well to start with this remarkable book. Author Leah Penniman, the 2019 recipient of the James Beard Found...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 25, 2020
by Zetta Elliott; illustrated by Loveis Wise
Turn to the Acknowledgements section in the final pages of this short 100 page collection of poetry-activism and you will see that the author knowingly divines that there will be more black women to mourn and re...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 16, 2020
by Martha S. Jones
According to conventional wisdom, American women’s campaign for the vote began with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this women’s movement was an overwhelmingly ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 11, 2020
by Jewell Parker Rhodes
Fifth grade student Dèja is starting the year at a new school in Brooklyn after her family moves into a shelter. Although the first day is filled with challenges, it is also filled with promise: a teacher who connects to her student...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: September 11, 2020
by Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She earned her M.F.A. at UMass Amherst. Memorial Drive is her first book that is not poetry. This memoir was written because, in the aut...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 28, 2020
by Rita Garcia Williams
One Crazy Summer follows the three Gaither sisters as they travel from Brooklyn to Oakland in the summer of 1968, where they hope to get to know the mother who left them. Delphine, the oldest sister, takes on many roles in her famil...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 21, 2020
by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach; foreword by Elijah Wald
We are excited to offer this new weekly feature and to share a wide array of books about Black lives in America. It seems appropriate to begin with a new book by a well-known Amherst res...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 21, 2020
by Carole Boston Weatherford; illustrated by Jamey Christoph
This picture book biography introduces readers to the life and work of multi-talented artist Gordon Parks. It traces Parks’ path to becoming one of the most important photographers of the 20th ce...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 21, 2020
by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin; illustrated by Nate Powell
The nation is mourning the death of a civil rights hero and “conscience of the Congress,” Representative John Lewis. Adults and young adults wanting to know more about Lewis and the civil rights mo...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 21, 2020
by Shayla Lawson
Writing in a fierce and humorous voice, Shayla Lawson provides a memoir in essays that is also a celebration of black women’s lives and culture. She knows the richness and resilience of black girl culture (its irony and rebellion!) and the...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week
Posted on: August 21, 2020
by Anne Monahan
Horace Pippin, sometimes described as an American Henri Rousseau, was a disabled veteran (WWI) without formal art training who began painting in his 40s and soon became famous in the art world. His works depict WWI, black families, Abraham ...
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Black Lives Matter Book of the Week