New African and African American Studies Titles from Penguin Random House

Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. This collection of short fiction was her third book, originally edited and published by Toni Morrison in 1977, and is now reissued.

A magisterial, intimate look at Black womanhood: the grief that is carried within the body and the bonds of love that grant strength.

A searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago—inspired by the author’s own family history.

After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to make institutional changes in the wake of the George Floyd protests was not a simple result of the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socioeconomic inequality.

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics’ Circle Finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts constraints of race, gender, and disability.