Books for Juneteenth

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction • Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction • The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together essays, poems, and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.

In her groundbreaking book, My Face Is Black Is True, historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the forgotten life of Callie House (1861–1928), a once enslaved person, widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five who, seventy years before the civil rights movement, headed a demand for reparations.

Across 11 original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad.

Juneteenth is a brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise novel. This edition includes a new introduction by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson.

Winner of the PEN Open Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction • The Black Period disrupts the myths of America’s origins through Hafizah Augustus Geter’s experiences as the queer Nigerian-born daughter of a Muslim Nigerian woman and a Black American man from a Southern Baptist family in Jim Crow Alabama.