"August Wilson (1945-2005) was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who had a particular talent for capturing the authentic, everyday voice of Black Americans. As a child, he read off soup cans and cereal boxes, and when his mother brought him to the library, his whole world opened up. After facing intense prejudice at school from both students and some teachers, August dropped out. However, he continued reading and educating himself independently....

The celebrated author shares the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, relating the events that prompted her mother to send young Angela to Arkansas to live with her grandmother and the complicated fallout that shaped their family life.

Haunted and haunting, Jones's memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence--into tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers,...

More than 50 poems and an accompanying CD introduce poetry with a beat.

Offers a comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction works that articulates issues of race, democracy, and American identity. His landmark collections, Notes of a native son and Nobody knows my name fuse the personal, literary, and the political. The classic, The fire next time, provides an analysis of America's racial divide and No name in the street and The Devil finds work chart is continuing response to the social and political turbulence...

A collection of postwar African-American poetry showcases the works of such poets as Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and others