How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

Jerald Walker

“No one—absolutely no one—I’ve read is writing better than Jerald Walker about race, being black, and the depths and complexities of our humanity.” —Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award

Read “Breathe,” a timely essay from the book

Reimagining the Middle Passage

Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song

Tara T. Green

“[Green] illuminates how individuals resisted social death and why this resistance is still necessary today.”—Matthew Teutsch, Black Perpectives

A 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Title

Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Political Horror

Edited by Dawn Keetley

“Just when I thought, ‘Okay, we’ve now seen every way we could approach this film,’ the next essay would reframe it in a new way that made me think and then rethink.” —Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Love’s Long Line

Sophfronia Scott

“Love’s Long Line reminds us that a life lived with hope is a life full of possibility. . . . Scott knows how to find grace even in its absence.” Renée E. D’Aoust, Brevity

Apocalypse Man

The Death Drive and White Masculine Victimhood

Casey Ryan Kelly

“Apocalypse Man is an ambitious, disturbing, and ultimately necessary project that helps us make sense of our current political moment.” —Joshua Gunn

James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity

Aaron Ngozi Orforlea

“Illuminates the rhetorics of black male subjectivities.…Oforlea demonstrates how Baldwin and Morrison invite an exploration of storytelling as an act of collective resistance against societal forces of racial oppression.”—American Literature

Winner of the 2018 College Language Association Award for Creative Scholarship