a more perfect Union

Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Winner, Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize

“A blood-oath ode to Black motherhood, to Love’s primal ecstasy, to the R&B royalty of Prince.”—Tyehimba Jess

How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

Jerald Walker
Finalist, 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction

“Restless [and] brilliant.”—Jennifer Szalai, the New York Times

Love’s Long Line

Sophfronia Scott

“Wise and ruminative.”—Brett Lott

Community In-Between / Urur Dhex-Dhexaad Ah: Portraits of Somali-Americans in Columbus

Qorsho Hassan and Ruth M. Smith

“A fascinating portrait of Columbus’s Somali community as seen through the eyes of its young people.”—Michael Coleman, former mayor of Columbus

The Haygoods of Columbus: A Love Story

Wil Haygood

“The Haygoods of Columbus takes the black experience out of the realm of sociology and puts it squarely in the kingdom of literature.”—David Nicholson, the Washington Post

On Board the U.S.S. Mason: The World War II Diary of James A. Dunn

James A. Dunn
Edited and with an Introduction by Mansel G. Blackford
Historical Introduction by John Sibley Butler

The Gentleman from Ohio

Louis Stokes with David Charnoff
Foreword by Congressman John Lewis

“With this book, [Stokes] bestows his last gift to the American public with this remarkable chronicle of his rise from poverty in Cleveland to the halls of power in Washington, DC, as the first black congressman from Ohio.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka

Jean-Philippe Marcoux, Ed.

Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation

John Murillo III

Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century

Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek, Eds.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror

Dawn Keetley, Ed.

Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement

Isiah Lavender III

The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction

Jerry Rafiki Jenkins

Staging Black Fugitivity

Stacie Selmon McCormick

Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance

Christina N. Baker

Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song

Tara T. Green
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature

Felice D. Blake

Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army”

Johari Jabir

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

Aaron Ngozi Oforlea
Winner, College Language Association Award for Creative Scholarship