Now Rise Books blog: By & About Black Women

Black women's literature--our stories, poems, histories, essays and autobiographies--reflects a tradition of self-determination to preserve our humanity and dignity, too often against entrenched social norms that tell us we are anything but normal.
Suggestions for browsing and buying Now Rise Books:

Books are listed by subject headings. Clicking each linked title will allow you to view details for that title on Now Rise Books @Amazon.com.
After viewing details, you can "Buy" the book or use your "back button" to return to this list.
Alternatively, you can browse all Now Rise Books that are online by clicking Now Rise Books Amazon storefront and entering a specific Title or Author name. You may also find some titles by entering a Theme such as, "women," "love," or "power."

(Recently sold titles are noted. All titles subject to prior sale.)

(19th) NINETEENTH CENTURY

GENERAL STUDIES


Sojourner Truth: A Life A Symbol

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century A Norton Critical Edition (Norton 1997 Pb $13)

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES / BIOGRAPHIES

Charlotte L. Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten
   (Norton 1981 Pb, $8.50)
Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
   (Oxford UP 1998 Pb, $12.50)
Jacqueline Bernard, Journey Toward Freedom:

The Story of Sojourner Truth

(Feminist Press at CUNY 1993 Pb $9)

WOMEN NOVELISTS

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(Harvest/HBJ 1973 Pb, $6.50)

Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches in the

Life of a Free Black

(Random House 1983 [orig. published in 1859] Pb, $7.99)

NRB Note . . .

Harriet Wilson's novel, Our Nig, is an autobiographical account of Frado, a mulatto girl held in indentured servitude in Massachusetts and Rhode Island by a White family, the Bellmonts. After breaking free from the harsh abuse of Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter, Frado later marries Samuel, a scheming preacher who abandons Frado when she becomes pregnant. Left in poverty, Frado gives up her son to a foster home. At the end of the novel, Harriet Wilson lifts the veil of fiction and appeals directly to readers, asking them to buy her novel so that she can earn royalties and regain custody of her son. Our Nig, originally published in 1859, reflects determination for individual liberty, dignity, and strong mother love, themes that remain prevalent in the contemporary fiction of Black women.

(20th) TWENTIETH CENTURY

AUTOBIOGRAPHY / BIOGRAPHY - ANTHOLOGIES
Rebecca Carroll, Sugar in the Raw (Clarkson Potter 1997 Pb $6) SOLD

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES / BIOGRAPHIES
Maya Angelou
Gather Together In My Name (Bantam 1975 MM $5)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Heart of a Woman (Random House 1997 Hb $10.50)

NRB Note . . .

In her segment of "Master Class" on the Oprah Winfrey Network, poet and author Maya Angelou declares, "love is liberating." We do not show love by trying to bind people to us but by giving them away, allowing them their own voice and freedom, she says. For more than four decades, Ms. Angelou has shown her love for humanity by giving herself away to her readers, in moving and enlightening autobiographies, phenomenal poetry, prose and affecting performances, in the style and grace of her Black womanhood.

Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: The Searing
Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High
(Washington Square Press 1995 Pb $11)
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power (Pantheon 1993 Hb $13) SOLD
Gail Horne Buckley, The Hornes: An American Family
(Knopf 1986 Hb, $18)
James Comer, Maggie's American Dream (Plume 1989 Pb, $9)
Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography SOLD
   (Intnl Publ 1989 Pb, $12.50)
Charity Adams Earley, One Woman's Army: A Black Officer
   Remembers the WAC
    (Texas A$M University Press 1989 HB $18)
Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power (Anchor 1998 Pb, $8) SOLD
Zora Neale Hurston
Dust Tracks on a Road (U of Ill Press, 1985 Pb, $10.50)
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...And Then Again
   When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive
Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead
(Addison-Wesley 1989 Pb, $8.99)
Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat:
An American Pilgrimage (Harper Collins 1987 First Ed. Hb, $15) SOLD
Jill Nelson, Volunteer Slavery (Noble Press 1993 Hb, $9.50) SOLD
Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero
(Bantam 1998 Hb $12)
Madam C.J. Walker
On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times
of Madam C.J. Walker by A'Lelia Bundles
(Scribner 2001 HB $15)
Myrlie Evers-Williams, Watch Me Fly: What I Learned
on the Way to Becoming the Woman I was
  Meant to Be   (Little Brown 1999 Hb $11)

FICTION
ANTHOLOGIES

Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith, Eds.,
But Some of Us Are Brave [All the Women Are White, all the Blacks Are Men]
(Feminist Press 1982 Pb, $18.50)
Bill Mullen, Ed. Revolutionary Tales: African American Women's
Short Stories from the First to the Present
Mary Helen Washington, Ed. Invented Lives: Narratives of

Black Women 1850-1960 (Anchor 1987 Pb, $13.50)

HISTORICAL FICTION
Barbara Chase-Riboud

Echoes of Lions (Morrow 1989 HB Ex-Lib

Sally Hemings

(Avon 1980 Pb, $4)

The Joys of Motherhood
by Buchi Emecheta

NIGERIA - Novelists

Buchi Emecheta

The Family (George Braziller 1990 Pb, $9)

The Joys of Motherhood (George Braziller 1990 Pb, $9)

UNITED STATES - Novelists

Tina McElroy Ansa, You Know Better: A Novel

(Morrow 2002 Pb, $5.50)

Connie Briscoe, Big Girls Don't Cry

(Anchor 2001 Hb, $9.99)

Octavia Butler

Mind of My Mind SOLD

Parable of the Sower (Warner 1995 MM, $5.50)

Bebe Moore Campbell, Brothers and Sisters

(Putnam 1994 Hb, $11)

Rebecca Carroll, I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like

(Clarkson Potter 1994 Pb, $8)

J. California Cooper, The Matter is Life

(Anchor 1992 Pb, $5)

Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

Zora Neale Hurston

Jonah's Gourd Vine

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Harper 1990 Pb, $8.25)

Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing

Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People

(Vintage 1984 Pb, $8)

Terry McMillan

A Day Late and A Dollar Short

Disappearing Acts

(Washington Square Press 1990 Pb, $7.25)

How Stella Got Her Groove Back

(Viking 1996 Pb, $8.99)

Mama (Pocket Books 1994 MM, $4.50)

Waiting to Exhale

Big Girls Don't Cry

by Connie Briscoe

Toni Morrison

Beloved

Jazz

Love (Knopf 2003 Hb, $10.50)

Love (Vintage 2005 MM)

Paradise

Song of Solomon (Plume 1987 Pb, $7)

Gloria Naylor

Mama Day (Ticknor & Fields 1988 Hb $8.25)

The Men of Brewster Place (Hyperion 1998 Hb $5)

Ann Petry
The Narrows (Beacon Press, 1995 PB $5.50)
Ntozake Shange, Liliane
(St. Martin's Press 1994 Hb, $9)

Alice Walker

Meridian

Possessing the Secret of Joy

The Color Purple

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

Dorothy West, The Living is Easy
(The Feminist Press at CUNY 1982 Pb, $10.50)

EDUCATION

Melba Patillio Beals, Warriors Don't Cry (Memoir of

integrating Little Rock's Central High School)

(Washington Square Press 1995 Pb $11)

Madeline Cartwright For the Children: Lessons from a
Visionary Principal

(Doubleday 1993 HB Ex-Lib

Marva Collins, Marva Collins' Way

(Jeremy Tarcher 1982 Pb, $7.50)

Marian Wright Edelman, The Measure of Our Success

(Harper 1993 Pb, $4)

Michelle Foster, Black Teachers on Teaching
(The New Press [NEW] 1997 HB $12)
Theresa Perry, Lisa Delpit, The Real Ebonics Debate:

Power, Language, and the Education of African American

Children (Beacon Press 1998 Pb $12)

ESSAYS:
Identity, Empowerment, Liberation, Inspiration

NRB Note . . .

Black women have a strong activist tradition of speaking out against injustice in America, which is documented in the early decades of the 19th century. In an era that frowned on women asserting themselves in public, both Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth risked public scorn and personal safety as outspoken advocates of social equality for Black women. Following in the trail blazed by these two pioneering activists were poet and abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells Barnett and subsequent generations of Black women who have articulated the particular impact of laws and social values on Black women and the Black community, generally. A selection of these works by and about Black women is listed below.

Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays

(Graywolf Press 2004 Pb,$10)

Maya Angelou

Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
(Random House 1993 Hb, $8)

Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
(Bantam 1994 MM )

Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, Eds.,
This Bridge Called My Back SOLD

Keith Michael Brown, Sacred Bond:
Black Men and Their Mothers

(Little Brown 1998 Hb, $13)

Farai Chideya, The Color of Our Future: Our Multiracial Future

(Morrow 1999 Hb, $10)

Anita Hill - Clarence Thomas (Wayne State University Press 1995 PB ) SOLD

Bell Hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

(South End Press 1999 Pb, $9) SOLD

June Jordan, Technical Difficulties

(Pantheon 1992 Hb, $14)

Patti LaBelle Patti's Pearls (Warner 2001 HB Ex-Lib
Audre Lorde, Zami, Sister Outsider, Undersong

(Quality Paperback 1993 Pb, $11) SOLD

Diane Roberts The Myth of Aunt Jemima SOLD

Anna Deavere Smith

Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics

(Anchor 2001 Pb, $9.99)

Geneva Smitherman, Editor African American Women
Speak Out on

Alice Walker

Technical Difficulties

by June Jordan

In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult: A Meditation on the Making of the Film "The Color Purple"

(Scribner 1996 Hb, $14.50)

Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman

(Verso Books 1990 Pb, $13.75)

Michelle Diane Wright, Broken Utterances: A Selected Anthology of 19th Century Black Women's Social Thought (Three Sistahs Press 2007 Pb, $17) SOLD

HISTORY

Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of
Black Women on Race and Sex in America

LAW

Joan Hoff, Law, Gender & Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women

(New York University Press 1994 Pb, $16) SOLD

LETTERS

Maya Angelou, Letters to My Daughter
(Random House 2008 Hb, $11)