In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters' stories build and build...

"The fast-changing contours of the African diaspora in the United States demand that we establish new ways of understanding black identity in the twenty-first century. Twenty-First Century Pan-African American Literature takes up writings by African born or identified authors like Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dinaw Mengestu, and NoViolet Bulawayo. Stephanie Li asserts that these texts reinvent the meaning of blackness by placing immigration...

"Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful--the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask...

This memoir traces Maya Angelou's childhood in a small, rural community during the 1930s. Filled with images and recollections that point to the dignity and courage of black men and women, Angelou paints a sometimes disquieting, but always affecting picture of the people-and the times-that touched her life.

Black Metafiction examines the tradition of self-consciousness in African American literature. It points to the short-comings of theories of metafiction founded on studies of Anglo-American literature. While some literary critics situate metafiction within the domain of postmodernism, others regard it to be as old as storytelling itself. Scholars of African American literature acknowledge it to be a distinguishing feature. Critics such as Henry Louis...