“Smith’s thrilling cultural insights never overshadow the wholeness of her characters, who are so keenly observed that one feels witness to their lives.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“A sweeping meditation on art, race, and identity that may be [Smith’s] most ambitious work yet.” —Esquire
A New York Times bestseller • Finalist for the National Book Critics...

Shayla Lawson is major. You don't know who she is, yet, but that's okay. She is on a mission to move black girls like herself from best supporting actress to a starring roles in the major narrative. With a unique mix of personal stories, pop culture observations, and insights into politics and history, Lawson sheds light on the many ways black femininity has influenced mainstream culture. Timely, enlightening, and wickedly sharp, This Is Major shows...

"From the award-winning entrepreneur, culture leader, and creator of the BLACK GIRLS ROCK! movement comes an inspiring and beautifully designed book that pays tribute to the achievements and contributions of black women around the world."--Publisher.

"Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn't have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around. He offers her a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral...

Wend Kuuni is a landmark in African filmmakers' attempts to "return to the sources" of their culture, to recover a "usable" African past to solve the problems of the African present. Filmmaker Gaston Kaboré adapts the measured rhythms of traditional African storytelling to create an authentically African cinematic language. He retells an ancient fable about a mute, memoryless orphan, driven from his homeland, who is renamed Wend Kuuni ("God's Gift")...

Black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated than they are now. But for every new milestone, the reality of everyday life for black women remains a complex, conflicted, contradiction-laden experience. Hunt, an American journalist who has been living and working in London for a decade, takes the difficult and the indefinable and makes it accessible. Here she illuminates our current cultural moment-- and transcends it. In creating...

Profiles ten black women from Canada and the United States, including Jackie Shane, Rosa Pryor, and Mary Miles Bibb.

"In Singapore, three very different women--Dara, a workaholic lawyer from the UK; Amaka, a sharp-tongued banker from Nigeria; and Lillian, a pianist turned "trailing spouse" from the United States--find their lives inexplicably intertwined upon the arrival of a handsome and mysterious man from Geneva who brings their worlds crashing down"--

"Living in Brixton and awaiting the return of her husband and young son from Nigeria, Obiajulu Ejiofor received shattering news. There had been a fatal car crash--and one of them was dead. In Where the Children Take Us, Obiajulu's daughter, Zain Asher, tells the story of her family and her mother's deeply personal fight to protect her children from the daily pressures of poverty, crime, and racism in 1980s and '90s South London as a widowed emigrant"--...

"In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black women are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to a diagnosis of heart failure at age twenty- nine, Dionne tracks her relationship with friends, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image. Along the way, she...