Cadillac Orpheus by Solon Timothy Woodward

While Jesmond, financially disadvantaged African-American repo worker from a hurrican alley Florida town, struggles with a troubled relationship with his father, his pator's gay son is implcated in the suicide death of his partner, and the woman Jesmond loves marries a threatening man.

Look for this book in February 2008.

Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History by Michael Klarman

Michael J. Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, is one of the leading authorities on the history of civil rights law in the United States. In Unfinished Business, he illuminates the course of racial equality in America, revealing that we have made less progress than we like to think. Indeed, African Americans have had to fight for everything they have achieved.

They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race by James Davidson

Recounts the first thiry years in the life of Ida B. Wells in an incisive portrait that sheds new light on how she defined her own aspirations and her people's freedom as an outspoken writer and lecturer against lynching.

The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson

There's a bit of the buccaneer in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's approach to her second novel, The Pirate's Daughter.

Setting her story against the steamy intersection of glamorous Hollywood and old-time Jamaica, she plunders history and pillages lives to tell an intricate tale of love and betrayal. The result is a glittering trove of fact, history, and fancy.

The Forgotten Spirit by Evie Rhodes

On the surface, Jamie Lynne Brooks looks like your ordinary nine-year-old girl. She likes to skip, laugh, and play. But Jamie is far from ordinary. She has been blessed with a magical gift -- a gift that will transform Jamie's world and all of the people in it this holiday season...

Although her loving grandparents have raised Jamie in a protective cocoon, Jamie is wise to the harsh realities of the tough neighborhood she calls home. And her mother's absence from her life has only made Jamie wiser beyond her years. Yet she has managed to hold onto hope -- hope for a better life for her grandparents, hope that her mother will return someday, and hope for anyone who's lost their way.

After all, Christmas is a time for miracles...

Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black: and Other Stories by Nadine Gorimer

"You’re not responsible for your ancestry, are you . . . But if that’s so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters . . . The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it."

In this collection of new stories Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather’s fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. “Dreaming of the Dead” conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in “History” is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped.“Alternative Endings” considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories—and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.

No Turning Back: My Summer with Daddy King by Gurdon Brewster

In the summer of 1961, Brewster, a white seminary student from the North, worked at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where both Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. were pastors. In this moving memoir, he recalls his first encounters with Atlanta's segregated restrooms, restaurants and public swimming pools, and describes finding the spontaneous church services of the black Baptist tradition both unnerving and energizing. When local white ministers didn't embrace Brewster's idea of setting up meetings between black and white church youth groups, Brewster's eyes were opened about the intransigent racism of ostensibly moderate white clergy. (Less dramatically, Brewster also learned about that staple of Southern cuisine, grits, during his Atlanta summer.)

Brewster's book is valuable not only for the record of his own awakenings, but for the personal anecdotes about King Sr., who emerges as a passionate, wise man with a sense of humor equal to his sense of justice. Though Brewster is not attempting to analyze the Civil Rights movement, he does offer useful insights about the importance of hymnody in black churches' freedom struggle.

Conception by Kalisha Buckhanon

Kalisha Buckhanon writes novels, plays and short stories. Her first novel, Upstate (St. Martin's Press, January 2005), won the 2006 American Library Association's Alex Award and was been nominated for a Hurston/Wright Award in the category of Debut Fiction.

East Cleveland Public Library has ordered Kalisha's second novel, Conception, and it will be published by St. Martin's Press in February 2008.

All I Want is Everything by Daaimah S. Poole

From the "Essence"] bestselling author of "Yo Yo Love" and "Got A Man" comes a powerful urban story of one womans determination to realize her dreams of stardom.

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Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe

Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe

In this sensational new novel from the "New York Times" bestselling author of "God Dont Like Ugly" and "God Dont Play," a beautiful, resourceful woman engineers a high-stakes game of love, money, and sex--all in the name of a better future.

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One Drop by Bliss Broyard

One Drop by Bliss Broyard

Two months before he died of cancer, renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard called his grown son and daughter to his side, to reveal a secret he had kept all their lives and most of his own: he was black. His daughter Bliss learned that her WASPy, privileged Connecticut childhood had come at a price. Ever since his own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to "pass" in order to get work, Anatole had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary élite, he maintained the façade. Now Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity.

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Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow by Dedra Johnson

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow by Dedra Johnson

Set in 1970s-era New Orleans, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is the disturbingly powerful and uplifting story of a young African American girl named Sandrine, whose only refuge against a world of poverty, racial discrimination, and parental abuse are the letters she writes to her dead grandmother. In the tradition of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is a brilliant debut from an important new voice in African American fiction. A professor of English at Dillard University, Dedra Johnson received her MFA from the University of Florida, where she was a finalist for the Hurst-Wright Award. Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow was a finalist for the 2006 William Wisdom Creative Writing Award.

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The Amen Sisters by Angela Benson

The Amen Sisters by Angela Benson

A Christy Award finalist offers a bold and gritty story about one of the most talked about issues in the church--religious leaders who sexually abuse members of their congregations--and how two women heal after betrayal.

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