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Did you hear about Kitty Karr? : a novel / by Paul, Crystal Smith,author.;
"When white silver screen icon Kitty Karr Tate dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the three Black St. John sisters, it prompts questions. A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty's affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty's journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could-and between a cheating fiancé and fallout from a controversial social media post, there are plenty. The truth behind Kitty's ascent to stardom from her beginnings in the Jim Crow South threatens to expose a web of unexpected family ties, debts owed, and debatable crimes that could, with one pull, unravel the all-American fabric of the St. John sisters and those closest to them"--
Subjects: Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Actresses; African American women; African Americans; Inheritance and succession; Secrecy;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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We have never lived on Earth : stories / by Van Schaik, Kasia,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."'Love in the age of microplastics.' Kasia Van Schaik's debut story collection follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town in British Columbia after moving from South Africa. The stories traverse the most intimate, violent, and transforming moments of female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis. Charlotte navigates relationships-- with lovers, parents, friends, and environments-- as they form and fray. Mother and daughter wait out the end of a bad year in a Mexican hotel; a friendship is tested as forest fires demolish Charlotte's town; a childhood friend disappears while travelling through Europe; and a girl on the beach examines the memories of dying jellyfish. Each story asks: how do we find connection in a world shaped by isolation? How do we accept the new? Written in startling, poetic prose, We Have Never Lived On Earth captures the feelings and experiences of being a woman: physical and psychological threat, creativity, disappointment, objectification, and desire. Calling to mind Alice Munro's precocious Del Jordan and Rachel Cusk's Faye, these powerful portraits of female interiority balance nostalgia, fear, and hope for the future as they tell of the struggle to understand what it means to live on earth."--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Short stories.; Linked stories.; Psychological fiction.; Children of single parents; South Africans; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The last dreamwalker / by Woods, Rita,author.;
"From Hurston/Wright Legacy Award-winning author Rita Woods, The Last Dreamwalker tells the story of two women, separated by nearly two centuries yet inextricably linked by the Gullah Geechee Islands off the coast of South Carolina-and their connection toa mysterious and extraordinary gift passed from generation to generation. In the wake of her mother's passing, Layla Hurley unexpectedly reconnects with her mother's sisters, women she hasn't been allowed to speak to, or of, in years. Her aunts reveal toLayla that a Gullah-Geechee island off the shore of South Carolina now belongs to her. As Layla digs deeper into her mother's past and the mysterious island's history, she discovers that the terrifying nightmares that have plagued her throughout her lifeand tainted her relationship with her mother and all of her family, is actually a power passed down through generations of her Gullah ancestors. She is a Dreamwalker, able to inhabit the dreams of others-and to manipulate them. As Layla uncovers increasingly dark secrets about her family's past, she finds herself thrust into the center of a potentially deadly, decades-old feud fought in the dark corridor of dreams. The Last Dreamwalker is a gripping, contemporary read about power and agency; family and legacy; and the ways trauma, secrets, and magic take shape across generations"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Magic realist fiction.; Novels.; African American women; Dreams; Family secrets; Islands;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Warrior king / by Smith, Wilbur A.,author.; Harper, Tom,1977-author.;
South Africa, 1820. When Ann Waite discovers a battered longboat washed ashore in Algoa Bay, she is stunned to find two survivors: a badly scarred sailor and a little boy. As the man walks away into the morning mist alone, refusing to take the child -- Harry -- with him, Ann is left with no choice but to raise the boy as her own. After two years of disaster and hardship in the African interior, desperation drives Ann and Harry back into the path of the mysterious shipwrecked man. Ralph Courtney has recently escaped from Robben Island and is determined to seek his fortune in Nativity Bay, the hidden harbour that his father told him about when he was a boy. But it isn't long before Ralph, Ann and their fellow settlers learn that Nativity Bay now lies on the borders of a mighty kingdom, where the warrior king Shaka rules. With no means of making their way back to Algoa Bay, Ralph is forced into a bargain with the Zulu king which will lead him to confront the past that he has been running from for his entire life.
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Epic fiction.; Novels.; Shaka, King of the Zulu, 1787?-1828; Adventure and adventurers; Courtney family (Fictitious characters);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 3
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Now let me fly [graphic novel] : a portrait of Eugene Bullard / by Wimberly, Ronald,author.; Revel, Brahm,artist.;
Includes bibliographical references."On the eve of World War I, Eugene Bullard was a refugee of the Jim Crow South who was determined to find a place where a Black man would be treated as a fellow human being. His search took him from rural Georgia to the streets of Paris, from the vaudeville stage to the boxing ring, and finally, from the muddy trenches to the open skies. In 1914, Bullard joined the fight to defend France--and made history as the world's first African American fighter pilot."--Publisher.
Subjects: Biographical comics.; Nonfiction comics.; Graphic novels.; Historical comics.; Personal narratives.; Bullard, Eugene Jacques, 1895-1961; African American fighter pilots; African Americans; Race discrimination;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The vanishing half / by Bennett, Brit,author.;
"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins. As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Psychological fiction.; Twin sisters; African American women; African American families; African Americans; Passing (Identity); Race discrimination;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
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Antebellum [videorecording] / by Huston, Jack,1982-actor.; Malone, Jena,1984-actor.; Monáe, Janelle,actor.; Sidibe, Gabourey,actor.; Renz, Christopher,screenwriter,film director,film producer.; Bush, Gerard,screenwriter,film director,film producer.; Richardson, Marque,1985-actor.; Chirisa, Tongayi Arnold,actor.; Lions Gate Entertainment (Firm),film distributor.;
Music by Nate Wonder and Roman Gianarthur ; editor, John Axelrad ; director of photography, Pedro Luque Briozzo.Janelle Monáe, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, Gabourey Sidibe, Marque Richardson, Tongayi Chirisa.Eden (Janelle Monáe) came to understand the worst degradation that a plantation slave in the Confederate South could know. African-American academic Veronica Henley (Monáe, again), on the road in Louisiana to promote her latest book, lived a happy and comfortable modern-day existence. Their fates would indeed prove to be intertwined--but in the last way you'd expect--in this socially charged shocker.Canadian Home Video Rating: 18A.MPAA rating: R.Described video for the blind and visually impaired.Subtitled for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH).DVD ; wide screen presentation ; Dolby Digital 5.1.
Subjects: Video recordings for people with visual disabilities.; Video recordings for the hearing impaired.; Horror films.; Feature films.; Women authors; Kidnapping; Slavery; Women slaves; Plantations;
For private home use only.
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Blood grove / by Mosley, Walter,author.;
After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and intosex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else.
Subjects: Detective and mystery fiction.; Rawlins, Easy (Fictitious character); Private investigators; African American men;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a Black family keepsake / by Miles, Tiya,1970-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Sitting in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is a rough cotton bag, called "Ashley's Sack," embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, just before nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag -- including Rose's message that "It be filled with my Love always." Historian Tiya Miles carefully follows faint archival traces back to Charleston to find Rose in the kitchen where she may have packed the sack for Ashley. From Rose's last resourceful gift to her daughter, Miles then follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States. The contents of the sack -- a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, "my Love always" -- speak volumes and open up a window on Rose and Ashley's world. As she follows Ashley's journey, Miles metaphorically "unpacks" the sack, deepening its emotional resonance and revealing the meanings and significance of everything it contained. These include the story of enslaved labor's role in the cotton trade and apparel crafts and the rougher cotton "negro cloth" that was left for enslaved people to wear; the role of the pecan in nutrition, survival, and southern culture; the significance of hair to Black women and of locks of hair in the nineteenth century; and an exploration of Black mothers' love and the place of emotion in history"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Ashley (Enslaved person in South Carolina); Middleton, Ruth Jones, 1903-1942; African American women; African American women; Enslaved persons; Enslaved women; Enslaved women; Memory; Mothers and daughters.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The unicorn woman / by Jones, Gayl,author.;
"Marking a dramatic new direction for Jones, a riveting tale set in the Post WWII South, narrated by a Black soldier who returns to Jim Crow and searches for a mythical ideal. Set in the early 1950s, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities. A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he's a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love. As he moves around the south, from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, primarily, to his second home of Memphis, Tennessee, he recalls his love affairs in post-war France and encounters with a variety of colorful characters and mythical prototypes: circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists, and bigots. The lead among these characters is, of course, The Unicorn Woman, who exists, but mostly lives in Bud's private mythology. Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of Black (and Indigenous) people in a time and place of frustration, disappointment, and spiritual hope"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Magic realist fiction.; Novels.; African American veterans; African Americans; Segregation; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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