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Gather me : a memoir in praise of the books that saved me / by Edim, Glory,1982-author.;
"An inspiring memoir of family, community, and resilience, and an ode to the power of books to help us understand ourselves, from the renowned founder of Well-Read Black Girl. 'She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.'-Toni Morrison. For Glory Edim, that 'friend of my mind' is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, but her love of books stretches far back: to public libraries alongside her little brothers after elementary school while her mother was working; to high school librairies where she discovered books she wasn't being taught in class; to dorm rooms and airplanes and subway rides-and, eventually, to a community of half a million other readers. When Edim's father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, she and her brothers were left with a single mother and little money, often finding a safe space at their local library. Books were where Edim found community, and as she grew older, she discovered the Black writers whose words would forever change her life: Nikki Giovanni through children's poetry cassettes; Maya Angelou through a critical high school English teacher; Toni Morrison while attending Morrison's alma mater, Howard University; Audre Lorde on a flight to Nigeria. In prose full of both joy and heartbreak, Edim recounts how these writers and so many others helped her to value herself: to find her own voice when her mother lost hers, to trust her feelings when her father remarried, to create bonds with other Black women and uplift their own stories. Gather Me is a glowing testament to the power of representation and the lasting impact of literature to gather our disparate parts and put them back together"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Edim, Glory, 1982-; Edim, Glory, 1982-; African American businesspeople; African American women authors; African American women; Authors, American; Books and reading; American literature; Literature;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Breath of oblivion / by Broaddus, Maurice,author.;
Beyond the Orun Gate, Epyc Ro and her elite soldiers are stranded. Capturing an alien ship and searching for a way home, they discover a stowaway who may be the key to overcoming the alien forces swarming all around them. On board the Cypher, Captain Stacia Chikeke is struggling to keep her ship and its fractured crew together. But the discovery of an interstellar phenomenon and the opportunity to explore unites them in a singular purpose, for now. In the slums of Indianapolis, Wachiru Adisa works to free the children of the diaspora detained in Original Earth facilities, only to be captured and sent to a nightmarish criminal justice facility, the Panopticon. On Original Earth, Ishant Sangsuwangul is the newly assigned liaison to the corporate entity running the government there. He feels like a prisoner, but must find a way to stem the tide of conflict as animosity toward his people grows. In the Badlands of Mars, Amachi Adisa and her new teacher Nehanda begin her training to learn from her past, chart her future, and unlock the power that is her birthright. In the Dreaming City, the lunar heart of Muungano power, Maulana Buhari struggles with how to lead his people. Is now the time for isolation or aggression? Together they, and all of Muungano, will guide the empire forward by any means necessary, as enemies of old and new extraterrestrial threats mount.
Subjects: Science fiction.; Novels.; Life on other planets; Space colonies; Space flight; Space warfare;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Too far / by Day, Sylvia,author.;
Lily Black was presumed dead for years. Now she's returned to the unquestioning arms of her loving husband, Kane. Where she's been is a mystery, but the deadly danger she's brought with her is manifest to all. Aliyah, Kane's mother, has worked hard to position herself in power. No one escapes her bitter ambition, not her children and certainly not a woman who may not be who she claims. Amy, Kane's sister-in-law, has been a pawn throughout the dangerous games the family plays. She's beginning to grasp the rules, though, and won't stop until all the pieces on the board have toppled.
Subjects: Romance fiction.; Novels.; Families; Secrecy; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Sky full of elephants / by Campbell, Cebo,author.;
One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charles Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he's now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn't even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old who watched her white mother and step-family drown themselves in the lake behind their house. Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across America headed for Alabama, where Sidney believes she may still have some family left. But neither Sidney or Charlie is prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it. When they enter the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell's astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.
Subjects: Apocalyptic fiction.; Magic realist fiction.; Novels.; African American college teachers; African American fathers; African Americans; Death; Fathers and daughters; Mass extinctions; Voyages and travels;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Rehearsals for living / by Maynard, Robyn,author.; Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake,1971-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming, began writing each other letters -- a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here. Rehearsals is a captivating book, part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers convening on what it means to get free as the world spins into some new orbit. In a genre-defying exchange, the authors collectively envision the possibilities for more liberatory futures during a historic year of Indigenous land defense, prison strikes, and global-Black-led rebellions against policing. By articulating to each other Black and Indigenous perspectives on our unprecedented here and now, and the long-disavowed histories of slavery and colonization that have brought us to this moment in the first place, Maynard and Simpson create something new: a vital demand for a different way forward, and a poetic call to dream up new ways of ordering earthly life."--
Subjects: Personal correspondence.; Maynard, Robyn; Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 1971-; Authors, Canadian; Social history; Social movements;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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God bless you, Otis Spunkmeyer / by Thomas, Joseph Earl,author.;
"After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility. Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life-of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; African American men; Fathers and sons; Interpersonal relations; Veterans;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Gwendy's magic feather / by Chizmar, Richard T.,author.; King, Stephen,1947-writer of foreword.; Minnion, Keith,illustrator.;
"Something evil has swept into the small western Maine town of Castle Rock on the heels of the latest winter storm. Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and his team are desperately searching for two missing girls, but time is running out to bring them home alive. In Washington D.C., thirty-seven-year-old Gwendy Peterson couldn't be more different from the self-conscious teenaged girl who once spent a summer running up Castle Rock's Suicide Stairs. That same summer, she was entrusted-- or some might say cursed-- with the extraordinary button box by Richard Farris, the mysterious stranger in the black suit. The seductive and powerful box offered Gwendy small gifts in exchange for its care and feeding until Farris eventually returned, promising Gwendy she'd never see the box again. One day, though, the button box shows up without warning-- and without Richard Farris to explain why, or what she's supposed to do with it. The mysterious reappearance of the box, along with the troubling disappearances in Castle Rock, leads Gwendy home again ... where she just might be able to help rescue the missing girls and stop a madman before he does something ghastly."-- Publisher description.
Subjects: Horror fiction.; Castle Rock (Me. : Imaginary place); Good and evil; Homecoming; Magic paraphernalia; Missing children;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
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The deeper the roots : a memoir of hope and home / by Tubbs, Michael,1990-author.;
"The making of a visionary political leader-and a blueprint for a more equitable country "Don't tell nobody our business," Michael Tubbs's mother often told him growing up. For Michael, that meant a lot of things: don't tell anyone about the day-to-day struggle of being Black and broke in Stockton, CA. Don't tell anyone the pain of having a father incarcerated for 25 years to life. Don't tell anyone about living two lives, the brainy bookworm and the kid with the newest Jordans. And also don't tell anyone about the particular joys of growing up with three "moms"-a Nana who never let him miss church, an Auntie who'd take him to the library any time, and a mother, "She-Daddy", who schooled him in the wisdom of hip-hop and taught him never to take no for an answer. So for a long time Michael didn't tell anyone his story, but as he went on to a scholarship at Stanford and an internship in the Obama White House, he began to realize the power of his experience, the need for his perspective in the halls of power. By the time he returned to Stockton to become, in 2016 at age 26, its first Black mayor and the youngest-ever mayor of a major American city, he knew his story meant something. The Deeper the Roots is a memoir astonishing in its candor, voice, and clarity of vision. Tubbs shares with us the city that raised him, his family of badass women, his life-changing encounters with Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, the challenges of governing in the 21st century and everything in between-en route to unveiling his compelling vision for America rooted in his experiences in his hometown"--
Subjects: Autobiographies.; Biographies.; Tubbs, Michael, 1990-; Stanford University; African American mayors; African American politicians;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The choice / by Roberts, Nora,author.;
"The conclusion of the epic trilogy from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Awakening and The Becoming. Talamh is a land of green hills, high mountains, deep forests, and seas, where magicks thrive. But portals allow for passage in and out-and ultimately, each must choose their place, and choose between good and evil, war and peace, life and death ... Breen Siobhan Kelly grew up in the world of Man and was once unaware of her true nature. Now she is in Talamh, trying to heal after a terrible battle and heartbreaking losses. Her grandfather, the dark god Odran, has been defeated in his attempt to rule over Talamh, and over Breen-for now. With the enemy cast out and the portal sealed, this is a time to rest and to prepare. Breen spreads her wings and realizes a power she's never experienced before. It's also a time for celebrations-of her first Christmas in both Talamh and Ireland, of solstice and weddings and births-and daring to find joy again in the wake of sorrow. She rededicates herself to writing her stories, and when his duties as taoiseach permit, she is together with Keegan, who has trained her as a warrior and whom she has grown to love. It's Keegan who's at her side when the enemy's witches, traitorous and power-mad, appear to her in her sleep, practicing black magick, sacrificing the innocent, and plotting a brutal destruction for Breen. And soon, united with him and with all of Talamh, she will seek out those in desperate need of rescue, and confront the darkness with every weapon she has: her sword, her magicks-and her courage ... "--
Subjects: Fantasy fiction.; Paranormal fiction.; Novels.; Dragons; Good and evil; Magic; Man-woman relationships; Multiverse; Space and time; Witches; Young women;
Available copies: 3 / Total copies: 5
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Murder on the Champ de Mars / by Black, Cara,1951-;
"Paris, April 1999: Aimée Leduc has her work cut out for her--running her detective agency and fighting off sleep-deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bebe. The last thing she has time for now is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (French Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimée, something to do with Aimée's father's unsolved murder a decade ago. How can she say no? The dying woman's secret is even more dangerous than her son realized. When Aimée arrives at the hospital, the boy's mother has disappeared. She was far too sick to leave on her own--she must have been abducted. What does she know that is so important it is worth killing for? And will Aimée be able to find her before it is too late and the medication keeping her alive runs out? Set in the seventh arrondissment, the quartier of the Parisian elite, Murder on the Champ de Mars takes us from the highest seats of power in the Ministries and embassies through the city's private gardens and the homes of France's oldest aristocratic families. Aimée discovers more connections than she thought possible between the clandestine "Gypsy" world and the moneyed ancient regime, ultimately leading her to the truth behind her father's death. After all, for Aimée, murder is never far from home"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Detective and mystery stories.; Mystery fiction.; Leduc, Aimee (Fictitious character); Women private investigators;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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