Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Press

Disability Is a Thread in the Fabric of Life: A Reading Guide for Disability Pride

Beacon Broadside — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 15:55:36 -0400

Redesigned Disability Pride flag by Ann Magill, 2021

Nobody wanted long COVID on our collective pandemic Bingo card, but there it is. In her The Daily Show interview, OG disability rights badass Judy Heumann told Trevor Noah that his likelihood of acquiring a disability, temporary or permanent, was statistically high. He took her statement as a threat in jest, but there’s truth in that for us. For some, long COVID is speeding up that transition from nondisabled to disabled.

Now, it can be a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Don’t forget that we have Judy Heumann and everyone she worked with to thank for making the ADA a civil rights reality. Long COVID folks won’t be alone. The disabled community makes up twenty-six percent of the US population, our largest and most diverse minority.

So in the name of Disability Pride Month, we’re serving up an inexhaustive handful of titles from our catalog centered on our favorite disabled s/heroes and on disability life, then and now.

All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship

By reclaiming our personal disability lineage, we open up the possibility of connecting it to a larger communal ancestry, with powerful political and social implications for all our family and kinship systems . . . . Though not all disability lineages can be fully reclaimed, the very act of assuming that our families always included disabled people can be transformative. Every family story is a disability story, if you choose to so tell it.
—Jennifer Natalya Fink

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

It didn’t occur to me then to think it unusual that I joined in all the kids’ games in my wheelchair. Because there was never a question of whether or not I would play, too—we all figured out a way for me to do whatever everyone was doing. Even when we jumped rope or roller-skated, we figured it out. We’d put roller skates over my shoes and I would pretend to be skating in my chair, or I’d turn the rope for the jumpers, or play in some other way. I didn’t know anything different. Now I know that this was the way it was because we were kids, and kids are problem solvers. But it taught me, at a very early age, that most things are possible when you assume problems can be solved.
—Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner

Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights

After the ADA, never could anyone see disability as deserving charity. No longer could anyone see disability as a purely medical condition or a rehabilitation opportunity. Instead, disability would be seen now and forever as a civil rights issue in which aid and redress would not be focused on physical therapy or monetary benefits. Rather, it would be about the right of individuals to have access to the world that everyone else is part of.
—Lennard J. Davis

The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist

Benjamin repeatedly dramatized what was wrong in both the Society of Friends and the world at large. For a quarter century he railed against slavery in one Quaker meeting after another, in and around Philadelphia, confronting slave owners and slave traders with a savage, most un-Quaker-like fury. Whenever he performed guerrilla theater, his fellow Quakers removed him by physical force as a “trouble-maker” or “disorderly person” as they had done in Burlington. He did not struggle against eviction, but back he came, again and again, undeterred, or rather more determined than ever. He began to stage his theater of apocalyptic outrage in public venues, including city streets and markets.
—Marcus Rediker

In Sickness and In Health: Love, Disability, and a Quest to Understand the Perils and Pleasures of Interabled Romance

I really shouldn’t blame other people for misunderstanding us. We [my wife, M.L., and I] were unusual. We were inventing something new—or so we thought. There were few resources to draw on, so I assumed most people born with a severe disability like mine didn’t get married at all, let alone have children. (And those who did rarely managed to stay together, I conjectured.) Our problem was, nobody ever told us we couldn’t.
—Ben Mattlin

Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother

Clara and Jessy [Park] were affected by the ways in which experts on the human mind and behavior, from psychiatrists to psychoanalysts to psychologists to therapists, conceived of autism. But Clara and Jessy also contested some of their views. In the process, they actively helped shape the history of autism. Their story illustrates how science affects people and how people contribute to transforming science.
—Marga Vicedo

Mean Little deaf Queer: A Memoir

At school I couldn’t wait to make a commotion, and headed straight for drama club. I could be one scary little kid, damp and lisping with need until my teachers gave me the male roles the boys my age scorned, like dorky, pantaloon-wearing Wilbur in the series of plays that bore his name. No matter how they cast me, I’d find some excuse to fall flat on my butt violently enough to shake the stage, and if the stage directions read laugh or cry I’d guffaw myself into hiccups or wail until snot shot out of my nose . . . . All the world a stage, and I was hell-bent on using it as such.
—Terry Galloway

Sincerely, Your Autistic Child: What People on the Autism Spectrum Wish Their Parents Knew About Growing Up, Acceptance, and Identity

Eds. Emily Paige Ballou, Sharon DaVanport, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

The greatest thing that a parent can do is support their child. Let your child know how amazing they are and how much you believe in them. It really does seem so simple, but it makes a world of difference. I’ve met hundreds of people on the spectrum and hundreds more who are not. Most everyone I’ve met says they wish their parents were more supportive and loved them unconditionally. Most parents do love their children, but it is important to let them know verbally, because we don’t always pick up on nonverbal cues. Yes, as difficult as it is to say it, we sometimes do not know when people care about us or love us.
—from Brigid Rankowski’s “It’s Us Against the World, Kid”

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

In her televised speech before the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hamer spoke candidly about her violent interaction with the police [in Winona, Mississippi]. She explained how the Winona beating left her with kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and a worsened physical limp from childhood she would carry for the rest of her life . . . . Unlike so many others, Hamer lived to tell her story. And she certainly told that story—over and over again to anyone who would listen. For Hamer, directly confronting racial and gendered inequalities was a key strategy to eradicate them.
—Keisha N. Blain

Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life

He came to understand the shaming and stigmatization of certain bodies as working to isolate people, to prevent them from assembling as a collective—a proven way for those lacking financial resources to empower themselves—to demand a better life. The origins of this viewpoint lay in Guthrie’s earlier life, in the tragedies that beset his family, all revolving around his mother’s mysterious condition, her undiagnosed Huntington’s disease.
—Gustavus Stadler

Brave New World?: A Graduation 2022 Reading List

Beacon Broadside — Tue, 24 May 2022 16:19:07 -0400

Photo credit: Leonardo Alvarado

It’s flying graduation caps season! We’re not post-pandemic, but graduates are embarking on a world stage that looks different from what it was two or three years ago. Some of those differences are alarming. Conservative pundits writing book banning and censorship into local legislations. (White fragility much?) SCOTUS dangling reproductive rights on a thin thread. Another round of racist gun violence, this time in Buffalo, NY. Oh, and COVID is still hanging around. How to step forward in this brave new world that has such people in it? We look to the words of wisdom in these recommended titles. Words that give you a frame for understanding what the heck is happening, the means to envision the person you want to be, the inspiration to build a better society.

All Is Not Lost: 20 Ways to Revolutionize Disaster

Disaster is an opportunity to change the world. This is the first lesson of this book. You can expand democracy for the majority in times of crisis. Luckily for us, there’s a rich history of activists, intellectuals, and artists navigating the treacherous terrain of the unknown and unseen, and living to tell their stories in a new world they both helped create and, at times, never thought would be possible. . . . From them, you’ll learn how to resist successfully, speak emphatically, organize collectively, memorialize ethically, dream poetically, write prophetically, occupy vigorously, build durably, and act decisively.
—Alex Zamalin

The Blooming of a Lotus: Essential Guided Meditations for Mindfulness, Healing, and Transformation

To be alive, and to touch all the wonders of life within you and around you, is truly a miracle. We need only to open our eyes and to listen carefully to enjoy life’s richness. That is why the present moment can be the most beautiful and wonderful moment when you know how to be aware of your breathing to bring yourself back.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

Boomerang/Bumerán : Poetry/Poesía

We spin, then come down in a spiral,
a high flying twirl, a spiral, a straight line.
If done justly, the flow lifts both wings,
understanding, of course, that at least half the time
we’ll each find a higher velocity
and then a subtracting tip speed.
We try to arrange the spinning, the spiral,
to control the curving along the unbalanced
elliptical path, the spiral
that returns us to our point of origin.

Giramos, luego descendemos en espiral,
une giro elevade, une hélice, línea recte.
Si se hace correctamente, le flujo levanta ambes alas,
entendiendo, por supuesto, que a le menos le mitad de le tiempo
cada une conseguirá une velocidad más alte
y luego une velocidad de punta reste.
Tratamos de arreglar le giro, le espiral,
para controlar le curvatura a le largo de le desequilibrade
camino elíptique, le espiral
que nos lleva a nuestre punto de origen.
—Achy Obejas, “Boomerang”/”Bumerán”

Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother

Permission to fully inhabit our humanity isn’t something we need to ask anyone for. It is our birthright. When you dare to live wholly in your humanness—to extend luxuriantly into its every crack and corner—you will likely discover that every seemingly unified front conceals a few defectors-in-waiting. Should you find yourself shouted down by a majority, their unanimity is an illusion more often than not.
—G’Ra Asim

Nothing Personal
with a foreword by Imani Perry and an afterword by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

It has always seemed much easier to murder than to change. And this is really the choice with which we are confronted now.
—James Baldwin

Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Pregnancy, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families

I used to envision my graduation day when I sat in the Motel 6 as a way to help me make it through to the next day. When I pictured it, the scenes and faces were a blur, but now they were in front of me, each smile, wrinkle, and tearful eye exact and clear and just as it should be. Now I tried to envision what was next for me and [my daughter Nerissa], and it was hard to think of an existence that didn’t involve me functioning in a constant state of scarcity. I also couldn’t imagine leaving my experience here in Williamsburg and not doing something for the millions of other young mothers and fathers out there who could do the very same thing and just needed the support and resources to get there.
—Nicole Lynn Lewis

The Radiant Lives of Animals

When I think of change, I consider the re-minding of ourselves and I mean that it is time to consider other kinds of intelligence and ways of being, to stretch our synapses to take in new ways of thought. As an Indigenous woman, I look toward our Native knowledge systems, the times when our relationship with the earth wasn’t the disjointed connection most of us have learned from our Euro-American education systems. I am one human animal who wants to take back original meanings and understandings in ways that are possible and are necessary.
—Linda Hogan

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

Try as we might, we cannot disentangle ourselves from the concerns of others who make up this diverse nation. The work of democracy is incomplete, but the fight is certainly not over. As Hamer reiterated time and time again, we still have the power to make these ideals a reality. Our individual futures, as well as our collective future, in the United States depend on it. We must keep pushing for change. We have a long fight ahead.
—Keisha N. Blain

We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy

Tell a story of America where we all belong; build civic spaces where we can all contribute and feel connected. You want people who are being their worst selves to be their better selves. And truthfully, you want to be better too. All of us need to be better.
—Eboo Patel

Back in the Swing of Things: Beacon Press Returns to In-Person OAH Annual Meeting

Beacon Broadside — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 17:20:56 -0400

By Avery Cook

All set up at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians! Photo credits: Avery Cook

After two long years of conference Zoom rooms, we donned our lanyards once again and set up our table-skirted shop at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in Boston, from March 31 through April 3.

With the conference in our backyard this year, we attended with numbers and enthusiasm, enjoying for the first time since 2019 the privilege of being surrounded by our books and chatting in person with some of our authors. Our booth saw visits from Mary Frances Berry, author of Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich and History Teaches Us to Resist and coauthor of Power in Words; Melinda Chateauvert, author of Sex Workers Unite; Dana Frank, author of Buy American and coauthor of Three Strikes; Marcus Rediker, author of Villains of All Nations, Outlaws of the Atlantic, The Fearless Benjamin Lay, coauthor of The Many-Headed Hydra, and editor of Prophet Against Slavery. And two of our forthcoming authors, Gloria Browne-Marshall, who wrote She Took Justice, and Rhonda Y. Williams, who wrote Concrete Demands, were there, too!

The titles attendees flocked to at this year’s conference were Dr. Keisha Blain’s Until I Am Free, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Not “A Nation of Immigrants” and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, David Lester, Marcus Rediker, and Paul Buhle’s Prophet Against Slavery, Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross’s A Black Women’s History of the United States, and Kyle T. Mays’s An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States. It was exciting to see titles both from our backlist and from recent years side by side reaching new audiences, and we look forward to sharing forthcoming history titles, including Catherine Ceniza Choy’s Asian American Histories of the United States, coming out this August, which was popular as advance reader copies at the booth.

Posing with with galleys and final copies: Ruthie Block, editorial assistant (left); Alison Rodriguez (center); Emily Powers, senior marketing manager (right)

We asked a few members of our team to share their thoughts about being back at OAH. Here’s what they said:

Gayatri Patnaik and her son, Matthew

“After two years of not being able to attend academic conferences, it was nothing less than a joy to be able to attend the OAH—and a definite plus that it was in Boston. It was wonderful to spend time with Beacon colleagues, meeting some of them in person for the first time. And after our virtual existence for the last two years, the impact of being together with other publishers in one space, surrounded by books and catching up with friends, was poignant. Highlights included sharing a meal with Beacon authors Mary Frances Berry, Melinda Chateauvert, Marcus Rediker, Paul Ortiz, and future authors Gloria Browne-Marshall and Rhonda Y. Williams. My son, Matthew, who joined us on the last day, thoroughly enjoyed his first OAH, generously helping himself to swag from every publisher and finally experiencing for himself these mysterious conferences his mother periodically attends!”
—Gayatri Patnaik, publisher and incoming director

“For me, I think the biggest positive changes were how much more we use technology at the booth. When I started five years ago, we were doing a lot of sales and requests on paper, and now we are using iPads for all transactions and using QR codes to link to special offers and newsletter sign ups. It’s exciting to see how much we’ve been able to streamline things.

As many other people probably said, this was a slower year for us - most likely because of lingering COVID impacts. But it was a great opportunity to be able to be close to home for our first in-person event since November 2019! It was definitely a smaller conference than usual, but I imagine things will get busier later in the year.

We still received numerous compliments and messages of thanks from people who noted how crucial these books are the current moment. And as always, everyone loves all our swag!”
—Emily Powers, senior marketing manager

“I was really motivated by the work the countless OAH historians were presenting and felt new energy towards different topics that I think would lend themselves really well to Beacon books. I got the opportunity to meet some of our authors for the first time and to share enthusiasm with them about their work and about the work we’ve done or will do together. It was amazing to get to see our books and our staff in action and to get to be in a space like that, in person, for the first time in too long!”
—Ruthie Block, editorial assistant

From here, Beacon Press continues plans for attending the 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego later this month.

About the Author

Avery Cook joined the Beacon sales and marketing teams in 2022. She graduated from Hamilton College in 2021, where she studied creative writing and worked in community outreach, interfaith organizing, and archival research around American communal societies.

Women Providing Healing, Providing Hope Through History

Beacon Broadside — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 16:48:29 -0400

Image credit: Alexas_Fotos

Remember those minutes-long social media videos of folks quarantine clapping for frontline workers? And for the medical staff and carers looking after droves upon droves of COVID patients? Do you also remember that most of the ones getting the applause were women? If our global health crisis has made one thing clear, it’s how much we depend on—and take for granted—the recognized and unrecognized work women of all cultures do to keep societies going.

Cases in point. Kate Washington exposes the cultural expectation of women to take on the all-consuming role caregiver in Already Toast. Rosemarie Day shows how 80% of women make all healthcare decisions for their families in Marching Toward Coverage. Look back in the archives of human life and you’ll see repeats of this story.

In the spirit of this year’s theme for Women’s History Month, Providing Healing, Providing Hope, here’s a batch of recommended reading and book-length shout-outs to the women who’ve done so, in the past and today. History would not be what it is without them.

All Made Up: The Power and Pitfalls of Beauty Culture, from Cleopatra to Kim Kardashian

“If beauty reproduces the social order, then beauty trends can shift to include or exclude certain groups—and we may be in that transition now. Studying makeup reveals why these preferences are in place, who sets them, and who benefits. There is no way to divorce beauty from cultural norms and power structures; looking closer at the tools of beauty is a step toward dismantling those systems. It’s time to take that step.”
—Rae Nudson

Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America

“The cultural role of caregiving is in many ways an extension of the everyday forms of gender imbalance that exist in heterosexual relationships . . . Certainly not all women are subjugated in this manner, and far from all men expect to so subjugate us. This model, however, does offer some illumination of a cultural preconception that operates, I think, unconsciously for many people—and a dynamic I personally experienced: the expectation that caregivers give freely of their entire selves, and more so when we are women.”
—Kate Washington

Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the Secret System That Protects Them, and the Women Who Blew the Whistle

“In 2006, an activist from New York, Tarana Burke, suggested that women should band together to combat pervasive stories of sexual abuse and assault by sharing what she called ‘Me Too’ stories, though Burke’s idea would not fully take hold until 2017. That year, other women finally began to speak out about how other powerful federal judges had committed sexual harassment and other forms of misconduct. Many men cloaked in the power of their black robes seemed to have gotten away with it.”
—Lise Olsen

Entry Lessons: The Stories of Women Fighting for Their Place, Their Children, and Their Futures After Incarceration

“Why aren’t there enough reentry programs across the country to address the specific issues formerly incarcerated women face? With eighty-one thousand women released from state prisons annually, we can’t afford to wait . . . Even those who describe themselves as ‘tough on crime’ must acknowledge that it’s more fiscally and socially responsible to support women and prevent future crime than to keep locking them up. Of course, fundamental to this entire discussion is the commitment to investing in these women and their communities before they become involved with the criminal justice system.”
—Jorja Leap

Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

“We have these images in our heads of what disability looks like and what counts. But many of the women I’ve met have made me realize that disability is largely about the world's failure to make space for you.”
—Michele Lent Hirsch

Marching Toward Coverage: How Women Can Lead the Fight for Universal Health Care

“Women are more likely to be caregivers for children and elderly parents, and they’re more likely to be patients themselves. This means that women are the ones who interact with the healthcare system most often and most intimately. In fact, according to the US Department of Labor, women make approximately 80 percent of all healthcare decisions for their families. As a result, underinsurance and skyrocketing medical costs represent more than a national health crisis; they’re a civil rights issue, and the next battlefront for the feminist movement.”
—Rosemarie Day

Mothercoin: The Stories of Immigrant Nannies

“In our popular imagination, mothers are somehow always present—loving tirelessly, sacrificing constantly, protecting fiercely, and making the work of housekeeping and family nourishment as neat and invisible as the pressed sheets of a freshly made bed. The role of the immigrant nanny is to facilitate this ideal, but it comes at a cost. The choices she makes are limited by the realities she encounters—regional inequity exacerbated by globalism and the neoliberal policies meant to manage it, labyrinthine immigration practices that refuse to account for the reality of ‘the female underside of globalization,’ and maternity and childcare policies in the US that willfully ignore the social and economic value of childrearing.”
—Elizabeth Cummins Muñoz

Poor Richard’s Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father

“The idea for this book grew out of my long interest in women’s lives. Today, as during previous waves of feminism, it is again acknowledged that women are the forgotten sex and that many of their deeds and influence have been dismissed or at best reduced to historical footnotes. Unfortunately, this loss of information has left a frustrating gap in our understanding about the lives of men as well. That became painfully obvious in the early 1990s as I first read traditional accounts of Ben Franklin’s life. The questions abounded. Why didn’t Deborah accompany him to England? What led her to remain in Philadelphia, far from the man she adored? Was that her decision, or Ben’s? Was their marriage filled with dissension? Was their separation an eighteenth-century version of divorce?”
—Nancy Rubin Stuart

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

“I want patriarchy to know that feminism is rage unleashed against its centuries of crimes against women and girls around the world, crimes that are justified by ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ and ‘it’s just the way things are,’ all of which are euphemisms for ‘this world is run by men for the benefit of men.’ . . . I also want feminism to be led by the nonwhite and the queer, who don’t have the luxury of fighting only misogyny. We must fight the multiple systems of oppressions that patriarchy often intertwines itself with: racism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, and ageism.”
—Mona Eltahawy

Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice

“Reproductive justice has three primary principles: the right not to have a child, the right to have a child, and the right to parent in safe and healthy environments. It is an intersectional approach grounded in the multiple challenges and social realities that women face during their entire reproductive lives. This intersectional approach also recognizes the moral complexity of individual women’s life situations, rejects the position of moral absolutism, and holds that moral meaning and value can only be measured within the context of an existing moral life.”
—Rebecca Todd Peters

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message for America

“In Hamer’s framing, no one could truly experience freedom if others in that society were constrained. She reiterated this message on a number of occasions, underscoring the danger of being complicit in the face of injustice. ‘Until I am free,’ she boldly told the mostly white audience members at the University of Wisconsin in 1971, ‘you are not either.’”
—Keisha N. Blain

Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“This, in the end, is what matters: not that we stand proudly in all our monstrousness every day but that we find small ways to gestate dissent and deviation, to nurse and nurture the things that are supposed to be wrong with us until they grow into something great. This is our strength: that each of us has the capacity to be not only a monster but a mother of monsters. We can birth from our own bodies every one of men’s worst fears”
—Jess Zimmerman

A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight for Black History in Schools

“Morgan’s demand that Black history receive a place in the school curriculum continues to hold relevance today, almost a century after she began teaching. Her conviction that the history of Black America must be acknowledged in the school curriculum anticipated the demands of civil rights workers in the 1950s, Black Power activists in the 1960s, and multiculturalists in the 1980s and 1990s.”
—Michael Hines

The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood

“It is time, once and for all, to dismantle the gods of Hollywood to whom we have all sacrificed too much for far too long. It is time to think and act radically about building a different kind of future for the industry that shapes our culture—not only for the women being actively hurt inside the film industry but also for those outside it, whose careers, relationships, purchasing decisions, and sense of self are shaped by the stories our industry is feeding them.”
—Naomi McDougall Jones

Fannie Lou Hamer Embodied Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Vision of Courageous Black Leadership

Beacon Broadside — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 14:55:12 -0500

By Keisha N. Blain

Fannie Lou Hamer, American civil rights leader, at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 22, 1964. Photo credit: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine

More than forty years since her death in 1977, Fannie Lou Hamer’s words still speak truth to power, laying bare the faults in American society and offering valuable insights on how we might yet continue the fight to help the nation live up to its core ideals of “equality and justice for all.” In Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Dr. Keisha N. Blain situates Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe.

Dr. Blain gave a keynote address about her this year at the twenty-third annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Virtual Holiday Observance and Sunrise Celebration. Hosted by the American Library Association, the event commemorates Dr. King’s legacy and recognizes the connection between his life’s work and the library world. This year’s theme focuses on Dr. King’s 1957 speech, “Give Us the Ballot—We Will Transform the South.” Dr. Blain’s address illustrates how Hamer embodied Dr. King’s vision of courageous Black leadership.

~~~

In 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a speech on the power of voting. King argued that access to the ballot would allow Black Americans to remake society without having to wait for federal support. He argued that voting was a solution for the many challenges Black Americans faced. King’s speech also addressed the 1954 Brown Decision. In the aftermath of Brown, local school districts and politicians continued to resist the attempts to desegregate schools nationwide. These delays frustrated Civil Rights activists across the nation who organized the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. King used his speech at the event to advocate for expanding Black political rights. He emphasized the need for strong leadership to emerge from several groups, including from within Black communities. King called for courageous Black leaders to emerge. He stated that these leaders must meet hate with love.

King’s vision would soon be realized as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, spread throughout the South. SNCC recruited local Black leaders to organize their communities. These leaders were essential to achieving the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, and perhaps none more so than Fannie Lou Hamer.

Fannie Lou Hamer was the embodiment of King’s vision, a courageous leader who answered the call to expand Black political rights. Hamer deeply believed in the power of voting. Although King and Hamer did not always see eye-to-eye, she shared his commitment that the politics of love could overcome the politics of hate.

Born in Mississippi in 1917, Hamer was a working poor and disabled Black sharecropper who joined the Civil Rights Movement at the age of forty-four. In 1962, her life changed dramatically after attending a mass meeting at a local church. The gathering had been organized by activists in SNCC. The speakers that night highlighted how ordinary citizens could transform American society with the right to vote, a message that resonated with Hamer. She went on to become a field secretary for SNCC and assisted Black people in Mississippi and beyond with voter registration.

This was dangerous work. In June 1963, Hamer was returning from South Carolina with a group of other activists. They stopped in Wynona to grab a bite to eat. Hamer’s colleagues encountered resistance from the owners of the café who made it clear that Black people were not welcome. The police arrived. And when Hamer exited the bus, an officer grabbed her and started kicking her. After Hamer and her colleagues were arrested, they received brutal beatings from the police officers who also instructed prisoners to do the same. Hamer’s injuries left her with kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and worsened a physical limp that she would carry for the rest of her life. However, Hamer was undeterred and continued her efforts to expand Black political rights.

This was no small matter. Despite the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Black people in the South were still shut out of the formal political process. During the early 1960s, only an estimated five percent of Mississippi’s 450,000 Black residents were registered to vote. Hamer was determined to change this. In April 1964, she joined forces with several other activists to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the MFDP. The group challenged the Mississippi all-white Democratic party. In August of 1964, only months after the establishment of the MFDP, Hamer and others traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to attend the Democratic National Convention. The group arrived in Atlantic City hoping to compel the state and national party to give up seats to the MFDP delegation rather than suffering the embarrassment of exposing the lack of equal representation before a national audience. They also hoped to raise awareness to the broader struggles Black people in Mississippi face as they attempted to exercise their right to vote. They wanted people to know about the resistance Civil Rights activists encountered while organizing in the state.

The experience in Atlantic City transformed Hamer. Although she encountered resistance, she persisted and delivered the most well-known speech of her political career before the Credentials Committee at the Convention. Hamer used her speech to describe the acts of racist violence Black people faced on a daily basis in the Jim Crow South. She told the stories of shots being fired at the homes of those who supported voting rights, and she told the story of what happened to her in Wynona. As she reflected on the painful experiences that Black people face in the South, Hamer could not help but to question America. In her words, is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?

These crucial words shook the nation to its core. The United States could not claim to be a democracy while withholding the voting rights from millions of its citizens. Hamer had asked an urgent question that all Americans were forced to ponder. Is this America?

~~~

Watch Dr. Blain’s full keynote.

About the Author

Keisha N. Blain is a historian of the 20th-century United States specializing in African American history, the modern African diaspora, and women’s and gender studies. She is the author of the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire, Until I Am Free, and co-editor, with Ibram X. Kendi, of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls. She is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, president of the African American Intellectual History Society, and a columnist for MSNBC. Follow her at keishablain.com, on Twitter (@keishablain), and on Instagram (@keishanblain).

#SorryNotSorry, Book Banners, Black History Is Still Happening

Beacon Broadside — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 15:33:26 -0500

What a difference a year makes. Book banning is back—and it’s on steroids. Is it a coincidence that it’s all the rave—more like rage—during Black History Month? The pearl-clutchers have assembled and are targeting not only books dealing with sex and gender but also books featuring Black themes and US history. It’s a predictable flex. A tired flex.

Don’t forget that Paul Ortiz’s An African American and Latinx History of the United States holds the dubious honor of making it on that little Krause list of around 850 books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” We know which students he’s referring to. That’s what you call cosigning ignorance. Is “psychological distress” the new doublespeak for learning and enlightenment?

And so, starting with Ortiz’s book, here’s a batch of recommended reading on Black history and Black lives for the month and year round. Psychological distress be damned. Because Uncle Jimmy Baldwin put it best in The Price of the Ticket: “One wishes that Americans—white Americans—would read, for their own sakes, this record and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives.”

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“In a time of endless war, with democracy in full retreat, I argue that we must chart pathways toward equality for all people by digging deep into the past and rediscovering the ideas of Emancipation Day lecturers, Mexicano newspaper editors, abolitionists, Latin American revolutionaries, and Black anti-imperialists who dreamed of democratic ways of living in the Americas.”
—Paul Ortiz

An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

“If I am to imagine a new world, one that brings an end to a world that hates Black people and reproduces antiblackness and white supremacy, and a world that erases Indigenous people and reproduces their dispossession through settler colonialism, I intend to tell some histories that have been ignored at best or made invisible at worst.”
—Kyle T. Mays

And the Category Is . . . : Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community

“What is Ballroom? First, let’s be clear about what it isn’t. Ballroom is not a single song, movie, catchphrase, TV show, pop star, or ‘scene.’ Ballroom, ball culture, or the house-vogue system is part of a thriving arts-based culture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latinx people of Harlem . . . If identity is a construct, and the world a stage, then Ballroom is the world’s Met Gala.”
—Ricky Tucker

How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Have you ever wondered how people lived with slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching but looked the other way? Look around right now. This is how they did it.”
—Crystal M. Fleming

Living While Black: Using Joy, Beauty, and Connection to Heal Racial Trauma

“This book sheds a light on the trauma of racism—its impact on both our mental and physical health and its consequences across individuals’ lifespans, across generations, and across social contexts . . . I want there to be no doubt that racism harms and that racial trauma is real. But, equally, I want to show that it is possible to resist and to practice radical self-care while navigating white supremacy.”
—Guilaine Kinouani

The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985

“My point of view certainly is formed by my history, and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”
—James Baldwin, from “White Man’s Guilt”

The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)member

“(Re)membering serves to honor the complexity of that wholeness in the long history of Black life, a history that moves us to be more fully human through both the joy and the tragedies of our existence as a people, and to learn from all of it.”
—Cynthia B. Dillard

Ten Lives, Ten Demands: Life-and-Death Stories, and a Black Activist’s Blueprint for Racial Justice

“The demands in this book are drawn from my desire to see my people fight and win the equality we deserve . . . America is our country. Its wealth is built on our backs. Its capitalism depends on our consumption, and its future will be defined by our success. We demand much more than I could list in these pages, but these ten things are a damn good start.”
—Solomon Jones

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

“As Hamer reminded audiences across the country, it was impossible to ‘make democracy work’ when only some Americans had access to rights and resources.”
—Keisha N. Blain

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., from “The World House”

White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality

“A basic move, of creating and maintaining Black-subordinating institutions to confer value on affluent whites, has not changed, though the mechanics and propaganda have metastasized. I argue that policy decisions made in the early twentieth century, to construct ghettos, have profound consequences for producing current inequality. I also contend that geography is now central to American caste, a mechanism for overinvesting in affluent white space and disinvesting and plundering elsewhere.”
—Sheryll Cashin

The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement

“Children and teenagers were on the front lines at nonviolent protests and demonstrations throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but their major contributions to civil rights activism has generally gone unacknowledged.”
—V. P. Franklin

Beacon’s Batch of Best-Of Books Is Bursting During Our Holiday Sale!

Beacon Broadside — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 11:40:59 -0500

This is it. The final hurrah for 2021! Yes, we’re ending in the phase of Omicron rising, but many of our titles were selected for a number of best-of lists and holiday gift guides for the year. So many! Let’s raise a glass to our authors to congratulate them!

And guess what? Our holiday sale is in full swing! The best-of books below and everything else on our website are 30% off through December 31 with code HOL30. If you’re still on the hunt for holiday gifts, you know where to scroll.

By the way, we will be closed Monday, December 20, 2021, through Friday, December 31, 2021. We will be back in the office on Monday, January 3, 2022.

As you place orders during this time, remember that USPS media mail takes 7 to 10 business days. Also, the Penguin Random House warehouse will be closed from December 23 to December 25 and then on December 31. So plan accordingly as you place your orders.

Here’s to a new plague-free year we desperately need and more best-of books to come!

Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2021

Harvard Book Store’s Gift Ideas 2021: History and Politics

Wall Street Journal’s “Who Read What: Writers Share Their Favorite Books of 2021”

Kirkus Reviews’ “2021’s Best Books About Being Black in America”

Publishers Weekly’s Holiday Gift Guide 2021: Poetry

The Telegraph’s “75 Best Books of 2021 to Read This Winter”

Audubon’s “44 Perfect Gifts for the Bird and Nature Lovers in Your Life”
Plume’s Staff Recommendations of December 2021

Harvard Book Store’s Gift Ideas 2021: History and Politics

NPR’s Books We Love 2021
Esquire’s The 50 Best Books of 2021
Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction Books of the Year
Harvard Book Store’s Gift Ideas 2021: Literary Fiction

NPR’s Books We Love 2021

Kirkus Reviews’ “Best YA Biography and Memoir of 2021”

Esquire’s “The 10 Best Christmas Books to Read During the Holidays”

Smithsonian Magazine’s “The Ten Best History Books of 2021”
The Guardian’s “The best books of 2021, chosen by our guest authors”
Chicago Tribune’s “Biblioracle’s 8 favorite nonfiction books of 2021”

The Progressive’s “Favorite Books of 2021”
Foreign Affairs’ “The Best Books of 2021”

NPR’s Books We Love 2021

October Is the New December, So Start Your Holiday Book Hunting Now

Beacon Broadside — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 15:32:46 -0400

You’ve heard the news. Now’s the time to jump on your holiday book buying. Supply chain delays are affecting many industries, including the book industry. Some new books you’ve been waiting for may not make it to bookstores in time for the holiday, and hot sellers may be sold out by December and not reprinted in time. On top of that, what’s thrown a wrench into the works is—wait for it—the pandemic. Who saw that plot twist coming? (We’d probably be in less of this mess if everyone got vaccinated, but hey, let’s not digress.) So, gifts you would typically start buying in December may not be available. That’s why we, along with your favorite authors and bookstores, are recommending that you get started now if you haven’t already while bookstores are stocked up with your favorite titles.

October is the new December. Trust us: This is not like seeing Christmas decorations in Walmart before Halloween.

We’re starting you off with some selections for the season from our catalog. Take a look!

~~~

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
Imani Perry

“Breathe is what is says it is, a letter from a mother to her sons, but it is more than that. It’s a meditation on child-rearing, world-building, fire-starting, and peace-building. Imani Perry combines rigor and heart, and the result is a magic mirror showing us who we are, how we got here, and who we may become.”
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance
Ntozake Shange

“A gorgeous last offering from one of our most gifted and multifaceted artists. Her passion for dance, just like her passion for words, is among the many reasons she will be missed, though these insightful interviews, ruminations, and reflections will continue to be a balm, across generations, from her to us.”
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside

How to Love a Country: Poems
Richard Blanco

“This clear-seeing and forthright volume marks Blanco as a major, deeply relevant poet.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl

“This is a book I reread a lot . . . it gives me hope . . . it gives me a sense of strength.”
—Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360/CNN

One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
Yaba Blay

“One Drop presents a nuanced exploration of racial identity that serves as a practical guide for thinking critically about what it means to be Black in the twenty-first century.”
—Tarana J. Burke, author, activist, and founder of the MeToo movement

Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
Mary Oliver

“Oliver has gained enormous popularity in recent years for the accessible yet highly articulate and profound treatment she gives each poem . . . This title will bring much pleasure to the many readers who claim Oliver as their favorite poet, as well as to people new to her work.”
—Library Journal

Palmares
Gayl Jones

“This story shimmers. Shakes. Wails. Moves to rhythms long forgotten . . . in many ways: holy. [A] masterpiece.”
—The New York Times Book Review

The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985
James Baldwin

“With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic acuity, Baldwin fearlessly articulates issues of race, democracy, and American identity.”
—Toni Morrison

Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel
David Lester with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle

“David Lester’s raw, expressive visual approach perfectly delivers. Prophet Against Slavery is a crucial account of abolitionism’s religious framework, its courage and moral clarity often recast as sin or insanity, and the necessity of taking outside risks in pursuit of justice and equality.”
—Nate Powell, National Book Award–winning artist of the March trilogy about US congressman John Lewis

The Radiant Lives of Animals
Linda Hogan

“Linda Hogan’s work is rooted in truth and mystery.”
—Louise Erdrich

A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories
Compiled and edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas

“Here was a veritable who’s who of Black writers, whose powerful stories and poems ran the gamut of literary expressions—from the tragic to the comic, fables to romance. A book for all seasons, these stories are bound to amuse, educate, and inspire all kids, from one to ninety-two.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America
Keisha N. Blain

“[A] riveting and timely exploration of Hamer’s life. . . . Brilliantly constructed to be both forward and backward looking, Blain’s book functions simultaneously as a much needed history lesson and an indispensable guide for modern activists.”
—New York Times Book Review

~~~

Here’s what you can do as we get through this season.

See something you’d like a loved one to have? Buy it now!
If you aren’t too blitzed by Zoom fatigue and working remotely, consider buying it as an e-book or audiobook.
Are your eyes set on a title that’s not coming out for another few months? Smash that preorder button now! Your authors and indie bookstores will love you and appreciate you for this.

Which brings us to the next point. Speaking of indies, we need to really show up for them and for venues like Bookshop, Indiebound, and our personal favorite, InSpirt UU Book and Gift Shop. Publishing delays are likely to hit them harder than large chain bookstores. Holiday season keeps indies afloat during the slower seasons. The pandemic hasn’t made this any easier for them.

We’re all in this together. We thank you, your authors thank you, and your indie bookstores thank you.

What Is This Rage Against Critical Race Theory All About?

Beacon Broadside — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 16:22:46 -0400

Image credit: Gerd Altmann

The townspeople have clutched their pearls and fetched their pitchforks to raise hell against the new boogeyman du jour allegedly stomping the horizon. Do we dare speak its name? That boogeyman is . . . Critical Race Theory. White conservatives don’t want its antiracist agenda infecting children’s minds. During a Newsmax segment, even political commentator Dick Morris went as far as to call Critical Race Theory a “cancer” and suggested that teaching it to children in schools could “reinforce the Oedipal notion all kids have of wanting to kill their father and marry their mother.” Honestly, there are wilder conspiracy theories that make more sense. The backlash is no different from the time when our former white supremacist in chief called for teaching “patriotic” histories.

Amid the hubbub, President Biden signed a law, making Juneteenth a federal holiday. But you can’t appreciate the celebration and relevance of the holiday without knowledge of the US’s original sin and its overarching reach in our policies today. In response to this, we reached out to some of our authors to weigh on all the sound and fury. Here’s what they had to say.

The recent decision of the Biden-Harris administration to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday coincides with widespread efforts to pass new laws restricting voting at the state level and renewed attempts to limit the teaching of diverse histories in classrooms across the country. These developments are connected and serve as an important reminder that symbolic gestures, while meaningful, fall short of addressing systemic racism in American society. Making Juneteenth a federal holiday does nothing to dismantle racism or its legacies. It should, however, serve as an impetus to reaffirm our commitment to building a more just and equal society—one that truly encapsulates the spirit of Juneteenth.
—Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

This is less a backlash against Critical Race Theory—a set of rigorous, theoretical concepts that obviously very few of the current CRT critics have read—and more a blow against the global Black Lives Matter movement. We are in an Empire Strikes Back moment when elements of the ruling class are trying to crush movements for policing reforms, historical truth, and working-class power.

The people inside of the vibrant social movements today have developed a new understanding of this nation’s past as well as its potential. They are on the cusp of major breakthroughs. The millions of people who have marched, organized, and have attended city council meetings across the country in support of BLM are moving toward creating the conditions for dismantling mass incarceration and creating a universal health care system. Above all, this is what the enemies of Critical Race Theory fear. They fear the power of a people awakened to their potential and they tremble at the vision of a truly antiracist and democratic society. We must push ever harder to bring a new world into existence.
—Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

For an educator like me, the federal observance of Juneteenth brings up a familiar and well-historied divide between word and deed that has worked, for centuries, to perpetuate contorted versions of US history. In the same week that Biden signed into law the national holiday observing Juneteenth, four states had voted in laws forbidding the teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools, and similar bills were in process in nineteen other states. Critical Race Theory is a multi-faceted legal theory with evidence that asserts that racism is enshrined in the nation’s laws. Some states, such as Iowa, are extending this McCarthy-esque ban to higher education. Iowa House Bill 802 “prohibits the use of curriculum that teaches the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation or racial discrimination . . . ”

It is literally impossible to teach the accurate history of Juneteenth without referring to slavery as an economic system that enslavers in Texas simply refused to cede until Union soldiers came to Galveston to enforce the then two-year-old Emancipation Proclamation. Interestingly, these white supremacy-fueled backlash bills and laws do not forbid teaching about the ongoing project of erasing Indigeneity.

Like the struggle to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday an observed federal holiday, Juneteenth is surrounded by watered down references that blur historical accuracy. However, the long-standing antiracist teaching parses out these contradictions and lifts up accuracy and facts.
—Leigh Patel, No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

The current controversy over Critical Race Theory is a reflection not of the American Right’s cultural strength, but of its waning ideological influence. Under the eras of Ronald Reagan and even George W. Bush, when conservatives controlled the bipartisan policy conversation around cutting taxes, going to war, and neglecting racial inequality, terms like freedom, equality of opportunity, and democracy were used, without second thought or much philosophical elaboration, to support right-wing initiatives.

Now, as the Right is unable to win national elections through the popular vote and is forced to confront a cultural landscape where—after the George Floyd protests of 2020—antiracism is a mainstream idea, it resorts to increasingly technical attacks on racial justice through demonizing an academic discipline like Critical Race Theory. In doing this, the Right is playing on the home turf of the scholarly journals and elite law schools that it claims to despise and showing that it can no longer control the narrative around race in the US. The Right no longer is confident that populist terms like “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” are winning slogans, like they were in the early 2010s. The Right can’t brazenly invoke the idea of colorblindness like it used to, effectively, in the 1990s—not after public attention on mass incarceration and police brutality. So, instead, it tries to say “Critical Race Theory” is dangerous and anti-American. Doing this might be fine for playing to the Right’s hardcore Fox News watching base, but it isn’t a strategy for seizing the US cultural vocabulary.

And yet, as the Right watches from the sidelines and seethes around the culture’s shift on antiracism, the young interracial activists on the ground are doing just this. They’re not just taking about Critical Race Theory; they’re already putting it into practice: running for office, organizing in their communities, and unapologetically advocating for policies to end racism.
—Alex Zamalin, Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility

Beacon’s Wealth of Black Women Biographies for Women’s History Month

Beacon Broadside — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:10:31 -0500

By Helene Atwan

Rosa Park, Odetta, and Lorraine Hansberry

When Beacon was founded, in the mid-1850s, two burning issues of the day were abolition and women’s suffrage. Here, as we transition from Black History into Women’s History Month, I’m feeling so proud of our lasting tradition of publishing biographies that celebrate Black lives and women’s stories, and often both.

Decades ago, about the time I came to Beacon, we published Marian Wright Edelman’s memoir of her mentors (and it was among the press’s best-selling books of the time), and more recently we have published biographies of Black women who have made an indelible contribution to our history, including, of course, the NAACP Image Award–winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis (also a best-selling book for Beacon, and just last month we published the YA adaptation of that book, coauthored by Jeanne and celebrated writer Brandy Colbert). These books put Mrs. Parks not just at the front of the bus but at the front of a movement that she very much helped to plan and lead. They correct the false image of an unwitting heroine who needed a rest and restore Parks to her actual role as an intentional and lifelong activist for civil rights.

The work of Black women as leaders in activism goes far deeper in our history, as recent films about Harriet Tubman and Madame C. J. Walker attest. But these women need no fictionalizing. In Keisha Blain’s powerful Until I Am Free, we will have a new book that tells the story of Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children, the granddaughter of enslaved people, a woman who worked as a sharecropper before dedicating herself to activism; and just out is a biography of Dorothy Pitman Hughes, With Her Fist Raised, Laura Lovett’s groundbreaking account of this pivotal figure in Black feminism and community organizing. The powerful work and witness of these women is baked into American culture and deserves to be better known. Like so many of the important books recently written by Black women activists, a good number of those published by Beacon, these stories correct the white supremacist version of history we’ve been fed for centuries.

We’ve also published in just the last half decade several important biographies of extremely influential Black women in the arts who are not as well-known as they deserve to be: Gayle Wald’s Shout, Sister, Shout!, the story of the life and times of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, often acknowledged to be the first gospel superstar, a book that led me to discover Sister Rosetta’s unique music, much as Ian Zack’s Odetta, an intimate portrait of a woman who was known as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” led me to hours of riveting listening. Angela Jackson’s acclaimed biography of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun, introduces us to one of the great American literary icons of the twentieth century, a protégé of Langston Hughes and a mentor to a generation of poets, including our own Sonia Sanchez. I hadn’t read enough of Brooks’s work or understood her role, her very real importance in our culture, until Jackson’s book. And until Imani Perry’s multiple award-winning biography of playwright and essayist Lorraine Hansberry, Looking for Lorraine, I mostly knew only A Raisin in the Sun and failed to appreciate the ways Hansberry used her prominence to challenge President Kennedy and his brother, the attorney general, to take bolder stances on civil rights, for example, or in supporting African anticolonial leaders and confronting the more subtle racism of the new generation of white writers. These books will help reshape our understanding of the lasting influence of Black women in the arts.

Just a few months ago, Beacon’s associate publisher and editorial director, Gayatri Patnaik, was awarded BIO’s prestigious 2020 Editorial Excellence Award. Most of the books I’ve mentioned above were acquired and edited by Gayatri; she deserves our gratitude.

Finally, on a personal note, I feel deeply honored, over the course of my career, to have had the opportunity to work with Black women whose influence on me has been profound. In the days before I came to Beacon, I was lucky enough to get to know Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, among other brilliant Black women. Since I became director here, now over twenty-five years ago, I’ve been fortunate to have had the chance to meet and interact with some of the writers mentioned here, along with some whose work I personally edited and whose friendship I count as one of the great joys of my life. So thank you to Amy Alexander, Elaine Brown, Dominique Christina, Carol Fulp, Lani Guinier, Anita Hill, Gayl Jones, Deborah Plummer, and Sonia Sanchez.

About the Author

Helene Atwan has been the director of Beacon Press since 1995.