Black Page Turners

I Am Charlie Wilson by:Charlie Wilson
The long-awaited memoir of seven-time Grammy-nominated artist Charlie Wilson, the iconic R&B and Funk singer-songwriter-producer—interwoven with his recollections of collaborating with fellow artists such as Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, and Snoop Dogg.

Recognized the world over for his distinct voice and timeless hits spanning a career of nearly half a century, Charlie Wilson is one of the most celebrated musicians of his generation. So it took friends and family by surprise when he checked into rehab and revealed that he had been not only homeless, but also helpless.

Here, in the memoir fans have been demanding, is the story of how love and faith carried him through not only his addiction, but also prostate cancer. Here, too, is the story of his work in the music business, including a career resurgence that saw collaborations with some of the most sought-after artists of today, including Pharrell and Justin Timberlake.

Now over twenty years sober, Wilson recounts a life filled with vertiginous highs and heartbreaking lows. His is a story of triumph over adversity, courage in the face of extreme hardship, and love when all else is lost. It is a tale of the last sixty years in social and pop culture history, and one that will stay with you for years to come.
Release:6/30/15
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The Star Side of Bird Hill by:Naomi Jackson
Two sisters are suddenly sent from their home in Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, in this stunning debut novel.

This lyrical novel of community, betrayal, and love centers on an unforgettable matriarchal family in Barbados. Two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah.

Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother’s limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother’s mysterious life.

This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family.

Jackson’s Barbados and her characters are singular, especially the wise Hyacinth and the heartbreaking young Phaedra, who is coming into her own as a young woman amid the tumult of her family.
Release:6/30/15
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Stand Your Ground by:Victoria Christopher Murray
A black teenage boy is dead. A white man shot him. Was he standing his ground or was it murder?

Janice Johnson is living every black mother’s nightmare. Her seventeen-year-old son was murdered and the shooter has not been arrested. Can the D.A. and the police be trusted to investigate and do the right thing? Should Janice take advantage of the public outcry and join her husband alongside the angry protestors who are out for revenge?

Meredith Spencer is married to the man accused of the killing and she sees her husband and the situation with far more clarity than anyone realizes. What she knows could blow the case wide open, but what will that mean for her life and that of her son? Will she have the courage to come forward in time so that justice can be done?

#1 national bestselling and award-winning author Victoria Christopher Murray’s Stand Your Ground is a pulse-pounding meditation on race, motherhood, marriage, and vigilante justice that will have readers spellbound until its shocking end.
Release:6/30/15
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One Righteous Man by:Arthur Browne
A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer.

When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America.

By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as “godfather” to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the “Hellfighters of Harlem.” He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department.

At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughes’s manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.

The Souls of Black Folk by:W.E.B. Du Bois
This collection of essays by scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and offers powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of moral, social, political, and economic equality. These essays on the black experience in America range from sociological studies of the African American community to illuminating discourses on religion and “Negro music,” and remain essential reading in our so-called “post racial age.” A new introduction by Jonathan Holloway explores Du Bois’s signature accomplishments while helping readers to better understand his writings in the context of his time as well as ours.
Release:6/30/15
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Little Rhino 3:Dugout Hero by:Ryan Howard
A new chapter book series from Major League Baseball’s 2006 National League MVP, Ryan Howard!

The score was 5-5 in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs, and two strikes. The Mustangs were on a hot winning streak and every victory was important. Little Rhino’s whole team was cheering for him. Even Dylan was standing on the bench rooting for Little Rhino, the home run hitter. It all came down to the next pitch. When the pitcher threw the ball, Little Rhino swung as hard as his arms could handle, felt a pop in his ankle, and dropped to the ground.

That was yesterday. Today, Little Rhino is propped up on the couch with a sprained ankle. The doctor said Little Rhino is not going to be able to play baseball for the next two weeks. Rhino’s friends keep dropping by to bring him his homework but Rhino just wants to be back on the field. Can he find a way to help his team without playing?
Release:6/30/15
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Her Sweetest Revenge by:Saundra
For seventeen-year-old Mya Bedford, life in a Detroit project is hard enough, but when her mother develops a drug habit, Mya has to take on raising her younger siblings. Too bad the only man who can teach her how to survive—her dad—is behind bars. For life. All he can tell her is that she’ll have to navigate the mean streets on her own terms. Mya’s not sure what that means—until her mother is seriously beaten by a notorious gang. Then it all becomes deadly clear.

Vowing revenge, Mya uses her feminine charm to begin a slew of successful robberies against the guilty crew. But the path she’s chosen gets complicated by a risky secret, a risky romance—and a scheme she might not come out of alive…
Release:6/30/15
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Acts of Betrayal by:Tracie Loveless-Hill
Michael and Lorece, young high school sweethearts, have a promising future ahead of them when Michael is offered a basketball scholarship to a junior college. He turns it down when Lorece becomes pregnant, taking a job at a local meat packing plant. Working himself up to supervisor within five years, he is devastated when the plant shuts down and he loses his job. When suggestions of better opportunities in another city comes along, he packs up his family and leaves the only life that they have known, only to find that life isn’t as promising as they thought.

Lorece is fighting depression when the family meets the bishop of a prominent church with high standing in the community. The bishop and his wife promise the couple that they will take care of their children until they can get back on their feet. Michael and Lorece soon find out that they are in a fight for their lives—and a battle to get their children back. When God sends someone to deliver them their blessings, secrets come out about the bishop and his wife. There will be many lessons to be learned amidst acts of betrayal.
Release:6/30/15
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Try a Little Tenderness: A Hislove.com Novel by:Isaiah David Paul & Allyson M. Deese
Husband and wife Isaiah David Paul and Allyson M. Deese team up to bring a street-themed Christian romance to life.

Amirah Dalton has accepted her calling to be in outreach ministry at her local church. The only problem is that she’s the only unwed female in leadership, and she feels the pressure to find a husband—fast.

After serving time in prison for larceny and mail fraud, Mateo Valdez joins the newly formed Street Disciples Ministry in Asheville, North Carolina in an effort to atone for his sins and spread the word of Christ.

Amirah and Mateo both join His-Love.com in an effort to meet someone of the opposite sex willing to give them a chance. Will they listen to God and connect, or will they let Satan allow their perceptions of one another get in the way?
Release:6/30/15
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Come Sunday Morning Saga by:Terry E. Hill
Hezekiah T. Cleaveland is the handsome pastor of New Testament Cathedral in Los Angeles. His beautiful wife, Reverend Samantha Cleaveland, is the power behind Hezekiah and his megachurch, running their national television ministry with a firm hand. Jealousy and an unbridled lust for power drive Samantha to devise a plan that would remove the one thing standing between her and the spotlight she desires. During a Sunday morning sermon, a shot rings out in the sanctuary, and Hezekiah is killed. Samantha convinces the congregation that she has set aside her grief for the good of the church, and she is installed as the pastor of New Testament Cathedral. Not everyone is happy about her rise to power.

Hezekiah’s former male lover, the wife of the church’s assistant pastor, and a reporter seeking a hot story to jumpstart his career, are all looking for a way to take down Samantha Cleaveland. They might be underestimating the cunning and dangerous nature of their prey, though. Samantha has a secret that she’s willing to go to any length to protect, and she doesn’t care who she has to destroy in the process. As Samantha continues her shameless pursuit of power, she is trailed by this unlikely band of co-conspirators. Who will emerge victorious?
Release:6/30/15
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Kiss Me On The Inside 2 by:Janice Burkett
Keisha could never have predicted her downfall when she accepted a job offer from her uncle at Top Dot Records. She was hired to do whatever it took to get artists signed to his label, and she was good at it, but she soon found herself in a predicament when she decided to double dip by dating two artists on the label.

When Hype learned of her betrayal, he set out on a mission to kill both Keisha and his label mate, Bling, but the plan went off track, and her uncle Patrick paid with his life. Keisha vowed to avenge her uncle’s death, but when she came face to face with her uncle’s killer, she got cold feet. She was taken hostage by the man she had betrayed, and he sold her to the highest bidder.

Now Keisha is waking up from a coma after all that trauma. Maybe it’s a good thing she has amnesia and can’t remember what happened to her. She finds herself in the arms of her estranged husband for a while—but that is short lived, as her memory resurfaces and she realizes that she’s sleeping with the devil. Keisha seeks comfort from Bling, and as she falls in love with him, she sets out on a mission to take what she believes belongs to her. She might just be setting herself up for more drama because his wife isn’t going to give him up without a fight.
Release:6/30/15
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Corrupt City Saga by:Tra Verdego
Meet Donald “Lucky” Gibson. He’s considered one of the best detectives around, until he joins his new unit, a team of corrupt cops who are just as bad as the criminals they are supposed to be catching. Lucky soon falls into the trap and becomes one more thug with a badge. Years of abusing his position have led to an out of control cocaine habit, the loss of his family, and a love affair with a young runaway prostitute, but Lucky has had enough. After an innocent black man is killed by his white partners, Lucky testifies against them. He uses the media to expose his dirty team, including his captain and the commissioner. Now Lucky is a marked man, and even the mayor wants him dead. Corruption does not begin to describe what the law enforcement and government officials represent.

With trickery in each chapter, this must-read novel will have you cheering for the bad guys, while wondering who can be trusted, who is behind the foul events that unfold, and where the corruption will end. You won’t be able to put this book down until you discover all the answers.

Welcome to Corrupt City Saga, where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, and every character is a suspect. Tra Verdejo is entering the street lit scene with a raw style that will quickly put him on top.
Release:6/30/15
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