A powerful new voice, telling the American story through three generations of Black mothers.

Sasha Bonét grew up in 1990s Houston, worlds removed from the Louisiana cotton plantation that raised her grandmother, Betty Jean, and the Texas bayous that shaped Sasha’s mother, Connie. And though each generation did better, materially, than the last, all of them carried the complex legacy of Black American motherhood with its origins in slavery. All of them knew that the hands used to comb and braid hair, shell pecans, and massage weary muscles were the very hands used to whip children into submission.

When she had her own daughter, Sofia, Bonét was determined to interrupt this tradition. She brought Sofia to New York and set off on a journey—not only up and down the tributaries of her bloodline but also into the lives of Black women in history and literature—Betty Davis, Recy Taylor, and Iberia Hampton among them—to understand both the love and pain they passed on to their children and to create a way of mothering that honors the legacy but abandons the violence that shaped it.

The Waterbearers is a dazzling and transformative work of American storytelling that reimagines not just how we think of Black women, but how we think of ourselves—as individuals, parents, communities, and a country.

Author Info:

SASHA BONÉT is a writer and cultural critic based in New York City. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Aperture, New York Magazine, Vogue, and BOMB, among other publications. Bonét is a professor of creative writing at Columbia University and Barnard College.

A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK • A young woman must shake off a family curse and the widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive novel about love, female rivalry, and superstition from the author of the smash hit My Sister, the Serial Killer (“A bombshell of a book... Sharp, explosive, hilarious"—The New York Times)

When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps.

There is also the matter of the family curse—“No man will call your house home. And if they try, they will not have peace...”—which has broken numerous hearts and caused three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof. 

When Eniiyi falls in love, she can no longer run from her family’s history. Is she destined to live out her family's story of love and heartache? Or can she break the pattern, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death but liberating herself from all the secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she can remember?

Cursed Daughters is a brilliant cocktail of vibrant humor and hard-won wisdom, romantic love and familial obligation. It asks us what it means to be granted a second chance, and how to live both wisely and well with what we’ve been given.

Author Info:

OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE is the author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised there and in the UK. She currently lives in London with her family.

A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State

The remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a Black state within the United States.

In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people — and the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him.

As the sweeping changes and brief glimpses of hope brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people was on the rise. As a result, both Black and white people searched for new places to settle. That was when Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state within the Union for Black people to live in and govern. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal, which became known as the Trail of Tears.

McCabe lobbied politicians in Washington, D.C., Kansas, and elsewhere as he exhorted Black people to move to Oklahoma to achieve their dreams of self-determination and land ownership. His rising profile as a leader and spokesman for Black people, as well as his willingness to confront white politicians, led him to be known as Black Moses. And like his biblical counterpart, McCabe nearly reached the promised land but was ultimately foiled by politics, business interests, and the growing ambitions of white settlers who also coveted the land.

In Black Moses, Gayle brings to vivid life the world of Edward McCabe: the Black people who believed in his dream of a Black state, the white politicians who didn’t, and the larger challenges of confronting the racism and exclusion that bedeviled Black people’s attempts to carve a place in America for themselves. Gayle draws from extraordinary research and reporting to reveal an America that almost was.

The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore

Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling, rigorously reported history of Black political movements, told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers of organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.

In Black-Owned, Char Adams celebrates the living history of Black bookstores. Packed with stories of activism, espionage, violence, community, and perseverance, Black-Owned starts with the first Black-owned bookstore, which an abolitionist opened in New York in 1834, and after the bookshop’s violent demise, Black book-lovers carried on its cause. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists sparked a nationwide Black bookstore boom. Malcolm X gave speeches in front of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem—a place dubbed “Speakers’ Corner”—and later, Black bookstores became targets of FBI agents, police, and racist vigilantes. Still, stores continued to fuel Black political movements.

Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of celebration: Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black-owned bookstores. Maya Angelou became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. And today, a new generation of Black activists is joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles and several stores making national headlines when overwhelmed by demand during the Black Lives Matter era. As Adams makes clear, in an age of increasing repression, Black bookstores are needed now more than ever.

Full of vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

Author Info:

Char Adams is a former reporter for NBC News and People, and her writing on race and identity has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, Oprah Daily, Vice, Teen Vogue, and Bustle. She hosted COVID University New York, one of the first podcasts to chronicle the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. She is a proud Philadelphia native and now lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.