Titles in this series offer new perspectives on African American history, literature, and art, and politics.
For more information or to submit a proposal, contact acquisitions editor Lisa McMurtray.
Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies
A Songbook of Slavery and Emancipation
Throughout the history of slavery in the Americas, music carried messages of survival, rebellion, and solidarity. Enslaved people composed songs that were far more than laments—they were calls for liberty a ...
Though There Be Giants
The African American Great Migration novel emerged as a popular mode of fiction in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the decade that saw both the Harlem Renaissance as well as the thunderous onset of the Jazz ...
Conjuring the Haint
What does it mean to live as a ghost, to live with ghosts, and how might ghosts lead to a path of healing and reimagining? Through an investigation of the intimate relationship between haunting and grief, ...
Refusing to Be Made Whole
In Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience ...
Soul of the Court
Legal legend Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer once stated that there were “only two people in the world who really understood the Constitution” and its impact on American lives. One was Hugo Black, deceased Sup ...
Black Saturation
Committed to developing frameworks for defining and evaluating Black poetry, literary scholar Stephen E. Henderson (1925–1997) examined the question: What makes a poem Black? In his critical approach, ...
The Nine O'Clock Whistle
Between the years of 1963 and 1965, civil rights protests rocked rural communities like Enfield, a small North Carolina town where segregationist and white supremacist attitudes prevailed. Whites in Enfield ...
From the Projects to the Presidencies
Raised in a public housing project in New Haven, Connecticut, James E. Lyons Sr. overcame the difficult circumstances of his childhood to flourish academically, eventually becoming president of six universities—Bowie ...
See Justice Done
In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Michael Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing ...
Vibe
Winner of the 2025 IASPM Book Prize in the category of English from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music
Where exactly does the South begin and end? Current maps are too rigid to ...