Mighty Real An Anthology Of African American Same Gender Loving Writing

In this wrenching and spiritual collection, Darius Omar Williams takes a closer look at the institution of the black church using a specific language to highlight the joy, pain, highs and lows of sexuality, disease, homophobia, spiritual elitism and pre-mature death. With titles including "Blessed Assurance," "Rapture" and "Look at Your Neighbor," these poems chart the sexual and spiritual terrain of black gay experience in a confessional, blunt and praise-filled voice. Blending southern black church tradition with contemporary black gay culture, Williams's poems are fresh, original and long overdue.

100 imagination-stretching writing exercises inspired by the idea of creative constraints, from the author of The Making of a Story. When you are facing down a blank page (or screen), a constraint-based prompt—for example, “you must use the words ‘cloud’ and ‘green’” or “you must set the scene in a crowded grocery store”—can get your brain working in unexpected ways. In this creative writing guide, longtime teacher and novelist Alice LaPlante shares 100 original exercises that will simultaneously push you into a corner and give you the tools to write yourself out of it. LaPlante explains the purpose of each exercise—to sharpen your ear for dialogue, generate surprising images, or access intense emotions—and breaks down student examples to reveal how to achieve these goals. Whether you are looking to jumpstart new ideas or find a fresh angle on a work in progress, and whether you write fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry, Write Yourself Out of a Corner will strengthen your imagination and your craft.

Silk Electric is a moving collection of poems exploring the conflict between spiritual, sexual and sacred spaces, while also juxtaposing the life of Diana Ross with black gay culture. Here is a new southern poet from Mississippi who exposes his soul through a candid, vulnerable account of his same gender loving self. Silk Electric searches for love in its most ideal form, but also reflects on love lessons from the past. Darius simultaneously takes you to church, the bedroom, the club, the bathhouse and the street corner all in one collection. Finally, Silk Electric is a celebration of the music of Diana Ross, a salute to civil rights activists including Medgar Evers, Beah Richards and Ossie Davis as well as a tribute to biological mamas, spiritual mamas and infamous drag-queens.

Becoming pregnant at thirteen by a young man who comes to her hometown complicates Ella's life. Her mother passed away in her sleep by 'refusing to wake up', leaving Ella, her sister and her brother with a father who has no idea of what it means to be a father and who spends most of his days talking to his dead wife's ghost.Eventually Ella meets a young man, Damon, who is a mystery to the citizens of New Home, the town in which Ella lives, having seemingly arrived out of nowhere, and they fall in love. Within months of meeting the young man Ella becomes pregnant. She is only thirteen and Damon is eighteen. No one understands why Ella would have given herself to someone at so young an age, but she does. She and Damon are both lonely and in search of something more in life.However, Damon's view of life is much larger than Ella imagined and she finds she must figure out a way of holding onto him. As a result, the seemingly small act she commits to hold onto Damon spins out of control leading to something that haunts Ella for years to come and touches everyone around her.'Ella Pruitt', a story about memory, guilt and reckoning.

The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon

Where Did Our Love Go?, an anthology of essays written by many major public figures and celebrities, will explore the substantive issues related to marital problem in the African-American community. From the "my baby's mama" syndrome to the more serious implications of what a generation of single-parent households will mean to future generations, this comprehensive collection will provide an in-depth discourse on the trends and issues that have caused the problematic behaviors within African-American relationships to persist with little sign of relief. The book will consist of a total of 40 essays divided equally into 4 lifestyle categories (single, married, divorced, and widowed), to present a wide cross section of perspectives on this subject. Marriage plays an essential role in maintaining the vitality and character of a community, so it is deeply unsettling for many African Americans to find that the value of this institution has lost its allure. While marriage among African Americans has always fallen below the average of other population segments, the gap today has grown so pronounced that the subject has sparked an intense national dialogue. A 2006 Washington Post article, “Is Marriage for White People,” created waves of controversy on the issue. In 2010, Nightline dedicated an entire broadcast to this growing crisis. The marriage gap in Black America has become such an open secret that it’s now the source of endless bad jokes and prime time reality shows. The statistics even back this up, as according to the U.S. Census, 43.3% of black men and 41.9% of black women in America have never been married, and the rate of decline is nearly twice the national average. Marriage is a rite of passage that is fundamental to every culture, which underscores the tremendous need for an active dialogue to take place that will lay a foundation for discovery. With essays from 50 Cent, Viola Davis, Jabari Asim, Darnell Williams, Faith Evans, Mara Brock Akil, and more, Where Did Our Love Go? will ignite the fight for that conversation to begin.

How did two teenagers brutally murder an innocent child...and why? And how did their brilliant lawyer save them from the death penalty in 1920s Chicago? Written by a prolific master of narrative nonfiction, this is a compulsively readable true-crime story based on an event dubbed the "crime of the century." In 1924, eighteen-year-old college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb made a decision: they would commit the perfect crime by kidnapping and murdering a child they both knew. But they made one crucial error: as they were disposing of the body of young Bobby Franks, whom they had bludgeoned to death, Nathan's eyeglasses fell from his jacket pocket. Multi-award-winning author Candace Fleming depicts every twist and turn of this harrowing case--how two wealthy, brilliant young men planned and committed what became known as the crime of the century, how they were caught, why they confessed, and how the renowned criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow enabled them to avoid the death penalty. Following on the success of such books as The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh and The Family Romanov, this acclaimed nonfiction writer brings to heart-stopping life one of the most notorious crimes in our country's history.