Originally published in 1999, Sounds Like Home adds an important dimension to the canon of deaf literature by presenting the perspective of an African American deaf woman who attended a segregated deaf school. Mary Herring Wright documents her life from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, offering a rich account of her home life in rural North Carolina and her education at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, which had a separate campus for African American students. Th...

Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired countless readers with the first three volumes of her autobiography, one of the most remarkable personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman, her turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for writing blazes anew.Her compassion and commitment lead her to respond to the fiery t...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lesso...

The remarkable story of Helen Forrester, author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey, and how she turned tragedy to triumph.When Helen Forrester’s father went bankrupt in the 1930’s, she and her six siblings fell from a comfortable middle-class existence into wretched poverty. Later in life, Helen wrote a ground-breaking series of memoirs, starting with Twopence to Cross the Mersey, which told the harrowing account of her family’s struggles in Depression-era Liverpool. It was a story fi...

Hip-hop mogul Jermaine Dupri shares his rise from teenage producer of Kris Kross to millionaire hitmaker, So So Def founder, and music business executive behind stars like Mariah Carey, Usher, Lil Jon, and Janet Jackson, offering an inside look at the recording industry and a blueprint for breaking into entertainment.Jermaine Dupri has reached modern-day mythical status in the music industry. He is the power behind the music of top artists includin...

A study guide on sign language would essentially help readers to learn a completely different form of communication. It would reveal the appropriate hand movements for communicating with a non-verbal language. It would start with the basics and then move to complex techniques. More importantly, it would help readers learn social and cultural cues that are expressed through sign language.

What if you met your future soul mate, but were too busy living in the here and now to realize you'd found "the one"?That's what happened when Courtney B. Vance met Angela Bassett….They ran for years as friends in the same small circles. They had some hits, but mostly misses with other partners, and they shared one spectacularly dreadful first date together. And then, Courtney and Angela connected.Experience the up-close-and-personal, real-life love story of this in...

The definitive biography of one of the most complex public figuresof 20th century America.A native South Carolinian, Marshall Frady was a journalist for over twenty-five years, writing principally on political figures and racial and social tensions in the American culture, first as a correspondent for Newsweek, then for Life, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, The Sunday Times of London, Atlant...

Photographs and stories of the legendary hostess's extravagant parties and glamorous guests in the final months before the Nazis invaded France.The American decorator Elsie de Wolfe was the international set's preeminent hostess in Paris during the interwar years. She had a legendary villa in Versailles, where in the late 1930s she held two fabulous parties—her Circus Balls—that marked the end of the social scene that her friend Cole Porter perfectly captured in his...

Jan Willis is not Baptist or Buddhist. She is simply both. Dreaming Me is the story of her life, as a child growing up in the Jim Crow South, dealing with racism in an Ivy League college, and becoming involved with the Black Panther Party. But it wasn't until meeting Lama Yeshe, a Tibetan Buddhist monk living in the mountains of Nepal, that she realized who the real Jan Willis was, and how to make the most of the life she was living.

This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion.The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"—each improvisin...

As an African American woman born in 1943, Maxine Childress Brown possessed a unique vantage point to witness the transformative events in her parents’ lives. Both came from the South -- her father, Herbert Childress, from Nashville, TN, and her mother, Thomasina Brown, from Concord, NC. The oldest of three daughters, Maxine was fascinated by her parents’ stories. She marveled at how they raised a well-respected, middle-class family in the midst of segregation with the added challenge of b...