In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. ...

While growing up in rural Indiana during World War II, William Fagaly began his first venture—collecting and selling earthworms to locals—from which he was christened with a childhood moniker. The ...

Beginning with her critically acclaimed independent feature film Eve’s Bayou (1997), writer-director Kasi Lemmons’s mission has been to push the boundaries that exist in Hollywood. With Eve’s Bayou ...

The comic book has become an essential icon of the American Century, an era defined by optimism in the face of change and by recognition of the intrinsic value of democracy and modernization. For many, ...

Winner of the 2007 Welty Prize

In 1960, Jon Edgar and Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb founded Loujon Press on Royal Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter. The small publishing house quickly became a giant. ...

Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ+ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred ...

Conversations with Dana Gioia is the first collection of interviews with the internationally known poet and public intellectual, covering every stage of his busy, polymathic career. Dana Gioia (b. 1950) ...

In December 2018, the United States Senate unanimously passed the nation’s first antilynching act, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. For the first time in US history, legislators, representing ...

On April 16, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued a blockade of the Confederate coastline. The largely agrarian South did not have the industrial base to succeed in a protracted conflict. What it did ...

For decades after the Second World War, Senator James O. Eastland (1904–1986) was one of the more intransigent leaders of the Deep South's resistance to what he called “the Second Reconstruction. ...