Clearance

Set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II, "Brown Girl, Brownstones" is the enduring story of a most extraordinary young woman. Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, is caught between the struggles of her hard-working, ambitious mother, who wants to "buy house" and educate her daughters, and her father, who longs to return to the land in Barbados. Selina seeks to define her own identity and values as she struggles to surmount the racism and poverty that surround her. Moving and powerful, "Brown Girl, Brownstones" is both a classic coming-of-age tale and a vivid portrait of one family's struggle to achieve the American Dream.

Poetry. African & African American Studies, Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. THE HILARY THAM CAPITAL COLLECTION. Cheryl Clarke's long-awaited fifth poetry collection travels the political and spiritual trails of her many commitments--to social justice, to women of color, to the LGBTQ community, and to the rage, love, and song that live in each reader. Says Nikky Finney, Cheryl has stayed the firebrand course, all while inventing new and wondrous paths. 2016 Judge Kimiko Hahn adds, Whether the tone is wily or grieving, wise or wise-ass, the reader is drawn closer by the page and into a world that may be Black, Lesbian, middle-aged, sister of a deceased Sgt. J. L. Winters, daughter of the Block Elder--but is certainly a threshold for all.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. Includes photos and tributes to Lorde written after her death in 1992.

"Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet." Adrienne Rich

"This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me." Alice Walker"

The gap between those living in the city and those in the countryside remains one of China's most intractable problems. As this powerful work of grassroots history argues, the origins of China's rural-urban divide can be traced back to the Mao Zedong era. While Mao pledged to remove the gap between the city worker and the peasant, his revolutionary policies misfired and ended up provoking still greater discrepancies between town and country, usually to the disadvantage of villagers. Through archival sources, personal diaries, untapped government dossiers, and interviews with people from cities and villages in northern China, the book recounts their personal experiences, showing how they retaliated against the daily restrictions imposed on their activities while traversing between the city and the countryside. Vivid and harrowing accounts of forced and illicit migration, the staggering inequity of the Great Leap Famine, and political exile and deportation during the Cultural Revolution reveal how Chinese people fought back against policies that pitted city dwellers against villagers.