By Patrick Dougher From an award-winning artist who was featured in Humans of New York comes a bold personal narrative about overcoming family trauma, addiction, poverty–and forging a creative life in the greatest city in the world. Born in Brooklyn in 1963, Patrick Dougher grew up in some of the most turbulent and culturally impactful…
By Shirley Neal The top memes, movements, and milestone moments dominating today’s social media have focused on Beyoncé, Rihanna, Hip-Hop, Usher, Black Enterprise crews, “Abbott Elementary”’s rise, and Oprah’s slim down. Driven by Black millennials, these trending topics demonstrate the influence and power of Black artistry and celebrity in American popular culture and around the globe.…
By Jennifer McGaha Once you begin looking for joy, you can find it pretty much anywhere. When Jennifer McGaha’s grandmother was in her late eighties, Jennifer asked her what her favorite age so far had been. “Fifty-five,” her grandmother answered, as though there were something magical about this stage of life, some deeper way of…
By Vanessa M. Reiser, LCSW Gaslighting. Love bombing. Hoovering. Triangulating. These are all insidious weapons in the narcissist’s toolkit. Narcissism can be hard to diagnose, but it is one of the hallmarks of abusive relationships. As a therapist specializing in narcissism and domestic abuse, Vanessa M. Reiser has strategies to help victims to identify, understand,…
By Ellie Yang Camp A primer on racism that offers an intersectional, anti-racist, coalition-building view of Asian American identity. What does it mean to be Asian American? How does our racialization in the United States shape our lives and our worldviews? With candor and care, Ellie Yang Camp, a Taiwanese American educator, offers a set…
By Tiffany Yu Founder of advocacy organization Diversability and creator of the viral Anti-Ableism Series on TikTok, Tiffany Yu takes readers on a revelatory examination of disability–how to unpack your biases and build a disability-inclusive and accessible world. As the Asian American daughter of immigrants, living with PTSD and a permanent arm injury sustained at…
By Will Packer You know Will Packer’s movies. From “Stomp the Yard” to “Ride Along” to “Girls Trip”, they’ve grossed more than $1 billion at the box office, including ten films that opened at number one. And, in the vein of Shonda Rhimes, he did it by featuring authentically diverse stories that highlight Black culture—something that Hollywood…
By Brad Walrond Every Where Alien is Brad Walrond’s dazzling afro-futuristic, afro-surrealist journey through New York City’s underground art movements, including the New Black Arts Movement, Black Rock Coalition, the Underground House Music-Dance community, the HIV/AIDS Black Queer Artivists, and the House Ballroom Scene. Every Where Alien catapults us to New York City mid-1990s, early-2000s…
by Diane Richards In the vein of The Paris Wife and The Personal Librarian comes this debut novel, a magnificent work of “biographical fiction” that reimagines the turbulent and triumphant early years of Ella Fitzgerald, arguably the greatest singer of the twentieth century. When fifteen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald’s mother dies at the height of the Depression…
by Rob Gore, MD Rob Gore first encountered violence when he was beaten and robbed as a 10-year old; it was treated as an inevitable fact of life, but after another brush with violence as a teen, he began to reject that prevalent attitude. As he matured and became a doctor, he grew in his…
