Kevin R. Free

After Othella--the daughter of the town tramp in Shreveport, Louisiana--convinces her to give her baby away, 15-year-old Ruby Jean Upshaw runs away to New Orleans where nothing can erase the memories of the child she lost or quell her simmering rage at Othella for persuading her to let her baby go.

The Hate U Give meets Internment in this pulse-pounding thriller about an impenetrable dome around Baltimore that is keeping the residents in and information from going out during a city-wide protest.

Jamal Lawson just wanted to be a part of something. As an aspiring journalist, he packs up his camera and heads to Baltimore to document a rally protesting police brutality after another Black man is murdered.

But before

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History notes that the ugly feud between J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr., marked by years of illegal surveillance and the accumulation of secret files, ended on April 4, 1968 when King was assassinated by James Earl Ray. But that may not have been the case. Now, fifty years later, former Justice Department agent, Cotton Malone, must reckon with the truth of what really happened that fateful day in Memphis. It all turns on an incident from...

Dave Mitchell is relishing the success of his start-up company, DMI. Success, however, has come at a tremendous price on the home front. The closeness he once shared with his wife of twelve years is gone. Dave spends most of his time working, while Madeline is struggling with balancing her job and home. When she elects to take time off and let Dave run the business, their lives are forever changed. Revered by others as a man of strong faith, Dave...

Archer Le Veq owes his life to the woman who rescued him from certain death at the height of the Civil War...a woman known only as "the Butterfly." Now, in the dark, waning days of Reconstruction, he needs the courageous and beautiful former spy...in more ways than before! Zahra Lafayette thinks her days of intrigue are far behind her, until she is asked to go on one more mission. Posing as an infamous madam in New Orleans, Zahra must gather information...

When an ambitious tyrant threatens genocide against the Jews, an inexperienced young queen must take a stand for her people. When Xerxes, king of Persia, issues a call for beautiful young women, Hadassah, a Jewish orphan living in Susa, is forcibly taken to the palace of the pagan ruler. After months of preparation, the girl known to the Persians as Esther wins the king's heart and a queen's crown. But because her situation is uncertain, she keeps...

When Mildred and Richard Loving are arrested, jailed, and exiled from their home simply because of their mixed-race marriage, they must challenge the courts and the country in order to secure their civil rights.
Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Jeter Loving wanted to live out their married life near family in Virginia. However, the state refused to let them—because Richard was white and Mildred was black. After being arrested and charged...

After the publication of the bestselling Letters to a Young Brother, accomplished actor and speaker Hill Harper began to receive an increasing number of moving letters from inmates who yearned for a connection with a successful role model. With disturbing statistics on African-American incarceration on his mind (one in six black men were incarcerated as of 2001, and one in three can now expect to go to prison some time in their lifetimes), Harper...

***Graywolf Press Lead Summer 2014 Fiction*** Song of the Shank is a novel loosely based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom. Told through the eyes and minds of people who try to manipulate or use Tom for one reason or another, the novel is an imaginative meditation on issues of blindness, race, and the role and importance of art and critical...

"Using original slave auction and plantation estate documents, contrasts the monetary value of a slave with the priceless value of life experiences and dreams that a slave owner could never take away"--