Showing results by narrator "Lynnette R. Freeman" in All Categories

Cora was born with a veil. She is able to discern spirits and wield the power of both the dark and the light as well as the ability to heal. Her grandmother, Mi, called it The Knowing. Cora has carried it as both a prophetic blessing and a curse, struggling under the burden until one decision changes her world. Possessed with a healer’s compulsion to help, she is unable to turn away when Fannie arrives on her doorstep, ripped, torn, and hanging precariously on the knife’s edge of death.

Uplifting and authentic, My Divine Natural Hair: Inspiration and Tips to Love and Care for Your Crown helps Black women embrace the God-created beauty of natural hair through inspirational readings and salon chair guidance on how to heal, consistently care for, and grow their coils.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity.

Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker’s first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night.

Single Ladies is back! Get ready to deal with the drama of baby daddies, side chick issues, divorce, child custody, child support, medical issues, money problems, infidelity, lust, in-laws, jobs, law enforcement, incarceration, and everything else that comes along with being a Single Lady in the hood! Tammy, Falisha, Kim, and Lisa return, with new issues and old relationships threatening each lady's happiness.

A leading sociologist reveals why racial inequality persists in the workplace despite today’s multi-billion-dollar diversity industry—and provides actional solutions for creating a truly equitable, multiracial future.

The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste - boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance - and unpacks its current legacy....

Stephanie Rose Bird grew up surrounded by forests, listening to the stories of her ancestors and learning African healing ways. From an early age, she dedicated herself to herbalism and living a spiritually fulfilled life in harmony with nature. Now, the wisdom she as accrued is gathered in this impressive encyclopedic work of African Healing and herbal medicine. Stephanie teaches you how to garden and harvest in unison with the seasons, and how to use herbalism and magic—derived from ancestral and spiritual helpers—to heal.

Writers are witnesses and scribes to society’s conscience but writing about social issues in the twenty-first century requires a new, sharper toolkit. Craft and Conscience helps writers weave together their narrative craft, analytical and research skills, and their conscience to create prose which makes us feel the individual and collective impact of crucial issues of our time. Kavita Das guides writers to take on nuanced perspectives and embrace intentionality through a social justice lens.

What do you do if people say you are born with the “mark of the devil,” especially in Jamaica where many believe in the spirits of good and evil? If you are Isabella “Bella” Pigmore, born with a birthmark so pronounced that she faces ridicule for most of her young life, you feel bad—very bad. Growing up feeling like a freak, Bella clings to the only support she has, her mother. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances and she is left alone with her abusive father, Bella suffers dearly at the hands of the man who should protect her.

Growing up in a Blue Ridge mountain town, little Roberta didn't have fancy clothes or expensive toys...but she did have music. And she dreamed of having her own piano. When her daddy spies a beat-up old upright piano in a junkyard, he knows he can make his daughter's dream come true. He brings it home, cleans and tunes it, and paints it a grassy green. And soon the little girl has an instrument to practice on, and a new dream to reach for—one that will make her become a legend in the music industry.

In an all too imaginable future, where the privileged lead lives untouched by wars that have become a global pastime, disenfranchised young people who “volunteer” to become super soldiers are injected with nano technology that repeatedly brings them back from death. In a race against time, one such soldier and an analyst struggle to understand strange phenomena that occur after too many resurrections: glitches known as nostalgia, which even in the midst of combat can hurtle a soldier into the past. But after eight, nine, even ten resurrections lies something much worse than just glitches.

Lila Bonnard has left her island home in the Caribbean to join the faculty as a visiting professor at Mayfield College in a small Vermont town. On her way from the airport to Mayfield, Lila witnesses the fatal shooting of a Black man by the police. It turns out that the victim was a professor at Mayfield, and was giving CPR to a white woman who was on the verge of an opioid overdose. The two Black faculty and a Black administrator in the otherwise all-white college expect Lila to be a witness in the case against the police.

When the How to Catch Kids stumble upon a trail of glitter and the entrance to an enchanted garden, they decide that they have to explore! Hoping to find the resident Garden Fairy to learn about her magical realm, our heroes set off on a whirlwind adventure through this larger-than-life garden.

A practical guide for handling life's financial emergencies for the cash-strapped, the meticulous budgeter, and everyone in between.

Over the waves, sea lions bark and seagulls wheel and call. The bay is smooth and bright in the sun. But under the waves, there’s a whole hidden forest full of whales and wolf eels, sardines and sea bass, and leopard sharks and luminous jellies, as well as the waving kelp that shelters them all.

Three strong-willed women—Reece, a successful attorney engaged to a handsome dentist; Maxie, a former foster child turned struggling journalist desperate to find her long-lost siblings; and Charlotte, an ambitious real estate agent confronting shocking news—encounter the ups and downs of life as they search for true love and fulfillment.

After her girlfriend breaks up with her for being too emotionally stifled, Jo Miller is trying to become more expressive. But then her boss calls her into his office for a private meeting and sexually assaults her. His parting words are, “you won't want to talk about this Jo. You think you do now, but trust me, you won’t.” Jo had been ready to go straight to the police, but every time she tries to talk about what happened, live insects crawl up her throat and into her mouth.

MaVynee loved going to the beach. But in the days of Jim Crow, she couldn't just go to any beach - most of the beaches in Jacksonville were for Whites only. Knowing something must be done, her grandfather bought a beach that African American families could enjoy without being reminded they were second-class citizens; he called it American Beach. Artists like Zora Neale Hurston and Ray Charles vacationed on its sunny shores. It's here that MaVynee was first inspired to sing, propelling her to later become a widely acclaimed opera singer who routinely performed on an international stage.