Jonell Joshua spent her childhood shuttling back and forth between Savannah and New Jersey -- living in grandparents' homes during the times her mother, struggling with mental illness, needed support to raise her and her brothers. Together the family found a way to keep going even in the darkest of times. How Do I Draw These Memories? is an illustrated memoir about nostalgia, faith, the preciousness of life, and unconditional love.

The author describes the life-altering tragedy she experienced as a teen, when her cousin was murdered in a robbery gone wrong and explains why she needed to meet one of the killers thirty years later at his parole hearing. As a teenager, Johnson lived in Queens with her family; her popular, cool cousin Karen in the Bronx. Her father was a highly protective, at times overbearing, parole officer; her uncle, Karen's dad, was a homicide detective. When...

"A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her-- "a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"-- began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own long lifetime. In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began to interview Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. In her book Daisy Turner's...

"In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary...