"Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into black women's lives and coming of age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular story 'Hot Comb' is about a young girl's first perm--a doomed ploy to look cool and to stop seeming 'too white' in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved to. In 'Virgin Hair', taunts of 'tender-headed' sting as much as the perm itself. It's...

"In these eight ... explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom -- award-winning professor and ... author of Lower Ed -- embraces her ... role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society"--Dust jacket flap.

When you look like us--brown skin, brown eyes, black braids or fades--everyone else thinks you're trouble. No one even blinks twice over a missing black girl from public housing because she must've brought whatever happened to her upon herself. I, Jay Murphy, can admit that, for a minute, I thought my sister Nicole just got caught up with her boyfriend--a drug dealer--and his friends. But she's been gone too long. Nic, where are you? If I hadn't hung...

"Inspired by The Wiz, this poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman's quest for self-discovery -- one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power"-- Inspired by the classic musical The Wiz, Byas's poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman's quest for self-discovery. The woman -- and the reader -- is pulled through a series of situations in which she must confront her womanhood, her...

"Ranita Atwater is wrapping up her four-year sentence for opioid possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center, near Boston. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children from her aunts who have been raising them. My name is Ranita, and I'm an addict, she has said again and again at [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? She is gaining her freedom, but...