Queenie: Godmother of Harlem

Queenie: Godmother of Harlem
Author: Aurelie Levy
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1647004519

An NAACP Image Award Nominee, Queenie: Godmother of Harlem is a historical graphic novel inspired by the life of legendary mobster Stephanie Saint-Clair, the infamous criminal who made herself a legend in the 1930s. “It’s original, entertaining, riveting, moving. A beautiful piece of art, a must-read!” —Whoopi Goldberg Born on a plantation in the French colony of Martinique, Stephanie Saint-Clair left the island in 1912 and headed for the United States, eager to make a new life for herself. In New York she found success, rising up through poverty and battling extreme racism to become the ruthless queen of Harlem’s mafia and a fierce defender of the Black community. A racketeer and a bootlegger, Saint-Clair dedicated her wealth and compassion to the struggling masses of Harlem, giving loans and paying debts to those around her. But with Prohibition ending, and under threat by Italian mobsters seeking to take control of her operation, she launched a merciless war to save her territory and her skin. In an America still swollen by depression and segregation, Saint-Clair understood that her image was a tool she could use to establish her power and wield as a weapon against her opponents. Authors Elizabeth Colomba and Aurelie Levy’s meticulous details—in both story and art—bring Saint-Clair’s story to life in a tense narrative, against a sometimes bloody backdrop of jazz and voodoo. The story tackles the themes of colonization, corruption, police violence, and racial identity, but above all, Queenie celebrates the genius of a woman forgotten by history.

Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem

Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem
Author: Raphael Confiant
Publisher:
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781944884567

Fiction. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Patricia Hartland and Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg. MADAM ST. CLAIR, QUEEN OF HARLEM is the story of a real-life woman's rise from the slums of Martinique to the heights of Sugar Hill during the Harlem Renaissance. In the years following her arrival on Ellis Island with little more than a razor and a slim roll of bank notes, St. Clair would become queen of the numbers game, facing off against both the black underworld and the white mafia. Traversing the era from the First World War, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, she became an iconic figure of the Harlem Renaissance, as a ruthless lady gangster but also as consort and benefactor to such heroes of the movement as W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. "MADAM ST. CLAIR, QUEEN OF HARLEM pulls you into the life of an unforgettable woman, who will capture your imagination. This is a rare, whirling, energetic book.��Maurice Carlos Ruffin

The World of Stephanie St. Clair

The World of Stephanie St. Clair
Author: Shirley Pamela Stewart
Publisher: Black Studies and Critical Thinking
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Businesswomen
ISBN: 9781433123870

This book profiles the compelling story and lineage of Stephanie St. Clair, a black female Caribbean immigrant in the early twentieth century. Upon entering the US, St. Clair created and managed a highly lucrative policy bank in Harlem ‒ earning a quarter of a million dollars a year. The author also explores St. Clair's lineage and the factors that influenced her decision to become an entrepreneur and activist.

Big Black: Stand at Attica

Big Black: Stand at Attica
Author: Frank "Big Black" Smith
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1641446374

The uprising at Attica Prison remains one of the bloodiest civil rights confrontations in American history... but without Frank “Big Black” Smith it could have been even worse. Now for the first time, the late Frank “Big Black” Smith shares his experience at the center of this uprising, struggling to protect hostages, prisoners and negotiators alike. Before his death, Frank “Big Black” Smith worked with writer and long time friend, Jared Reinmuth, to share the true story of his time in Attica State Prison. Adapted to a graphic novel by Améziane (Dark Horse’s Muhammad Ali), this is an unflinching look at the price of standing up to injustice.

The Eightfold Path

The Eightfold Path
Author: Steven Barnes
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1683359135

From award-winning authors Charles Johnson and Steven Barnes comes a graphic novel anthology of interconnected Afrofuturistic parables inspired by the teachings of Buddha Eight strangers looking for enlightenment from an ancient spiritual teacher are trapped in a cave high in the mountains on their way to his temple. One of his acolytes directs them to each tell a story that the group can learn from as they wait out the horrible snowstorm that rages outside the cave’s entrance. One by one the travelers each share a story that, unbeknownst to them, is actually a morality tale representing one of the aspects of final enlightenment as taught in Buddhism. As the wind howls through the night, they tell symbolic stories of horror, dystopia, high adventure, cyberpunk, and urban fantasy. Each story is a spoke on the symbolic Dharma wheel, and each interlocking tale gets the travelers closer to their true destiny—unveiling the future of the entire human race. This remarkable collection borrows heavily from the traditions of pop-culture morality anthology series such as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, Lovecraft Country, and the publications of E.C. Comics. Heavily influenced by the science fiction pulps of the 1950s and 1960s, this brilliant collection remixes classic social narratives such as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights, through an edgy, contemporary, yet spiritually centered lens. In The Eightfold Path, our destinies lie in heeding the lessons given in every one of these entrancing tales.

Ten Days in a Mad-House: A Graphic Adaptation

Ten Days in a Mad-House: A Graphic Adaptation
Author: Brad Ricca
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1982140666

AN EISNER AWARD NOMINEE A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY “BEST NEW COMIC OF 2022 FOR ADULTS” Beautifully adapted and rendered through piercing illustrations by acclaimed creators Brad Ricca and Courtney Sieh, Nellie Bly’s complete, true-to-life 19th-century investigation of Blackwell Asylum captures a groundbreaking moment in history and reveals a haunting and timely glimpse at the starting point for conversations on mental health. “I said I could and I would. And I did.” While working for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper in 1887, Nellie Bly began an undercover investigation into the local Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. Intent on seeing what life was like on the inside, Bly fooled trained physicians into thinking she was insane—a task too easily achieved—and had herself committed. In her ten days at the asylum, Bly witnessed horrifying conditions: the food was inedible, the women were forced into labor for the staff, the nurses and doctors were cruel or indifferent, and many of the women held there had no mental disorder of any kind. Now adapted into graphic novel form by Brad​ Ricca and vividly rendered with beautiful and haunting illustrations by Courtney Sieh, Bly’s bold venture is given new life and meaning. Her fearless investigation into the living conditions at the Blackwell Asylum forever changed the field of journalism. A timely reminder to take notice of forgotten populations, Ten Days in a Mad-House warns us what happens when we look away.

Harlem Godfather

Harlem Godfather
Author: Mayme Hatcher Johnson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"The first and only full biography on legendary Harlem gangster, Bumpy Johnson who was depicted in the movies Cotton Club, Hoodlum, and American Gansgster. ... Bumpy was a man whose contradictions are still the root of many an argument in Harlem. But there is one thing on which both his supporters and detractors agree in his lifetime, Bumpy was the man in Harlem." --p. [4] of cover.

Arrive in My Hands

Arrive in My Hands
Author: Trinidad Escobar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2022-04-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9781732419087

Arrive In My Hands is a page collection of Queer erotica comics by award-winning artist Trinidad Escobar (Be Gay Do Comics, The New Yorker, Ode to Keisha). It features 22 color erotic comics, poem-comics, and illustrations beautifully written and illustrated by the Filipina cartoonist, poet, and musician. With this unapologetic book, Trinidad Escobar hopes to add to the growing conversations on Queerness, gender, liberation; and, she invites others to Arrive at liberation within themselves.

African-American Classics

African-American Classics
Author: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Publisher: Graphic Classics (Eureka)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 9780982563045

"Great stories and poems from America's earliest Black writers"--Cover.

Post-Colonial and African American Women's Writing

Post-Colonial and African American Women's Writing
Author: Gina Wisker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2017-03-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0333985249

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.