"Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature's forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly." —Maya Angelou

This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez, her first in over a decade, is music to the ears: a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach "exploding in the universe," the "blue hallelujahs" of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta "thundering out of the earth." Sanchez sings the praises of contemporaries whose poetic alchemy turns "words into gems": Maya Angelou, Richard Long, and Toni Morrison. And she pays homage to peace workers and civil rights activists from Rosa Parks and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to Brother Damu, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. Often arranged in strings of twelve or more, the haiku flow one into the other in a steady song of commemoration. Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning.

Unavailable for almost a decade, Stride Toward Freedom, King's unparalleled historical account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolent resistance in America, is now must reading for a new generation of readers.

"Martin Luther King's early words return to us today with enormous power, as profoundly true, as wise and inspiring, now as when he wrote them fifty years ago." —Howard Zinn

Unavailable for over ten years, King's last book is an acute analysis of American race relations and the movement after a decade of civil rights efforts.

"His unique ability to connect the life of the mind to the struggle for freedom is legendary, and in this book—his last grand expression of his vision—he put forward his most prophetic challenge to powers that be and his most progressive program for the wretched of the earth." —Cornel West

"A stunning and disturbing book. Jonathan Metzl shows how white fears of black militancy, radical shifts in diagnoses, the pharmaceutical industry's promotion of new antipsychotic drugs, and the rise of a carceral state converged to invent the schizophrenic Negro.…Acompelling cultural history." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original