Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing encompasses the broad spectrum of Black speculative writing, including science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and Afrofuturism, all by Black women writers. Editors Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle have gathered the voices of twenty emerging and established voices in speculative fiction and poetry; writers who've imagined the weird and the wondrous, the futuristic and the fantastical, the shadowy and the sublime.

“A literary experience unlike any I’ve had in recent memory . . . a blueprint for this moment and the next, for where Black folks have been and where they might be going.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) What does it mean to be Black and alive right now? Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work—images, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more—to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The book presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with activists and academics to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful essays to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. In answering the question of what it means to be Black and alive, Black Futures opens a prismatic vision of possibility for every reader.

Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories. "Marvelous and wide-ranging." -- Los Angeles Times"Gorgeous" -- NPR Books"Breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold." -- Entertainment Weekly Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Finally, a book that breaks free of the narrative. A book that would make Malcolm X proud as it takes on the misinformation of the white liberal. Learn how white liberals created the KKK and Jim Crow laws and turned dogs and hoses on black Americans in the 1960s. Find out the real motive for Affirmative Action and purging the past. Follow along the exciting African battles in Zulu land and Ethiopia where warriors with spears beat back advanced armies. Imagine a future of a Wakanda-like city being planned in Senegal by music artist Akon! This book has it all.

The Future is Black presents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin, and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as, a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.

In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother's suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In "Outgoing," the speaker erases his brother's answering machine message to save his family from "the shame of dead you / answering calls." In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, "a flower / of smoldering filaments." A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, "a tinfoil lake," "vegetables / dying in the crisper." Destructive and redemptive, Black Aperture opens to the complicated entanglements of mourning: damage and healing, sorrow and laughter, and torment balanced with moments of relief.

Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory, edited by Marleen S. Barr, is the first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. The contributors, including Hortense Spillers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor. They articulate a platform for scholars to mount a vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a range of black women's writing that would otherwise be excluded. Afro-Future Females builds upon Barr's previous work in black science fiction and fills a gap in the literature. It is the first critical anthology to address the "blackness" of outer space fiction in terms of feminism, emphasizing that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. Black science fiction writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself. The work's main point: black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the nascent twenty-first century.