The author has compiled a compendium of the words and phrases of the Gullah, Geechee, and Creole people showing the origination of these words and the people who use them.

Basically, this started in 1969-70 while I was on vacation in Houston, Texas. I asked my grandfather, Nelson Mason Jones, Sr., "Granddaddy, where do we come from and who are we?" And he answered, "They say we are Guitchees." It was said so ominously, I did not know whether that was bad, like being a criminal or top secret like being a spy. Since then, I have heard a number of explanations such as 1) these were Blacks who settled in the islands off Louisiana, and 2) these were Blacks who were basically English speakers among people whose primary language was not English. You can take your pick of definitions, or even add a new one; I'm still not sure what the definition is!

The African American Griot is a comprehensive collection of more than seventy proverbs found in Hip-Hop and R&B songs. It demonstrates how these art forms use proverbs to transmit life wisdom from generation to generation. The meaning of each proverb is explained, followed by a detailed analysis of how one or more songs use that proverb to teach a life lesson.

Contains almost 100 stories by famous yarn-spinners from the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean, ranging from ghost stories to ghetto adventures.

The African American Griot is a comprehensive collection of more than seventy proverbs found in Hip-Hop and R&B songs. It demonstrates how these art forms use proverbs to transmit life wisdom from generation to generation. The meaning of each proverb is explained, followed by a detailed analysis of how one or more songs use that proverb to teach a life lesson.

After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.

This study is about how four representative African American poets in the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra’s David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement’s Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of African griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and Black History, and in so doing narrate, using jazz as meta-language, genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and Black (hi)stories. In intersecting and complementary ways, Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka fashioned their griotism from theorizations of artistry as political engagement, and, in turn, formulated a Black aesthetic based on jazz performativity –a series of jazz-infused iterations that form a complex pattern of literary, musical, historical, and political moments in constant cross-fertilizing dialogues with one another. This form of poetic call-and-response is essential for it allows the possibility of intergenerational dialogues between poets and musicians as well as dialogical potential between song and politics, between Africa and Black America, within the poems. More importantly, these jazz dialogisms underline the construction of the Black Aesthetic as conceptualized respectively by the griotism of Hughes, of Henderson, and of Sanchez and Baraka.