Showing results by narrator "Earl Sewell" in All Categories

James Henry Ferguson doesn't belong here. After a highly publicized fall from grace, James attempts to flee from the chaos in his life. He ends up in a community he had never heard of before, one that has been neglected and ignored by everyone in rural Ham, Mississippi. A place of abject poverty, the neighborhood is commonly referred to as "Around the Way." Within a place forgotten by the rest of the world, politics can be a dangerous game.

Cammie, a dancer in her thirties, has just landed her first part in a show since coming to New York City. Yet the tug of familial obligations and the guilt of what she sacrificed to be there weigh down her dancing feet. Cammie’s lover, Tom, an older piano player, came to the city as a young man in the 1980s with a story eerily in tune with Cammie’s own. Through their triumphs and failures, both learn the fleetness of glory, the sweetness of new love, and how a dream come true isn’t cherished until it’s passed.

This anthology edited by the American writer, philosopher, and patron of the arts Alain Locke brings together some of the most influential pieces of African American works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Featuring the voices of Zora Neale Thurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, Locke included commentary on the emergence of the New Negro Movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro is considered to be the definitive text on the movement.

In 2015, Tony Carpenter stumbled upon the plans for the Chronocar, a time machine conceived before it could be built by Dr. Simmie Johnson, genius, scientist, and son of a slave. Tony’s visit to 1919 to see the doctor and his lovely daughter Ollie turned into disaster, forcing the doctor to make a most difficult final decision. Now the timeline has worked its way back to 2012.

Jason Tanner, protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been by his mentor’s side in New York to spread the message of passive resistance. In Harlem, the epicenter of Black culture, poet Anita Hopkins tries to capture the message of Malcolm X, which she believes with all her heart: The time is now; enough is enough.

Simmie Johnson was born the son of a slave. He was also a genius. After earning a PhD in physics from Tuskegee Institute, he wrote a paper outlining a theory for time travel, including plans for a time machine - called a chronocar - which was published in a scientific journal in the early 1900s. Since the technology required to build the chronocar did not yet exist, the paper and its brilliant writer faded into obscurity.

Meet the Collins family. Julian, Kendall, and Lauren Collins are siblings who were raised under the same roof on Chicago's south side, but approach life from vastly different angles and agendas. Hope Collins is the ailing matriarch of the Collins children. She raised them under the same roof, but with differing types of love and affection. Now in the twilight of her life, Hope has to acknowledge her part in creating the rift between her three children. Will the Collins siblings be able to come together and put their difference aside along enough to help keep Hope alive?

Beyond the Blue is a coming of age novella. 12-year-old Anthony Breckenheimer is a clever boy with blue eyes, red hair, and, like his father, he is a little on the chubby side. He lives in the big City of Toronto with his mother, his little brother Ronald and his little sister Leona. His father died a year ago and Anthony misses him greatly especially when he is confronted by bullies on his way to and from school; the biggest and baddest one being Jerry Hasselbergen. One day while in his classroom Anthony discovers a magical window.

Michael Custis Washington is a young black slave living on a cotton plantation in the Province of Virginia. Left an orphan at the age of five, he is taken into the big house by his master, Alfred Gordon, to be trained as a house servant. While in this house, he suffers severe emotional and sexual abuse. He finally runs away with his wife, Lucinda, through the Underground Railway and reaches Canada. Freedom is his at last. But when the American Civil War breaks out in 1861, Michael chooses to join the Union Army. He works his way back to Virginia. Is he seeking justice or vengeance?

Set in early 20th century Mississippi, Lenny Gray yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within. She has known from an early age that she is meant to live a better life, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women and, particularly, African American women. Lenny Gray is set in motion when she attempts to escape from marriage to a loathsome man. Under the cloak of nightfall, Lenny rushes towards nearby train tracks to begin her walk north towards a better future.

An Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historical phenomenon.