JD Jackson

"One of Esquire's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 Breathtakingly imaginative and unapologetically original, The World Doesn't Require You announces a bold, generational talent. Deftly spinning genres of his feverish literary invention, Rion Amilcar Scott creates his very own Yoknapatawpha County with fictional Cross River, Maryland. Established by the leaders of America's only successful slave revolt, the town still evokes the fierce rhythms of its...

Ray Lewis, legendary Baltimore Ravens linebacker and one of the greatest defensive players of his generation, holds nothing back on the state of football as well as his troubled childhood, his rise to athletic greatness, the storm that threatened to ruin his NFL career, and the devastating injury that nearly cost him a final moment of glory. A lot of folks, they know my game, but they don't know my deal. This book right here, it tells the story of...

The son of a sharecropper dreams of leaving Mississippi on a train with the legendary engineer Casey Jones.

"People called me Harlem. I dubbed myself after that dangerous neighborhood that I'd never seen. I read life is rough in Harlem, and a black man isn't expected to live to see twenty-five. I was twenty-three. The clock was ticking.” When Harlem gets off on a murder charge due to insanity, the asylum he's sent to feels worse than death, with one exception: the beautiful nurse Daphane. As their relationship grows, so do the stakes: she has the ability...

Using original slave auction and plantation estate documents, this moving book-on-video contrasts the monetary value of a slave with the priceless value of life.

"In Holler, Child's eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something-- hope, reconciliation, freedom. In 'Cutting Horse', the appearance of a horse in a man's suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In 'Holler, Child', a mother is forced into an impossible position when...

Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

"As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is a high school senior about to start classes at a local college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough...

"A modern tale of striving ambition, envy, desire and murder, and a mesmerizing take on Theodore Dreiser's classic novel An American Tragedy, this time set among California's beautiful people"--

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." This was one of the most famous catch-phrases of boxing legend Muhammad Ali. Rising from poverty-stricken Louisville in the 1950s he became one of the world's greatest athletes. Beginning life as Cassius Clay, Ali would struggle against opponents both in and out of the ring. Segregation and racism stood as obstacles in his path, but as he climbed the boxing ranks, his social conscience grew. He refused to...