books

Keith Boykin wasn’t planning on writing a book in 2022 when the idea for “Why Does Everything Have to Be about Race?” took hold.

When Rev. Brandon Thomas Crowley revealed his queer identity to his congregation at the historic Myrtle Baptist Church in Newton, Massachusetts, the group embraced him with love and acceptance.

Fall is a season of book releases, and the Harvard Book Store, an independent shop  in Harvard Square, recently hosted three authors whose new books, already bestsellers, explore the lives of women who become changemakers.

A new study of racial representation in U.S. school books by The Education Trust holds that numbers alone don’t cut it: To change unequal representation for people of color is to change not only how many are portrayed, but also how they’re portrayed.

More than 100 years later, Viola Fletcher can still vividly remember the smell of her thriving neighborhood — dubbed America’s “Black Wall Street” — burning.

Michael Harriot, author, historian and public intellectual, has a new book, “Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America,” that will be published on Sept. 19 with Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Historian, academic and writer Ibram X. Kendi, in collaboration with Joel Christian Gill, chair of MFA program in Visual Narrative at Boston University, this month released a graphic version of Kendi’s 2016 book, “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” 

Heather McGhee recently shared a few of the lessons she learned researching and writing her 2021 New York Times bestseller, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” with a large audience of educators at Brookline High School.

Award-winning Boston-based journalist Carmen Fields grew up in a house full of music. Her father, Ernest (Ernie) Lawrence Fields, was a trombonist, pianist, musical arranger and bandleader who toured in the Southern United States with an orchestral territory band.

Admirers and diehard devotees of Terry McMillan gathered to hear the best-selling author speak at the Mattapan Branch of the Boston Public Library earlier this month.

Three women in an urban beauty salon scheme and plot against the manipulative owner to get their due in a madcap mix of social, romantic and material ambition. Everything, of course, goes terribly wrong but terribly funny in Dutch novelist Najoua Martin’s darkly comedic debut, which draws on Black beauty and barbershop humor.

Free Soil Arts Collective has debuted a book of interviews with Black residents of Lowell. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Stories of Black Lowell,” published Dec. 13, delves into the history of the city that’s often left behind in archives and dialogues.