The chief film critic for the Boston Globe charts the history of Blaxploitation cinema and the genre’s widespread and enduring influence. Working year by year in the peak era, from 1970 (with the hit, Cotton Comes to Harlem) to 1977, Henderson breaks down its elements and origins (looking at the “race movies” of the 1920s, for example), as well as the stars, unforgettable soundtracks and talents behind the lens.

The retired 79-year-old  Canadian track and field sprinter and activist who competed at the 1960 Rome Olympics is from a family of elite athletes. In the 1960s, her brother, Harry Jerome, set seven world records and competed for  Team Canada at three Olympics to bring home the bronze; their grandfather was top sprinter John ‘Army’ Howard – Canada’s first Black Olympian – who ran at the 1912 Stockholm Summer Games. Nearly 40 years in the making, Jerome’s recently published memoir offers insight into what drove them to compete, the racism they faced and the personal cost of athletic achievement.

The innovative fiction debut from the lauded Canadian poet and Guelph University professor who won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize is structured as a response to the 59 articles in the real Code Noir. The historical 1685 decrees from Louis XIV of France dictated the lives of enslaved people in the French colonial empire. Lubrin links 59 fragments, from historical fiction to fantasy, covering many time periods, in a book that Toronto’s former poet laureate  Dionne Brand calls “storytelling at its deepest and most intimate.”

A lost luminary of Black literature, the feminist writer from Charlotte, N.C. had a life sadly cut short. Although she only published four stories, she had already won an O. Henry award before her untimely death in 1966, at 22, in a motorcycle accident while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories, many exploring suburban racism in Jim Crow America, have been collected and many published for the first time.

The Newbery and Caldecott Medal-winning, New York Times bestselling author (and creator of The Crossover series) edits this wide-ranging anthology named for the Mahogany L. Browne poem it features. The collection, which contains the work of contemporary and emerging Black poets such as Tracy K. Smith, Rita Dove and Alice Walker, probes and celebrates “joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise.”

The subtitle of this buzzy debut by a Toronto elementary school teacher is “Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging.” The eight essays explore the influence of Black male sports and entertainment figures on cultural expectations, and Morris’ exposure to Black culture growing up, in the Toronto neighbourhood of Scarborough, as the son of an immigrant Black father and white mother, while striving for academic success and navigating stereotypes.

The only book published in the late South African photographer’s lifetime was House of Bondage, a powerful 1967 landmark documenting the horrors of apartheid. Then, in 2017, more than 60,000 images previously believed to be lost were located in a Swedish bank vault. These rediscovered street photographs of African-American life were taken in the turbulent time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 and its aftermath and form a similarly indelible record.

To accompany her ongoing exhibition in the Artist’s Choice series at New York’s Museum of Metropolitan Art, the acclaimed London-based designer and artistic director of the fashion brand Wales Bonner offers “an archive of soulful expression” through 80 artworks selected from the MoMA Collection and the very personal connections she makes between them. Texts and works by Lee Friedlander, Steve McQueen, Langston Hughes and Greg Tates, among others, are juxtaposed to reveal new meaning.