New Releases by Veronica Chambers

A dazzling fiction debut from the author of Mama’s Girl, Miss Black America is the warm and tender story of Angela, a young girl growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. Angela goes to school one ordinary day and returns home to find her glamorous and fiercely independent mother gone. Her magician father, Teddo, left to raise Angela alone, insists on keeping Melanie’s disappearance shrouded in mystery. As Angela grows to womanhood and struggles to understand her mother’s motivation for escaping the bonds of her family, she wryly observes, “My father was a magician, but my mother was the real Houdini.” A universal story that is both finely tuned and elegant, Miss Black America captures the intricacies, pleasures, contradictions, and complexities at the heart of every family. Spare and finely told, this novel will seep beneath your skin and stay with you long after the last page has been turned.

Bom of African-American frustrations in the 1970s, rap music first came to prominence with the Sugar Hill Gang''s ''Rapper''s Delight'' (1979). Since then, rap and the hip-hop culture that surrounds it have pervaded all our lives. The History of Rap Music examines rap through three decades, from the impact of ground-breaking rappers like Kurtis Blow, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy, to successful contemporary artists such as Lauryn Hill, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and will Smith. It also looks at the rap world''s influence on language, dance, and fashion. Plus a chronology of rap, some classic rap albums, suggested books, and morel

In 1839, a young man is brutally kidnapped from his homeland and imprisoned on the slave ship "Amistad" with 52 other Africans. But this man is brave beyond his years, and for him destiny has another plan. His name is Joseph Cinque, and, with former president John Quincy Adams as his ally, he will change the course of history. Full color.

Separated from her best friend in Brooklyn, thirteen-year-old Marisol spends a year with her grandmother in Panama where she secretly searches for her real father.

On the streets of Brooklyn in the 1970s, Veronica Chambers mastered the whirling helixes of a double-dutch jump rope with the same finesse she brought to her schoolwork, her often troubled family life, and the demands of being overachieving and underprivileged. Her mother—a Panamanian immigrant—was too often overwhelmed by the task of raising Veronica and her difficult younger brother on her meager secretary''s salary to applaud her daughter''s achievements. From an early age, Veronica understood that the best she could do for her mother was to be a perfect child—to rewrite her Christmas wish lists to her mother''s budget, to look after her brother, to get by on her own. Though her mother seemed to bear out the adage that "black women raise their daughters and mother their sons," Veronica never stopped trying to do more, do better, do it all. And now, as a successful young woman who''s achieved more than her mother dared hope for her, she looks back on their mother-daughter bond. The critically acclaimed Mama''s Girl is a moving, startlingly honest memoir, in which Chambers shares some important truths about what we all really want from our mothers—and what we can give in return.

At twenty-four John Singleton became the youngest filmmaker and only African American ever to be nominated for Best Director (and Best Screenplay) for Boyz N the Hood, his debut feature film. Only a year after receiving such sensational acclaim for that debut, Singleton has returned to the Hood. His new film, Poetic Justice, which stars Janet Jackson and features the poetry of Maya Angelou, gives voice to young African-American women.