Whenever Christa Black looked in the mirror, she was waging a war with herself. Her hatred of her face and body drove her, as a young woman, into frantic overachievement, addiction, and an eating disorder that landed her in rehab. A preacher's kid, she'd grown up imagining God as a "thou shalt not" tyrant. It was only when she miraculously discovered God's unconditional love for her--physical imperfections, moral failings, and all--that she finally began to accept herself. As she tells her story, Christa shares the tools she uses to combat the self-rejection that harms so many people's lives. In this raw testimony, Christa Black takes women on a step-by-step journey of faith and positive belief to reveal that if God loves ugly, then we can too.

Parade Knight finally gets what she wants, a man of her own, despite hating her own dark skin; Daffany battles the disease that haunts her body and the poison she places in her blood while Miss Wayne fights to keep their friendship together.

What's the one area from your past that you keep getting your flesh caught in over and over again? Where are you still wounded and bleeding? The good news is that the most unanticipated and rewarding turns in the story often start with the ugliest beginnings. Growing Up Ugly is an inspirational coming-of-age memoir that traces the upbringing of a painfully shy child with chronically low self-esteem--a gifted student reprimanded for daydreaming too much and raised in a struggling inner-city New York neighborhood who emerged to become an artist, a leading educator, and an award-winning scholar. In this new release from Simple Word Publications, author James Haywood Rolling, Jr. composes a rich canvas of raw vignettes, family photos, original illustrations, and vivid poems in order to sketch a candid self-portrait of a Black boy unlocking his creative superpowers. Growing Up Ugly tells the story of: The author's upbringing as the first-born son and namesake of a talented professional artist...and domineering father; the unexpected personal consequences of being bused to school daily from a racially segregated area of Crown Heights to a mostly white neighborhood far across Brooklyn; how being identified and tracked since elementary school as a gifted student contributed to a dangerously distorted view of his own capabilities--until God intervened. No matter who or what first made you feel ugly, here is storytelling that elevates its readers beyond their own trauma, social anxiety, and self-doubt. This is a book for anyone who has ever been underestimated, bullied, abused, or simply overlooked as you reimagine your way from daydreams to destiny. Growing Up Ugly makes a great gift for any family raising children of color, or for adults mentoring or teaching Black boys. An in-depth reflection on the power to reshape how one's presence is seen and felt in the world, this book is also an ideal addition to libraries serving multicultural populations!

Catholic lore, American tales, and Sicilian superstition blend in this “clever, funny, heartbreaking, and heartwarming” novel (Publishers Weekly). Born with unruly red hair, a sharp tongue, and wine-colored marks all over her body—marks that oddly mimick a map of the world and make her subject to endless ridicule—Garnet Ferrari would hardly consider herself blessed. So when an emissary from the Vatican shows up at her door, convinced that her seeming ability to cure the skin ailments of others qualifies her for sainthood, she’s not quite convinced—or pleased. Garnet sets off on a quest to better understand who she is and where she and her unusual gifts came from. Tracing a twisted path that leads from Sicily to West Virginia, poverty to riches, romance to loss, reality to mythology, Garnet uncovers a truth far more powerful than any dermatological miracle: that the things of which we are most ashamed often become our greatest strengths. “A cleareyed, touching fable of a girl learning the hard truths about herself and others.” —Kirkus Reviews

A beaut story about one very ugly kid. Robert Hoge was born with a tumour in the middle of his face, and legs that weren't much use. There wasn't another baby like him in the whole of Australia, let alone Brisbane. But the rest of his life wasn't so unusual: he had a mum and a dad, brothers and sisters, friends at school and in his street. He had childhood scrapes and days at the beach; fights with his family and trouble with his teachers. He had doctors, too: lots of doctors who, when he was still very young, removed that tumour from his face and operated on his legs, then stitched him back together. He still looked different, though. He still looked ... ugly. UGLY is the true story of how an extraordinary boy grew up to have an ordinary life, and how that became his greatest achievement of all.

This novel is the fourth installment to Black and Ugly, Black and Ugly As Ever and Miss Wayne & The Queens of DC.

Tilly has spent most of her adult life in an Oxfordshire shelter, unchosen, unwanted and practically feral. Seeking a distraction from her own troubles, the author and renowned pet columnist, Celia Haddon begins a project to transform Tilly into a household pet. Through Tilly's journey from unwanted and unadoptable cat to adored pet, Celia begins to explore her own inward journey and the way that cats had helped her through the difficulties of childhood and middle age, through to self knowledge. By loving Tilly she found she could love her inner self.

The year 2003 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the lifting of the ban excluding black members from the priesthood of the Mormon church. The articles collected in Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith's Black and Mormon look at the mechanisms used to keep blacks from full participation, the motives behind the ban, and the kind of changes that have--and have not--taken place within the church since the revelation responsible for its end. This challenging collection is required reading for anyone concerned with the history of racism, discrimination, and the Latter-day Saints.

This definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short-story volumes published during Williams’ lifetime with previously unpublished or uncollected stories. Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."