A Bird by Bird for the African-American market--A top-notch writer's guide filled with practical guidance, essays, and journal exercises for the African-American writer including advice from E.Lynn Harris, Charles Johnson, and Yolanda Joe. In her introduction, Jewell Parker Rhodes writes: "Never (in four years of college or five years of graduate school) was I assigned an exercise or given a story example that included a person of color...While the educational system and the publishing world have become progressively more welcoming of African-American authors, there is still little attention to educating, supporting, and sustaining the writing process of African-American authors. Free Within Ourselves is a solid first step--it is the book I wished I had when I started out as a writer. It is meant to be a song of encouragement for African-American artisits and visionaries. Free Within Ourselves is a step-by-step introduction to fictional technique, exploring story ideas, and charting one's progress, as well as a resource guide for publishing fiction." For the legions of people who have a novel stuck in their word processors, help is finally on the way! Free Within Ourselves is an excellent guide to all the elements necessary to crafting fiction: character development, point of view, plot, atmosphere, dialogue, diction, sentence variety, and revision. Writing techniques are taught using exercises, journaling, story examples, and analyses of famous writing fragments, as well as several complete stories (including those of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Dandicat, among others). The book is further enhanced by inspirational advice from successful contemporary black writers (such as Bebe Moore Campbell, Rita Dove, Henry Louis Gates, John Edgar Wideman, and others), a bibliography, and a guide to workshops, journals, magazines, contests, and fellowships supportive of black arts.

Presents a history of African American literature for children from its beginnings in the oral culture of the slaves of the South to the initial church works of the nineteenth century and its full emergence as a literature following the Harlem Renaissance.

In college and graduate school, Jewell Parker Rhodes never encountered a single reading assignment or exercise that featured a person of color. Now she has made it her mission to rectify the situation, gathering advice and inspiring tips tailored for African Americans seeking to express their life experiences. Comprehensive and totally energizing, the African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction bursts with supportive topics such as: ·Finding your voice ·Getting to know your literary ancestors ·Overcoming a bruised ego and finding the determination to pursue your dreams ·Gathering material and conducting research ·Tapping sweet, bittersweet, and joyful memories ·Knowing when to keep revising, and when to let go The guide also features unforgettable excerpts from luminaries such as Maya Angelou, Brent Staples, Houston Baker, and pointers from bestselling African American authors Patrice Gaines, E. Lynn Harris, James McBride, John Hope Franklin, Pearl Cleage, Edwidge Danticat, and many others. It is a uniquely nurturing and informative touchstone for affirming, bearing witness, leaving a legacy, and celebrating the remarkable journey of the self.

"Most folks probably don't learn about Alexis de Tocqueville in school anymore, but his seminal work, Democracy in America, is still surprisingly resonant. When he came to America in 1831 to study our great political experiment, he reported that the main issues were: religion, money, sex, death, love, gender inequality, work and politics. Clearly, we haven't come as far as one might hope. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. De Tocqueville not only cataloged our problems; he also provided a manual on how to solve them. In The Art of Being Free, journalist and scholar James Poulos parses de Tocqueville's advice for a modern audience, showing us how to live a sane, healthy, and happy life, regardless of the hectic world around us. Poulos dives into the original, beloved text to see what Tocqueville would say about our relationship to technology; our methods for coping with stress; our obsession with appearances; our workaholism; and our physical indolence. He explores how our uniquely American malaise might be alleviated, not by the next wellness or self-help craze, but by the kind of inner inventory-taking that has fallen out of fashion. Like Sarah Bakewell's How to Live or Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Being Free offers a vital new twist on a collection of timeless wisdom--for Americans of all ages."--

With Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google’s earliest engineers and personal growth pioneer, offers a proven method for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in life and work. Meng’s job is to teach Google’s best and brightest how to apply mindfulness techniques in the office and beyond; now, readers everywhere can get insider access to one of the most sought after classes in the country, a course in health, happiness and creativity that is improving the livelihood and productivity of those responsible for one of the most successful businesses in the world. With forewords by Daniel Goleman, author of the international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned mindfulness expert and author of Coming To Our Senses, Meng’s Search Inside Yourself is an invaluable guide to achieving your own best potential.

"Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves.

Contentment is a super power. If you can learn the skills of contentment, your life will be better in so many ways: You’ll enjoy your life more. Your relationship will be stronger. You’ll be better at meeting people. You’ll be healthier, and good at forming healthy habits. You’ll like and trust yourself more. You’ll be jealous less. You’ll be less angry and more at peace. You’ll be happier with your body. You’ll be happier no matter what you’re doing or who you’re with. Those are a lot of benefits, from one small bundle of skills. Putting some time in learning the skills of contentment is worth the effect and will pay off for the rest of your life.

Running and hiding won't save you because The Darkness lives within ... and it will never stop hunting you. Amber and her four best friends are about to reach their teenage years when the unthinkable happens; one of her friends, Kieran, is killed in a freak accident. Twenty years later, Amber no longer speaks to her friends and is still haunted by that day in the form of severe psychological issues, including sleep paralysis, insomnia and hallucinations of a terrifying entity she calls The Creature. But it isn't just in her head; it is real. Unbeknown to Amber, her former friends have also been suffering from their own psychological nightmares, each trapped and twisted into people they no longer recognise. Then a piece of evidence is found from that day and Amber and her former friends are forced to relive the events leading up to Kieran's death, learning truths along the way that they would rather not know about themselves. Can they work together to rid themselves of their demons and find out what really happened to Kieran all those years ago? The Darkness Within Ourselves is the start of "The Darkness Series", a page-turning psychological thriller series that is guaranteed to keep you awake at night. If you like fast-paced thrillers with dark twists and themes of mental health then you'll love this terrifying story of psychological disorders by author Jessica Huntley. ** Winner of the Editor's Choice Award in the BookShelf Fiction Awards 2023**

We all experience drama in one form or another. Whether its relational conflicts, financial stress, addiction, anger, overeating, or any number of problems; drama is not something that happens to us, but something that happens within us. In whatever form we experience it, drama is ultimately the internal dialogue of wrestling against what is. Drop the Drama! From Drama Addiction to Simply Inspired Living asserts that we become drama addicts, emotionally reacting to life, recreating life stories based on a limited understanding of who we really are. In an approach that transcends all spiritual paths, Drop the Drama! takes an alternative view of the ancient story of Adam and Eve challenging our traditional ways of viewing God, self, the nature of reality, and ultimately revealing a new way of Simply Inspired Living for all humanity. Explore the root cause of suffering; The Drama Mind. Expose the symptoms of the Drama Mind and how it cloaks itself from our awareness. Drop the cycles of Shame, Blame, and The Drama Game. Discover The Quest, questions found in the story of Adam and Eve leading us out of drama and back to Simply Inspired Living. Drop the Drama! is not about providing more factual knowledge for the mind, or getting motivated to achieve certain results in life. It is about uncovering the stories we create, the discovery of who we really are, and unleashing a life that is simply inspiring. Are you ready to Drop the Drama?