Urban Books’ popular Girls From da Hood series continues its gritty street drama in this eleventh installment, featuring urban fiction superstar Nikki Turner, and newcomer Katt. Tia, Ton’ya, and Tammi are not only making moves in the game, but they’re doing it in the bedroom too—and anywhere they need to get what they want. Tia is quick with her razor-sharp mouth, and she carries an equally sharp razor to slice a throat if need be. Ton’ya is loyal to a fault, but will body a nigga if they trip. Tammi is the brains of the operation. They have collected more bodies than a Manhattan hooker working the lower East Side. What happens when the heart gets in the way of making money? Best friends Pedro and Rico met Shane at a concert in Brooklyn, and they soon became fast friends, making money and moving major weight to solidify their place in the game. Pedro is the pretty boy who thinks his dick can get him anywhere and anyone. Rico, the strategist, believes that he is the smartest man in any room. Shane, the outspoken one, is the deal maker and breaker. They have but one goal: to become the best in the game. All hell breaks loose when brains, brawn, and dick collide with tantalizing titties and tongue. What will happen when everyone wants what they want and it interferes with their crew’s best interests?

Urban Books' popular Girls From da Hood series is back, bringing readers more dramatic tales about the lives of some tough, resourceful women who can hold their own when things get rough on the streets. This time, Redd, Nikki-Michelle, and Erick S. Gray deliver the stories with their trademark flair. Like a hood-rich Bonnie and Clyde, Candy and Raynail have their hands on all of the drugs that run through the veins of Westwood. When Raynail is set up to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit, Candy goes on a mission to take down everyone involved. Baby and G.G. should be thinking about high school, but their minds are definitely not on studying. These two are tight like sisters, and they have each other's backs no matter what--until Baby comes up with a plan that involves blackmailing someone to kill G.G.'s man. When these two cousins clash, the shock wave will be felt throughout the hood. Vix Dixon is an upscale ghetto-girl that no man in his right mind wants to cross. She's a predator who preys on the weak. Her mission? To have any man or woman she wants by any means necessary. Now, she's set her sights on her teacher, Alex Rodriguez, and he bites the apple instead of a bullet. By the time Alex realizes just what he's gotten himself into, hell on earth will have a different meaning for him.

Two Essence® bestselling Urban Books authors have teamed up to bring the Motor City drama in this latest installment of the popular Girls from da Hood Series. All the Way In, by Treasure Hernandez: Born into the struggle, Sonya and Melody are far from living the good life. They’re missing meals, have no clean clothes to put on their backs, and are forced to sleep in abandoned houses. There are zero possibilities in sight for a legal come-up for either young woman. The desperate teens have no choice but to beg, borrow, and steal if they hope to survive on the savage streets of Detroit. In a twist of fate, the pair link up, adapting a bloodthirsty, anything-goes, what’s-yours-is-mine attitude that they inflict upon all with whom they come in contact. Sonya and Melody are made of no sugar, no spice, and definitely nothing nice! Escaping a Thug’s Love, by Ms. Michel Moore: The Dexter Linwood Area is one of the most notorious neighborhoods in Detroit. Sable and Mike Mike were both born into that pure madness. When they fall in love, the young couple soon becomes DLA royalty, and they embrace all the chaos that comes along with it. Whenever he rocks, she rolls. If she hustles, he grinds. Their gangsta lifestyle is picture-perfect until Mike Mike starts popping pills and getting high on the regular. Soon, bills are not getting paid, vehicles are being repossessed, and shutoff notices become the norm. The last straw is when Sable’s jewelry mysteriously comes up missing. Now, the hood princess wants out of their toxic relationship. Will Mike Mike let her go?

Urban Books' popular Girls From da Hood series is back, bringing readers more dramatic tales about the lives of some tough, resourceful women who can hold their own when things get rough on the streets. This time, Redd, Nikki-Michelle, and Erick S. Gray deliver the stories with their trademark flair. Like a hood-rich Bonnie and Clyde, Candy and Raynail have their hands on all of the drugs that run through the veins of Westwood. When Raynail is set up to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit, Candy goes on a mission to take down everyone involved. Baby and G.G. should be thinking about high school, but their minds are definitely not on studying. These two are tight like sisters, and they have each other's backs no matter what—until Baby comes up with a plan that involves blackmailing someone to kill G.G.'s man. When these two cousins clash, the shock wave will be felt throughout the hood. Vix Dixon is an upscale ghetto-girl that no man in his right mind wants to cross. She's a predator who preys on the weak. Her mission? To have any man or woman she wants by any means necessary. Now, she's set her sights on her teacher, Alex Rodriguez, and he bites the apple instead of a bullet. By the time Alex realizes just what he's gotten himself into, hell on earth will have a different meaning for him.

In a fascinating look at how young women are coming of age in America, Vendela Vida's Girls on the Verge explores a variety of rituals that girls have adapted or created in order to leave their childhoods behind. Vida doesn't just observe the rituals, she actively participates in them, going as far as spending a week at UCLA to experience rush--she emerges a Tri-Delt. She also goes to Miami to learn about the "quince" (the Latin American celebration of a girl's fifteenth birthday), to Houston to take part in a debutante ball, to Los Angeles and San Francisco to talk to female gang members, to Salem, Massachusetts, to interview a coven of witches, and to Las Vegas to watch young brides take the plunge--some of them in drive-through wedding chapels. With humor, insight, and illuminating detail, she explores girls' struggles to forge an identity and secure a sense of belonging through various rituals--rituals that they embrace without necessarily understanding the comforts they seek or the repercussions of their often all-too-adult choices.

Gender, Sex, and Politics: In the Streets and Between the Sheets in the 21st Century includes twenty-seven chapters organized into five sections: Gender, Sexuality and Social Control; Pornography; Sex and Social Media; Dating, Desire, and the Politics of Hooking Up; and Issues in Sexual Pleasure and Safety. This anthology presents these topics using a point-counterpoint-different point framework. Its arguments and perspectives do not pit writers against each other in a binary pro/con debate format. Instead, a variety of views are juxtaposed to encourage critical thinking and robust conversation. This framework enables readers to assess the strengths and shortcomings of conflicting ideas. The chapters are organized in a way that will challenge cherished beliefs and hone both academic and personal insight. Gender, Sex, and Politics is ideal for sparking debates in intro to women’s and gender studies, sexuality, and gender courses.

Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen. For decades, feminist film criticism has focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation? Girl Head explores how gender and sexual difference have been deeply embedded within film materiality. In rich archival and technical detail, Yue examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. The book develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art. This original work of feminist media history shows how gender has had a persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen.

The Unknown History of Jewish Women—On Learning and Illiteracy: On Slavery and Liberty is a comprehensive study on the history of Jewish women, which discusses their absence from the Jewish Hebrew library of the "People of the Book" and interprets their social condition in relation to their imposed ignorance and exclusion from public literacy. The book begins with a chapter on communal education for Jewish boys, which was compulsory and free of charge for the first ten years in all traditional Jewish communities. The discussion continues with the striking absence of any communal Jewish education for girls until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the implications of this fact for twentieth-century immigration to Israel (1949-1959) The following chapters discuss the social, cultural and legal contexts of this reality of female illiteracy in the Jewish community—a community that placed a supreme value on male education. The discussion focuses on the patriarchal order and the postulations, rules, norms, sanctions and mythologies that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, laid the religious foundations of this discriminatory reality.

This book was inspired by God and how He has led me through this journey, and everything in me wanted to share that journey with others. You see, everyone has their own perception of what beauty means to them. But for each individual, it cant be about what beauty means to others; it has to start with what it means to you. There was a time in my life that I believed that my beauty, both inside and out, was determined by someone elses perception. But I have learned through the years that you have to be yourself. To be the person that you know you are or capable of becoming; the person that has strength, endurance, patience, love to give, power to embrace life, and one whose beauty is like no others. When you allow someone else to determine your beauty, you waste the energy of the person you truly are, The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, but must be felt with the heart. (Helen Keller) The title Be-You-tiful the Way He Made You was not one that was chosen lightly; it does have a specific meaning behind it. It means Be You, just the way God made you, Beautiful. God never intended for us to feel worthless, ashamed, or lonely. The women depicted in the stories in this book come from all walks of life, who had high aspirations and goals for themselves and were self-assured, but at some point in their life lost their self-esteem (self-worth) caused by some of lifes drawbacks. But just as there are stumbling blocks in life, there are also benefitsespecially when God becomes the center of it. You will see this become evident as you read each one of these ladies story.