Mick Scott, aka "Osmosis" when performing at local poetry venues, is a talented writer/poet; from Clarksville, Tennessee. His will to progress at his passion has improved his hunger for knowledge through word play, metaphors, and puns to express his thoughts among societies young & old. "The Black Soapbox" is the long anticipated follow up volume to his first book, "The Sunshine from Behind a Mountain." (2006) In this new volume, he takes you deep into his psyche and distributes real thoughts to the world about love, gang violence, black thought, real world, and timeless issues that involves our society today. When asked about the title, he stated that" Black" illustrates his ethnicity as well as the intergalactic thoughts he shares. "Soapbox" is derived from when someone has something to address to the masses, they "get on their soapbox", and pour out their thoughts and feelings to society, which silhouettes the title, "The Black Soapbox." From a humorous point of view, he simply smiles, shrugs his shoulders, and says, "I guess I'm a brother with a lot to say through prose and poetry." Once you open the first few pages and let the wisdom of his poetry grasp you from the beginning to end with its realism, you will feel as if he is talking to you! You will not want to put this book down for one second, it's just that good and you will be satisfied that you spent your monies worth! www.osmosispoet.com www.myspace.com/osmosispoet

By examining the minister who helped inspire the founding of the Harlem Unitarian Church Reverend Ethelred Brown, Floyd-Thomas offers a provocative examination of the religious and intellectual roots of Black humanist thought.

Michael was born in Larchmont, New York, the 3rd youngest of 11 children. With sports being his first love, he earned 9 letters playing varsity sports in high school and college. In his first book, The Old Oak Table, Michael invites the reader into his boyhood life in a gentler time, through marriage, fathering 6 children, up to his current retirement in Southern California with his wife, Jan.

A merry-go-round sitting on a beached barge in the murky waters of the Kill van Kull is discovered. The story takes place in the post covid-20 era when local and state governments have slashed their budgets. Three men from Elm Park attach a rope to the barge truck and pull it onto the litter-strewn shore. It would be a nice diversion for kids in the neighborhood, where schools are closed and shopping malls shuttered. Freddy and Hank help Gregg chain the merry-go-round to his flatbed truck and haul it to Eggert’s Field in Elm Park on Staten Island’s north shore. The three men repair its gasoline engine and replace a broken horse with a chair. Nancy, a woman in her 30s, helps with the cleanup of the merry-go-round. On the advice of Lora, a clairvoyant, Nancy and Freddy place magnets along the whirligig’s circumference. Immediately, it begins to glow and a high-pitched sound emanates from the amusement ride. Staring into her crystal ball, Lora asserts that the people can take time trips while holding a large horseshoe magnet found in the area. Apparently, there’s a connection between magnetic fields and time travel. The story depicts colorful characters: Nancy, deadly accurate with a gun, Lora, crystal-ball gazer, Freddy, energetic octogenarian, Charlie, a retired detective, Mildred, the prim woman, Rev Staller, soapbox preacher, Billy, side talker to his invisible sidekick, Blanche, ex-gogo dancer, Dr. Emil, alcoholic doctor and his young assistant Alfred. A trio of villains, Darren Trupp, David Bloom, and Lance Landum, appear from time to time – forcing Nancy and her friends to deal with them –ultimately dispatching the trio to a fishing village in the Caribbean.

Black Panther was the first black superhero in mainstream comic books, and his most iconic adventures are analyzed here. This collection of new essays explores Black Panther's place in the Marvel universe, focusing on the comic books. With topics ranging from the impact apartheid and the Black Panther Party had on the comic to theories of gender and animist imagery, these essays analyze individual storylines and situate them within the socio-cultural framework of the time periods in which they were created, drawing connections that deepen understanding of both popular culture and the movements of society. Supporting characters such as Everett K. Ross and T'Challa's sister Shuri are also considered. From his creation in 1966 by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee up through the character's recent adventures by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, more than fifty years of the Black Panther's history are addressed.

Adopting a unique historical approach to its subject and with a particular focus on the institutions involved in the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature, this handbook surveys the way in which the Cold War shaped literature and literary production, and how literature affected the course of the Cold War. To do so, in addition to more 'traditional' sources it uses institutions like MFA programs, university literature departments, book-review sections of newspapers, publishing houses, non-governmental cultural agencies, libraries, and literary magazines as a way to understand works of the period differently. Broad in both their geographical range and the range of writers they cover, the book's essays examine works of mainstream American literary fiction from writers such as Roth, Updike and Faulkner, as well as moving beyond the U.S. and the U.K. to detail how writers and readers from countries including, but not limited to, Taiwan, Japan, Uganda, South Africa, India, Cuba, the USSR, and the Czech Republic engaged with and contributed to Anglo-American literary texts and institutions.

How does the autobiographer want us to perceive him? How do we penetrate the memoirist’s strategies and subterfuges—sometimes conscious, usually—brilliant—and discover the real person screened behind them? In this fresh and provocative approach to the reading of autobiography, Herbert Leibowitz explores the self-portraits of eight Americans whose lives span almost two centuries and encompass a stunning range of personality and circumstances: Benjamin Franklin, Louis Sullivan, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, and Edward Dahlberg. In pursuit of clues to both the human essence and the literary artifice of each, he examines their styles (Franklin’s plain talk and “possum’s wit,” Sullivan’s “gilded abstractions,” Stein’s “gossipy ventriloquism,” Williams’s “grumpy clowning” and foxy innocence), their metaphors, and their choices of incident, looking beyond their visions of themselves to their true identities. In American autobiography particularly Leibowitz finds an extraordinary medley of voices—from the balanced objectivity of Addams and the heated oratory of Goldman, as each encounters the promises and failures of the democratic ideal, to the uneasy self-consciousness of Wright, reflecting the tensions of growing up in a world he did not trust, and the baroque contrivances of Dahlberg, who painted himself in mythic proportions on the American canvas. As he guides us through the labyrinths and mazes of these self-histories, Leibowitz relates the material to a wide cross section of the American experience and helps to interpret our history. His engrossing and highly original book is both a contribution to biographical criticism and a vivid recapturing of some remarkable American lives.

This study of sociolinguistic variation examines the relation between social identity and ways of speaking. Studying variations in language not only reveals a great deal about speakers' strategies with respect to variables such as social class, gender, ethnicity and age, it also affords us the opportunity to observe linguistic change in progress. The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation. Beginning with an introduction to theoretical issues, the book goes on to discuss key approaches to stylistic variation in spoken language, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology.

“Cooper paints a meticulous and absorbing portrait of McKay’s restless artistic, intellectual, and political odyssey... The definitive biography on McKay.”—Choice Although recognized today as one of the genuine pioneers of black literature in this century—the author of “If We Must Die,” Home to Harlem, Banana Bottom, and A Long Way from Home, among other works—Claude McKay (1890–1948) died penniless and almost forgotten in a Chicago hospital. In this masterly study, Wayne Cooper presents a fascinating, detailed account of McKay’s complex, chaotic, and frequently contradictory life. In his poetry and fiction, as well as in his political and social commentaries, McKay searched for a solid foundation for a valid black identity among the working-class cultures of the West Indies and the United States. He was an undeniably important predecessor to such younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and also to influential West Indian and African writers such as C. L. R. James and Aimé Césaire. Knowledge of his life adds important dimensions to our understanding of American radicalism, the expatriates of the 1920s, and American literature. “Mr. Cooper’s most original contribution is his careful and perceptive analysis of McKay’s nonfiction writing, especially his social and political commentary, which often contained ‘prophetic statements‘ on a range of important social, political, and historical issues.”—New York Times Book Review