From the acclaimed award-winning author of The Butler and Showdown comes this unprecedented history of Black cinema. Colorization examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America.

Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood’s first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes.

He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others.

An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

You will have the opportunity to ask the speaker questions after the event, purchase books, and get your books signed.

The Devil’s Berries is book two of The Last Favorite's Page trilogy, inspired by the true life of Louis-Benoit Zamor. His mother told him he was God’s greatest thing. Then he was stolen, sold, shipped to France, and re-named Louis-Benoit Zamor. Stripped of his esteem as efficiently as a fox’s coat in a royal hunt, Zamor has been reared by Madame du Barry—with a love as false as her smile.

Serving Madame du Barry by day and rubbing shoulders with revolutionaries at night, Louis-Benoit Zamor is ready to find his greatness. During his time in the sun, he will lend his voice to the revolutionary movement and love like he’s never dared. But the Ancient Régime isn’t done with him yet. Much like the deadly devil’s berries, Madame’s bitter anger takes root at the chateau. Zamor will discover that when facing the devil in disguise, only one thing is for sure: every fox must survive its own hunt.

You will have the opportunity to ask the speaker questions after the event, purchase books, and get your books signed.

Lola and the Troll is a debut picture book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Connie Schultz about a young girl named Lola who decides to be brave and stand up to a bully.

Lola is a happy kid who loves recess and her imaginary dog, Tank. There’s just one problem: the neighborhood bully. He hides behind a troll costume and says mean things to everyone who walks by, including Lola. Soon she starts wearing her hair differently, walking on her tippy toes to add a few extra inches to her height, and even putting cornstarch in her shoes because he said her feet stink! But when Lola’s mom takes her to her favorite place, The Bee’s Sneeze bookstore, the owner, Ms. Sneesby, reminds Lola that she LOVES her curly hair, her bright smile, and her big eyes. And most importantly, Ms. Sneesby reminds Lola that she is brave.

Lola and the Troll is about remembering how to be brave, even when it’s hard, and realizing that sometimes all a bully really needs is a little kindness.

You will have the opportunity to ask the speaker questions after the event, purchase books, and get your books signed.

Paul Landis was a twenty-eight-year-old Secret Service agent in President John F. Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963. Landis is only one of two Secret Service agents still alive who accompanied Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, on that fateful day. Though Landis was a witness to the events that day, he was never interviewed by the Warren Commission, and has kept his recollections private until now, including details surrounding a key piece of evidence.

Dallas, Texas. November 22, 1963. Shots ring out at Dealey Plaza. President John F. Kennedy is struck in the head by a rifle bullet. Confusion reigns.

Special Agent Paul Landis is in the follow-up car directly behind JFK’s and is at the president’s limo as soon as it stops at Parkland Memorial Hospital. He is inside Trauma Room #1, where the president is pronounced dead. He is on Air Force One with the president’s casket on the flight back to Washington, DC; an eyewitness to Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office.

What Agent Paul Landis saw is indelibly imprinted upon his psyche. He writes and files his report. And yet … Agent Landis is never called to testify to the Warren Commission. The one person who could have supplied key answers is never asked questions.

By mid-1964, the nightmares from Dallas remain, and Landis resigns from the Secret Service. It isn’t until the fiftieth anniversary that he begins to talk about it, and he reads his first books on the assassination. Landis learns about the raging conspiracy theories—and realizes where they all go wrong.

You will have the opportunity to ask the speaker questions after the event, purchase books, and get your books signed.

From the bestselling author of The Kindness of Strangers comes a poignant and life-affirming novel about our connections to the past, and the promise for the future during the least promising of times.

Grieving but feisty widow Vivian Laurent is at a late-in-life crossroads. The man she loved is gone. Their only daughter is estranged and missing. And the assisted-living facility where her husband died is going into quarantine. Living in lockdown with only heartache and memories is something Vivian can’t bear. Then comes a saving grace.

Luna, a compassionate nursing assistant and newly separated mother, is facing eviction. Vivian has a plan that could turn their lives around: return to her old home and invite Luna and her two children to move in with her. With the exuberant eleven-year-old Wren in her hot-pink motorized wheelchair and Wren’s troubled older brother, Cooper, the new housemates make for an unlikely pandemic pack, weathering the coming storm together.

Now it’s time to heal old wounds, make peace with the past, find hope and joy, and discover that the strongest bonds can get anyone through the worst of times.

You will have the opportunity to ask the speaker questions after the event, purchase books, and get your books signed.

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”

There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

You will have the opportunity to ask the speaker questions after the event, purchase books, and get your books signed.