Julie Mehretu's Literature Gift Set

Celebrate this holiday season with a book set from Julie Mehretu, our 2000-2001 Artist-in-Residence alumna.

Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an unprecedented time bringing together some of our most treasured writers today—Edwidge Danticat, Layli Long Soldier, Monica Youn, Julia Alvarez, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor—to give voice to the unthinkable grief and hopeful possibilities born in an era of revolution and change.Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Reverberations of shock and outrage remain with us all.There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and articulates all of these roiling sentiments unleashed by a profound national reckoning.

Such Color: New and Selected Poems, Tracy K.Smith’s first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even—and especially—in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief.

Beautifully written and deeply researched,Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law...Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination,Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women’s radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

Harlem Shuffle: A Novel
Author:Coleson Whitehead
Page Count:318
Publisher:Doubleday
Year:2021
Size:6.125 × 9.25 in.

There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love
Author:John Freeman, Tracy K. Smith
Page Count:320
Publisher:Vintage
Year:2021
Size:5.37  × 8 in.

Such Color: New and Selected Poems
Author:Tracy K. Smith
Page Count:240
Publisher:Graywolf
Year:2021
Size: 6 × 9 in.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Author: Saidiya Hartman
Page Count:464
Publisher:W. W. Norton & Company
Year:2019
Size:5.5 × 8.3 in.