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Biography and Memoir February 2026 |
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| Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton by Martha AckmannMartha Ackmann’s biography of country music legend Dolly Parton goes beyond the glamour to reveal the grit that propelled her to international stardom. Parton’s phenomenal talent was discovered while she was a teenager. Her business savvy and philanthropic generosity would be discovered later, namely by sexist Nashville executives trying to control her skyrocketing career. For the story of another feminist music star who refused to be put in a box, try Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel. |
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Heart Life Music
by Kenny Chesney
In college, [Country Music Hall of Fame member] Kenny Chesney found himself on a barstool with a guitar and an unexpected connection between people, life, and songs. His heart caught fire. With Nashville's vibrant creative scene, characters, legends, and places now long gone from the city he encountered in those early days, Chesney explores the quest to find himself as an artist and a man, as well as a sense of home anywhere there's an ocean. These are the stories of the unlikely game changer who became the sound of coming of age in the 21st century, made friends with his heroes, rocked stadiums, and founded a No Shoes Nation--
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| A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to... by Adam MorganAmerican editor Margaret C. Anderson was a champion of early modernists including Djuna Barnes and James Joyce, giving their experimental works voice in her upstart literary journal The Little Review. Critic Adam Morgan documents her fierce advocacy of the arts, romances with various high-profile women, and independence from the 20th-century status quo. Readers will savor this “enlightening depiction of a[n]…influential figure of both modernism and queer history” (Publishers Weekly). |
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| One Aladdin, Two Lamps by Jeanette WintersonProlific novelist and essayist Jeanette Winterson considers the richness of storytelling traditions using One Thousand and One Nights as a guide. Amidst examples of tales spun by Shahrazad that draw parallels with the author’s experiences and the real world, Winterson holds out hope for humanity, expressed through our seemingly inexhaustible imagination. This is an original, thought-provoking work in the vein of Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. |
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House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home
by John T. Edge
The James Beard Award-winning author of The Potlikker Papers tells the story of how food and restaurants helped him heal from the racism ingrained in his Southern roots-and give him hope for the possibility of reckoning with our nation's painful history--
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Focus on: Black History Month
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Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
by Imani Perry
What it is: a revealing biography of acclaimed A Raisin in the Sun playwright and social activist Lorraine Hansberry.
Topics include: Hansberry's conflicted views on her privileged upbringing; career beginnings writing for Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom; brushes with the FBI; her closeted sexuality.
Why you might like it: Library Journal calls this concise and engaging portrait "a must-read for fans of black and queer history."
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The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation
by Jim Clyburn
From one of America's most venerable politicians, The First Eight is an extraordinary work of living history: the powerful, untold story of the pioneering Black politicians from South Carolina who were elected to Congress in the aftermath of the Civil War, and a revealing explanation of why it took nearly a century before the ninth, James Clyburn, was elected. In The First Eight, Congressman Clyburn shares these men's stories, and their message of liberty, with the nation they served. Among them are Joseph Rainey, the first Black politician to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in our nation's history, who was born enslaved in 1832; Robert Smalls, iconic for his heroism during the Civil War, when he fled the Confederacy, stole a ship, and fought for the Union Army; and Richard Cain, who ran a widely read newspaper for Black South Carolinians and is associated with the Emanuel AME Church, one of the oldest and most distinguished Black churches in America, and where neo-Nazi Dylan Roof killed nine Black congregants in a mass shooting in 2015. Through the trials, tribulations, triumphs, and challenges that all nine men faced, Congressman Clyburn reveals a whole new way of understanding the period between the Civil War and the present. A unique blend of history and memoir, The First Eight is both a monument to the legacies of these eight trailblazing Americans, and also a clear-eyed appraisal of how far we've come, and how far we have left to go, in our nation's ongoing struggle for true democracy.
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Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson
by Mark Kriegel
Long before anyone heard of Tony Soprano, Mike Tyson was HBO's leading man. It was the greatest sales job in the sport's history, and the most lucrative. But the business of Tyson concealed truths that were darker and more nuanced than the script would allow. The intervening decades have seen Tyson villainized, lionized, and fetishized--but never, until now, fully humanized. Mark Kriegel ... was a young cityside reporter at the New York Daily News when first swept up in the Tyson media hurricane, but here measures his subject not by whom he knocked out, but by what he survived. Though Tyson was billed as a modern-day Jack Dempsey, the truth was closer to Sonny Liston. Tyson was Black, feared, and born to die young. What made Liston a pariah, though, would make Tyson--in a way his own handlers could never understand--a touchstone for a generation raised on a soundtrack of hip hop and gunfire--
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Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King
by Preston Lauterbach
... [Preston] Lauterbach examines the lives, music, legacies, and interactions with Elvis Presley of the four innovative Black artists who created a style that would come to be known as Rock 'n' Roll: Little Junior Parker, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur Big Boy Crudup, and mostly-unknown eccentric Beale Street guitarist Calvin Newborn. Along the way, he delves into the injustices of copyright theft and media segregation that resulted in Black artists living in poverty as white performers, managers, and producers reaped the lucrative rewards.--Provided by publisher.
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Just Follow Me: James Owens and the Integration of Southeastern Conference Football
by Jr. Gossom, Thom
"In 1969, James Owens (1951-2016) made sports history as the first Black football player at Auburn University-a significant milestone that marked the beginning of the end of segregation in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Owens, a running back, was an exemplary athlete who battled racism and immense scrutiny throughout his entire time at Auburn. Yet his strength, his faith, and his family's support emboldened him to persevere and break the color barrier, which ultimately opened the door for other Black athletes. Just Follow Me: James Owens and the Integration of Southeastern Conference Football chronicles Owens's remarkable life and career-from growing up in Fairfield, Alabama, to his first day on the gridiron as an Auburn Tiger, his work as a coach and pastor, and his later years when he was plagued by heart issues. Through personal interviews with Owens and his former teammates, friends, and coaches, authors Thom Gossom Jr. and Sam Heys reveal the struggles faced by Owens and his contemporaries both on and off the field, all within the broader historical context of the civil rights movement. Just Follow Me is an honest, inspiring account not only of a trailblazing football player but of a resilient and influential leader in the sports community."
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Contact your librarian for more great books! |
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