Beresford Bennett

Bootlegging was Milton and Yvonne Hamilton's ticket out of poverty, prison time, and plain bad luck. Now they've moved on--to a bigger, richer pool of clientele--right in their own respectable new middle-class backyard. And their growing friendship with seemingly-perfect couple Joyce and Odell Watson is proving golden in more ways than one. As Milton soon learns, Odell is hiding an outside family and dubious business dealings. It's the perfect recipe...

A father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in a friend's spare bedroom in Brooklyn. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his family afloat, and four days to make sense of his past and his future in a country where he feels preprogrammed to fail. But he has...

Within the stoned soul picnic of Black music icons in the '60s and '70s, only one could bill himself without a blush as Moses, demanding liberation for Black men with his notions of life and self, Isaac Lee Hayes Jr...Hayes's stunning self-portraits, his obsessive pleas about love, sex, and guilt bathed in lush orchestral flights and soul-stirring bass lines, drove other soul men to libidinous license. While he thrived on soulful remakes of pop standards,...

In this captivating Depression-era set novel by New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe, two couples find their grudges endangering more than their Alabama small town's deceptive peace. When good-time couple Milton and Yvonne Hamilton moved one house over from the respectable-but-restless Odell and Joyce Watson, it was a fast friendship of shared secrets--and secret jealousies and betrayals. Their alliance was bound to crash and burn, but the...

The seventh child of one of Richmond, Virginia's most ambitious hustlers, Seven is a talented poet and author with a true ear for the streets. In Gorilla Black, a boy with a love of Shakespeare and Langston Hughes struggles to thrive while growing up in the projects as the son of an alcoholic mother. In time, self-dubbed Gorilla Black will ascend to the top seat of a cocaine-fueled empire-and discover the truth about his beloved brother's death so...

Marshall Keeble, the premier evangelist in Churches of Christ in the twentieth century, died in April 1968, the same month as Martin Luther King Jr. Keeble spent fifty-five years as a full-time evangelist using his remarkable gifts, steadfastness, toughness, and tactical navigation of the Black/White divide to baptize as many as forty thousand people. He planted and raised over three hundred congregations and mentored powerful sons and grandsons...

When Ferron Morgan's father dies in suspicious circumstances, his trauma is exacerbated by the conflict within his family and among his father's friends over whether the death was the result of medical negligence or if it was a political assassination. Ferron grew up in awe of his father's radical political endeavors, but in later years he watched as the resurgence of the political right in the Caribbean in the 1980s robbed the man of his faith. Ferron's...

The role of men is critical when it comes to preventing sexual assault. Gordon Braxton was in his second year of college before anybody bothered to speak to him about sexual violence, despite the fact that he already knew friends and family members that had survived a sexual assault. Unfortunately, this is a common experience as many young men and boys, especially Black boys, do not have an opportunity to discuss their views on sexual violence and...

A remarkable narrative of both chance and purpose that touches all corners of society to tell the improbable tale of one man looking for something greater A young, Black kid from a hardworking family in one of the poorest sections of Washington, DC, despite being legally blind in one eye, leaps to the pinnacle of his sport: the Hall of Fame. A rookie bank teller rises to become one of the nation's most celebrated Black business leaders. A once-reluctant...

Johnnie Wise, haunted by the murder of her mother's killer and the subsequent riots, is unable to stop thinking about ruthless crime boss Napolean Bentley even though she loves Lucas Matthews, the current man in her life.