New Books This Week

Check out these new titles that are now available wherever books are sold. And don’t forget that if you want to see everything new this month, you can visit our Hot Off the Press page or sign up for monthly enews to get updates in your inbox every month on new books & other exciting UNC Press news.

Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education edited by Shardé M. Davis

This curated collection of original personal narratives from Black scholars across the country seeks to continue the conversation that started with the 2020 viral social media movement #BlackintheIvory.

“The perils and possibilities of life for Black scholars exist in the same academic house. Shardé Davis’s pathbreaking interventions on social media about what it means to be Black in higher education find an extended shelf life with this brilliant collection of bold voices speaking about what’s wrong and how to fix it. Being Black in the Ivory is just what the doctor ordered. This book must be read by everyone and anyone who cares about Black scholars and scholarship in the twenty-first century!”—Michael Eric Dyson, University Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University, author of Entertaining Race

“Being Black in the Ivory is a collective exhale. Davis validates the experiences of Black scholars and reminds us that we are not crazy and we are not alone.”—Kellie Carter Jackson, author of Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, finalist for the MAAH Stone Book Award

Come! Come! Where? Where?: Essays by James Seay

James Seay’s essays reflect a poet’s eye for detail and a seeker’s wrestling with life’s big questions and experiences: what it means to be a parent, losing a child, confronting mental illness, observing and living through the collision of cultures, finding the universal in the particularity of every day.

“With the touch of a poet and the depth of an offshore fisherman (both of which he is), James Seay ranges from wrangling with hard men and heavy equipment to feeling for his butter-churning mom and a baby cowbird. The little cowbird is ignored, except by Seay, but this book shouldn’t be.”—Roy Blount Jr., author of Alphabet Juice

“From single-wides to severed digits and the naming of dogs, Come! Come! gently explores the beautiful, the profound, and the sad, illuminating the rich and varied human spectacle with wisdom and kindness. “—Sally Mann, photographer and author of Hold Still