The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.

Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.

From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”

True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 19, 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 256 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 166806426X

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1668064269

• Author: Jesmyn Ward 

The first full and definitive narrative of one of the most shocking and largely unknown events of racial injustice in US history: the execution of nineteen Black soldiers in Texas

On the sweltering, rainy night of August 23, 1917, one of the most consequential events affecting America’s long legacy of racism and injustice began in Houston, Texas. Inflamed by a rumor that a white mob was arming to attack them, and after weeks of police harassment, more than 100 African American soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, took their weapons without authorization and, led by a sergeant, marched into the largely Black San Felipe district of the city. Violent confrontations with police and civilians ensued and nineteen lives were lost.

The Army moved quickly to court-martial 118 soldiers on charges of mutiny and murder, even though a majority of the soldiers involved had never fired their weapons. Inadequately defended en masse by a single officer who was not a lawyer and had no experience in capital cases, in three trials undermined by perjured testimony and clear racial bias, and confronted by an all-white tribunal committed to a rapid judgment, 110 Black soldiers were found guilty—despite the fact that no mutiny had, in fact, taken place. In the predawn darkness of December 11, thirteen of them were hanged at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio—hastily and in secret, without any chance to appeal. News of the largest mass execution in the Army’s history outraged the country and inspired preventive legislation; and yet six more Black soldiers were executed in early 1918 and the rest were sentenced to life in prison.

The Houston Incident, as it became known, has remained largely untold, a deep stain on the Army’s record and pride. Award-winning historian and Army veteran John A. Haymond has spent six years researching the events surrounding the Incident and leading the efforts that ultimately led, in November 2023, to the largest act of retroactive clemency in the Army’s history when the verdicts were overturned and honorable discharges awarded to all the soldiers involved. His dramatic chronicle of what transpired—situated amongst the rampant racism in Texas and the country—is a crucially important and harrowing reminder of our racially violent past, offering the promise that justice, even posthumously, can prevail.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 14, 2026

• Author: John A. Haymond

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 400 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802167594

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802167590

Explores the intersection of racial thought and reproductive science and policy across the British Empire.

In Generating Difference, Andrew Wells traces the entwined histories of race, sex, and reproduction in Britain and its empire during the long eighteenth century. Challenging the assumption that the concept of race evolved in the modern era solely through new forms of biological science, Wells argues that older ideas of lineage, sexual reproduction, and bodily difference remained central to how race was understood, categorized, and enforced well into the nineteenth century.

From the pages of Enlightenment science to colonial policy in the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Pacific, Wells shows how reproductive sex served as a primary framework for defining human differences. Concepts of identity were written onto bodies—especially those marked as non-white or non-male—through perceived differences in anatomy, fertility, and sexuality, albeit never unproblematically. Whether in debates about slavery, interracial relationships, embryology, or population policy, the reproductive body became the crucible in which ideas about race and sex were forged and maintained.

Offering a global scope beyond the Atlantic, including South Asia and the Pacific, and drawing from a wide range of sources—from satire to scientific treatises—Generating Difference brings the scholarship of race and sexuality into direct and compelling conversation. Wells uncovers how deeply reproduction structured imperial ideologies and how the policing of bodies helped naturalize hierarchy, control, and exclusion. At its core, the book reconsiders what made difference "visible" in a period before the dominance of the idea of racial biology.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 13, 2026

• Author: Andrew Wells

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 390 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1421453606

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1421453606

From one of America's most venerable politicians, the powerful, untold story of the pioneering Black congressmen from South Carolina who were elected in the aftermath of the Civil War, revealing why it took nearly a century before the ninth, James Clyburn, was elected.

Today, South Carolina congressman James E. Clyburn is renowned as a Democratic kingmaker and our nation's most august Black political leader. But behind him stand eight other remarkable men: the first Black politicians to go to Congress from his home state, and who blazed a path for his own ascent. Since his own arrival in Congress in the early nineties, Congressman Clyburn has been guided by the wisdom and example of these men, and also instructed by their struggles—especially with the demon of American racism. South Carolina's first eight Black congressmen all rose to office following the Civil War and emancipation, but then the dark veil of Jim Crow fell across the South. It would take nearly a century before the ninth Black representative, Clyburn himself, 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.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 11, 2025

• Author: Jim Clyburn

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316572748

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316572743