For many African Americans living in Vancouver, their roots in this community go back to the Kaiser Shipyards during World War II. With ample work in the Pacific Northwest, it was all the motivation these pioneers needed to leave the racial animosity of the Jim Crow South. They were among the first Black families to reside in Vancouver...

Over the years, many an unscrupulous author has assumed an alibi in order to pass as a member of another ethnic group. Perhaps the most infamous of these so-called "slippery characters" was Ku Klux Klansman Asa Carter who faked a Native American background to publish "The Education of Little Tree," a critically-acclaimed memoir about growing up Cherokee which not only topped the NY Times Bestseller List back in the Seventies but won the Book of the Year Award as well ...

It was announced today that Naseem Rakha's The Crying Tree has won a 2010 Pacific Northwest Booksellers award for fiction. This is Rakha's debut novel, but she is a well-known, award-winning journalist whose stories have been heard on NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, as well as Marketplace Radio, Christian Science Monitor, and Living on Earth. The winners were selected by a committee of independent booksellers from more than 200 nominated titles, each written by a Northwest author and published in 2009.

A list of pertinent books related to civil rights struggles ...

When he was 19, Nasir "Nas" Jones began recording what would be one of the most important hip hop albums of all time. The 1994 "Illmatic" is a personal account of life in New York's Queensbridge housing project...

Wench" by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known fact, Wench combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones's "The Known World" as it tells the story of four Black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War...

How did Christmas come to be more closely associated with consumerism than with spiritualism? What sort of toll does the emotional and financial pressure to buy gifts we can't afford take on today's society? Should it matter that the recipients generally aren't even very appreciative since they tend to get things they neither want nor would ever consider buying for themselves?

Who even knew that any children of slaves were still alive? A debt of gratitude is owed to Sana Butler for compiling this bittersweet collection of revealing interviews with the offspring of folks freed by the Emancipation Proclamation well over a century ago. What makes this book special is how seamlessly the author contrasts her aging subjects' fading recollections with her own expectations of them and her intimate reflections about being Black and female in present-day America.

In "Who Will Cry for the Little Girl" author Alexander Lee Barrett follows the life of his own great-great-great-great-great Grandmother, Chaney Rice as she deals with life as a slave on the plantation of one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Greene County, Alabama

By the time Felicia "Snoop" Pearson was 15, she was serving hard time for a murder she says happened in self-defense. But now, the woman that was born a "three-pound, cross-eyed crack baby in East Baltimore," is famous for starring as a cold-blooded villain on the critically acclaimed HBO series "The Wire."