March 8, 2026

Jennifer Crewe: A Legacy of Leadership at Columbia University Press

Jennifer Crewe discusses her path to leadership and the lasting impact of her efforts to integrate the Press with Columbia University.

February 17, 2026

Cisco Bradley on I Hear Freedom

Cisco Bradley discusses how oral history anchors the book and why the Great Migration and Black freedom movements are essential to understanding the music.

February 10, 2026

Jamall A. Calloway on Imagining Eden

Author, Jamall A. Calloway reflects on his new book, Imagining Eden, Black theology, and James Weldon Johnson’s reimagining of Genesis.

February 1, 2026

15 Must-Read Books for Black History Month 2026

Celebrates Black voices, recognize Black contributions to literature and culture, and reflect on ongoing struggles with this Black history booklist.

November 12, 2025

Writing in the Ring

Building Community as Authors

A. Kayum Ahmed

A. Kayum Ahmed writes about the rewarding sense of community in the Columbia University Press author meet-ups for series authors.

November 10, 2025

Building Community Through Words

Reflections on Our Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future Series Writing Group

Carolette Norwood

Carolette Norwood reflects on her experience in the Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future Series Writing Group.

October 2, 2025

Textual Life, Institutional Death

On Gaza Solidarity, Columbia University, and the Crisis of the Humanities

Wendell Marsh

Wendell Marsh reflects on how his book Textual Life emerged from critical academic spaces now under siege, defending humanities scholarship.

June 16, 2025

Reimagining the Plantation Toward More Liberatory Futures

Strategies in Black Self-Determination

Jarvis C. McInnis

Jarvis C. McInnis discusses the transformation of plantation legacies as strategies in Black self-determination and community empowerment.

January 20, 2025

Lauren Coyle Rosen and Hannibal Lokumbe on Music, Life, and Liberation

For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, Lokumbe composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, Indigenous...

March 27, 2024

Laura E. Helton on Scattered and Fugitive Things

In Scattered and Fugitive Things, Laura E. Helton tells the stories of six Black collectors who played a pivotal role in shaping the early twentieth-century Black archive. From the parlors of the urban North to HBCU reading rooms and branch...

February 7, 2024

Black Life in a Nazi Internment Camp:

The Art of Josef Nassy

Sarah Phillips Casteel

In July 1947, an exhibition of artworks created in Nazi concentration and internment camps was mounted in railway cars stationed in Brussels’s Gare du Nord. Included in the exhibition were several works by Josef Nassy, an artist from the Dutch...

February 15, 2023

Q&A: Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume and Dr. Frank Guridy on Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future

A Howard-Columbia Intellectual Partnership

In February 2021, Columbia University Press announced a new partnership with Howard University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Columbia University’s African American and African Diaspora Studies Department—the Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future series. Building on Columbia University...