This exciting collection introduces the first-ever annual anthology of writing solely by African Americans. Here are remarkable essays on a variety of subjects informed by—but not necessarily about—the experience of blackness as seen through the eyes of some of our finest writers.

From art, entertainment, and science to technology, sexuality, and current events—including the battle for the Democratic nomination for the presidency—the essays in this inaugural anthology offer the compelling perspectives of a number of well-known, distinguished writers, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, James McBride, and Walter Mosley, and a number of other writers who are just beginning to be heard.

Selected from an array of respected publications such as the New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and National Geographic, the essays gathered here are about making history, living everyday life—and everything in between. In “Fired,” author and professor Emily Bernard wrestles with the pain of a friendship inexplicably ended. Kenneth McClane writes hauntingly of the last days of his parents’ lives in “Driving.” Journalist Brian Palmers shares “The Last Thoughts of an Iraq War Embed.” In “Jamaica Girl,” author Lori Cullen illustrates the struggle of immigrant blacks to become American without losing hold of their cultural roots, and writer Hawa Allan depicts the forces of race and rivalry as two catwalk icons face off in “When Tyra Met Naomi.” A venue in which African American writers can branch out from traditionally “black” subjects, The Best African American Essays features a range of gifted voices exploring the many issues and experiences, joys and trials, that, as human beings, we all share.

 
Debra J. Dickerson was educated at the University of Maryland, St. Mary’s University, and Harvard Law School. She has been both a senior editor and a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, and her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, the Village Voice, and Essence. She is the author of The End of Blackness and An American Story. She lives in Albany, New York.


Gerald Early is a noted essayist and American culture critic. A professor of English, African & African American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Early is the author of several books, including The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s. He is also editor of numerous volumes, including The Muhammad Ali Reader and The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader. He served as a consultant on four of Ken Burns’s documentary films, Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, and The War, and appeared in the first three as an on-air analyst.