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Equator Woman is the autobiography of a time-traveling Black woman who saves planet Earth. The author, Axis Heart, provides a provocative glimpse into how the past impacts the future. Her reflections on adventure, soup, and self-defense reveal complex identities of females born in the African diaspora. This scribe chronicles life as an "Equator Woman"-a Black woman from Africa, India, Australia, Brazil, the United States, and beyond-to KeplerPrime, a human-inhabited planet in the Lyra constellation. The story begins in 10th-century BCE Ethiopia, from where readers follow Axis to several continents during six flavorful lives. As a United Nations GalaState mediator, Axis finds herself pitted against violent forces that perpetuate fear and ignorance in order to control social and natural resources. In an epic struggle to bring balance to the home planet, she joins a group of creative activists to fight humanots and to tip the scales in a faceoff against the relentless Captain G. By challenging readers to "follow your heart" in order to solve human problems, these travel memoirs pose important questions about attitudes, behaviors, and choices we embody. This is the tale of an ancient "sassy" Black girl who learns to negotiate power through trade, technology, and law. Seasoned with experience, her soulful recipe for community building is clearly embedded in the text. As publisher of this narrative about a 3,500-year quest for justice, Dr. Stephanie Evans presents a timeless story to nourish booklovers and activists far and wide.

Bow is a little bundle of joy who sees her reflection in the mirror for the first time. Her mother is there to help her identify her matchless characteristics by pointing out features such as Bows beautiful brown eyes and curly hair. Bow is delighted to find out that she is perfect in every way!

Today is the worse day of Steven James' life. He gets in trouble for everything that he does. His homework is all wrong, he misplaces things, and he causes his class to lose the kickball game. To top it all off his teacher, Mrs. Jones, does the one thing that every kid dreads. She calls his mom to figure out why he can't pay attention.

In a new mystery featuring Texas minister Walker “Bear” Wells, a teen tragedy hits too close to home… The ominous text message Bear Wells received from his teenage daughter Jo simply said: “Come home.” The Texas minister never imagined he’d rush back to find her cradling the dead body of her estranged friend Phoebe. While the death rocks Sugar Land, the apparent suicide seems like an open-and-shut case. But nothing is settled in the Wells household, especially for Jo. The deeper she digs into Phoebe’s life, the more she realizes nobody knew her at all. Bear found it hard enough dealing with Phoebe’s skimpy Goth outfits, painful-looking piercings, and the outrageous scandals she brought to his idyllic Sugar Land congregation, but now it’s his daughter who’s acting out. Jo knows Phoebe caused major problems between her picture-perfect father and stepmom, but she has no idea what’s at stake or whose lives are in jeopardy. Bear’s painfully aware that his last private investigation resulted in a bullet wound, so when Jo sneaks out alone to confront her primary suspect, he’s not only praying that he’ll find her in time—he’s asking forgiveness for what he may have to do to save her.

Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. Evans reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators--despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies--contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Among those Evans profiles are Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This first complete educational and intellectual history of black women carefully traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development. Evans reveals historic perspectives, patterns, and philosophies in academia that will be an important reference for scholars of gender, race, and education.

A resource guide that uses African American memoir to address a variety of issues related to mentoring and curriculum development. In this resource guide for fostering youth empowerment, Stephanie Y. Evans offers creative commentary on two hundred autobiographies that contain African American travel memoirs of places around the world. The narratives are by such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Angela Davis, Condoleezza Rice, and President Barack Obama, as well as by many lesser-known travelers. The book addresses a variety of issues related to mentoring and curriculum development. It serves as a tool for “literary mentoring,” where students of all ages can gain knowledge and wisdom from texts in the same way achieved by one-on-one mentoring, and it also provides ideas for incorporating these memoirs into lessons on history, geography, vocabulary, and writing. Focusing on four main mentoring themes—life, school, work, and cultural exchange—Evans encourages readers to comb the texts for models of how to manage attitudes, behaviors, and choices in order to be successful in transnational settings. “This book provides a new and refreshing way to think about Black youth and issues of empowerment. It will be a useful tool for teachers, parents, scholars, and community organizers, leaders, and activists.” — Valerie Grim, Indiana University Bloomington

“NO POLITICS whatever.” Walker Evans made this emphatic declaration in 1935, the year he began work for FDR’s Resettlement Administration. Evans insisted that his photographs of tenant farmers and their homes, breadlines, and the unemployed should be treated as “pure record.” The American photographer’s statements have often been dismissed. In Walker Evans: No Politics, Stephanie Schwartz challenges us to engage with what it might mean, in the 1930s and at the height of the Great Depression, to refuse to work politically. Offering close readings of Evans’s numerous commissions, including his contribution to Carleton Beals’s anti-imperialist tract, The Crime of Cuba (1933), this book is a major departure from the standard accounts of Evans’s work and American documentary. Documentary, Schwartz reveals, is not a means of being present—or being “political.” It is a practice of record making designed to distance its maker from the “scene of the crime.” That crime, Schwartz argues, is not just the Depression; it is the processes of Americanization reshaping both photography and politics in the 1930s. Historicizing documentary, this book reimagines Evans and his legacy—the complexities of claiming “no politics.”

How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.

Writing scholarly books is stressful, and academic publishing can be intimidating—especially for women, queer folks, and scholars of color. Black Feminist Writing shows scholars how to prioritize their mental health while completing a book in race and gender studies. Drawing on Black women's writing traditions, as well as her own experience as the author and editor of nine university press books, Stephanie Y. Evans gives scholars tools to sustain the important work of academic writing, particularly in fields routinely under attack by anti-democratic forces. Evans identifies five major areas of stress: personal, professional, publishing-related, public, and political. Each chapter includes targeted discussion questions and tasks to help authors identify their unique stressors, create priorities, get organized, and breathe. Whether working on your first scholarly book or your tenth, this robust, heartfelt guide will help you approach writing as an ongoing practice of learning, creating, and teaching in ways that center wellness and collective self-care.

Africana Tea is an illustrated tea table book that catalogs 320 narratives about Black women’s diverse experiences with tea as a tool for health, healing, and wellness. Based on research by Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans and her work on historical wellness, Africana Tea unveils the roots of Black women’s international tea culture. From hibiscus in Egypt and Jamaica to black tea in Kenya, sassafras or orange pekoe iced tea in the US South, and aromatic herbal teas of California, Black women’s wellness is steeped in tea history. This tea table book traces the historical, geographic, health, and educational traditions of collective care and offers a tea tasting journal for self-care.