A Most Perilous World: The True Story of the Young Abolitionists and their Crusade Against Slavery

The stories of the four teenage children of prominent abolitionists before and during the Civil War combine to form a surprisingly familiar tapestry of struggle, disappointment, and ultimately hope.

Flowers in the Gutter author Kristina R. Gaddy tells the story of America’s tumultuous years leading up to the Civil War and of the war itself from the viewpoints of four children of famous abolitionists, including those of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Gaddy crafts a surprisingly contemporary braided coming-of-age narrative, supported by meticulous research and featuring dozens of primary documents. Each of these four young people—two white, two Black—was strongly committed to the anti-slavery cause but felt just as keenly a need to make their own names, away from the often over-protective or disapproving shadows of the famous adults in their lives. This is a true story of how a torch of resistance is passed and how a new generation makes its mark.

​Out June 10, 2025

Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo 

co-authored with Rhiannon Giddens

For the first time, this groundbreaking songbook collaboration by music writer Kristina R. Gaddy and Grammy Award winner Rhiannon Giddens makes nineteen examples of early Black Atlantic music accessible and playable for today's musicians, music enthusiasts, and historians.

Presenting music from 1687 through the 1860s in modern treble clef and banjo tablature, along with the rich stories behind each song, Gaddy and Giddens take readers on a journey from the Caribbean across the Americas. Immensely readable for amateurs and professionals alike, Go Back and Fetch It explains the significance of early Black Atlantic music and how the patterns of tunings, melodic lines, and lyrics shed light on the impact that Black American music has had on nineteenth-century popular music, early country, old time, and bluegrass. Each tune pairs with an engaging essay on its historical background and how the tune transformed over time, as well as information about the collector. Deeply researched and carefully approached, this essential source restores the roots of Black music to the musical canon. 

Out September 16, 2025

Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music.
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In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo’s beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became U.S. states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York.

African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten.

Flowers in the Gutter: The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis

The true story of the Edelweiss Pirates, working-class teenagers who fought the Nazis by whatever means they could.

Fritz, Gertrud, and Jean were classic outsiders: their clothes were different, their music was rebellious, and they weren’t afraid to fight. But they were also Germans living under Hitler, and any nonconformity could get them arrested or worse. As children in 1933, they saw their world change. Their earliest memories were of the Nazi rise to power and of their parents fighting Brownshirts in the streets, being sent to prison, or just disappearing.

As Hitler’s grip tightened, these three found themselves trapped in a nation whose government contradicted everything they believed in. And by the time they were teenagers, the Nazis expected them to be part of the war machine. Fritz, Gertrud, and Jean and hundreds like them said no. They grew bolder, painting anti-Nazi graffiti, distributing anti-war leaflets, and helping those persecuted by the Nazis. Their actions were always dangerous. The Gestapo pursued and arrested hundreds of Edelweiss Pirates. In World War II’s desperate final year, some Pirates joined in sabotage and armed resistance, risking the Third Reich’s ultimate punishment.

A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays​

Edited by Randon Billings Noble, featuring "Intersectional Landscapes" by Kristina Gaddy

What is a lyric essay? An essay that has a lyrical style? An essay that plays with form in a way that resembles poetry more than prose? Both of these? Or something else entirely? The works in this anthology show lyric essays rely more on intuition than exposition, use image more than narration, and question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has responsibilities—to try to reveal something, to play with ideas, or to show a shift in thinking, however subtle. The whole of a lyric essay adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

In A Harp in the Stars, Randon Billings Noble has collected lyric essays written in four different forms—flash, segmented, braided, and hermit crab—from a range of diverse writers. The collection also includes a section of craft essays—lyric essays about lyric essays. And because lyric essays can be so difficult to pin down, each contributor has supplemented their work with a short meditation on this boundary-breaking form.
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