NY Times Bestselling Author Discusses Her Latest, “Of Greed & Glory”

“This is an emotional and passionate book, raw in its grief and anger, but also imbued with hope for redemption. Based on objective his­torical fact and subjective experience, Of Greed and Glory has the power of a sermon and the urgency of a manifesto.” — Bookpage (starred review)

Did you know that 2.5 million American citizens are incarcerated? And 6,300 of them are incarcerated inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola – the largest maximum-security prison in the country. One of those prisoners is the brother of DEBORAH G. PLANT – the Editor of New York Times Bestselling book, “Barracoon.” Her brother has been incarcerated there for nearly 25 years and has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Drawing on parallels between her brother’s incarceration and years of thorough research dating ALL the way back to the creation of our US Constitution, Plant provides: “a compelling argument against the systemic abuse of justice as a weapon of oppression” (Kirkus Reviews) in her new book: OF GREED & GLORY.

The book has been praised as a must-read for socially conscious citizens – helping to explain current issues surrounding race, social justice, and the resulting inequality. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY awards Deborah G. Plant as one of the top “BLACK AUTHORS TO READ IN 2024!”

Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice…freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent.

“Several hundred thousand Americans are caged in American jails every single day, not because they are necessarily guilty of a crime but because our wealth-based justice system targets those who don’t have the money to post bail….and the vast majority of those …are poor, Black, and brown.” So writes Deborah Plant, an African American and Africana studies scholar – providing an example in her brother, who is now in Angola state prison in Louisiana, a state that, a legal scholar notes, “has some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country.”

About the author: DEBORAH G. PLANT is an African American and Africana Studies Independent Scholar, Writer, and Literary Critic specializing in the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston. She is editor of the New York Times bestseller Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston and the author of Alice Walker: A Woman for Our Times, a philosophical biography. She is also editor of The Inside Light: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, and the author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit and Every Tub Must Sit On Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. She holds MA and Ph. D. degrees in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and traveled to Benin as a Fulbright-Hays fellow. Plant played an instrumental role in founding the University of South Florida’s Department of Africana Studies, where she chaired the department for five years. She presently resides in Florida.