"This book presents a valuable contribution to several disciplines. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
-- T. N. Allen Choice
"Black Madness :: Mad Blackness is what happens when you get to take the road less traveled with a professional driver or go deep into the weeds with an expert botanist. You may feel out of your depth, but you’re assured by the fact that your traveling companion is extremely knowledgeable. . . . Pickens has called us all outside to play, to think deeply and without eventuality, to consider Blackness and madness – dare I say –irreverently, and we are all the better for it."
-- Moya Bailey Black Perspectives
“Pickens’s Black Madness :: Mad Blackness invites the reader to think about race and disability in Black American literature.... [It] invite[s] us to enter into what Pickens calls a ‘politics of curiosity,’ one that moves beyond dominant forms of mythmaking or the living nightmares of the carceral state, and to see the constellation of Black life, the impulse to rectify freedom and break the confines of mass incarceration.”
-- Edna Bonhomme Public Books
"A timely reimagination of how we read the intersection of Blackness and disability, opening up further possibilities for anti-ableist and anti-racist futures."
-- Rhya Moffitt Brooke MELUS