"Focusing on Black women as political actors, Dowe launches a new conversation on candidate emergence, offering new ways of conceptualizing political ambition. She illuminates new spaces where women candidates are groomed and offers a vision of political ambition that is grounded in a collective, community-based ethos rather than an individualist frame, which has dominated much of the candidate emergence literature emergence. Anyone interested in women in electoral politics will find this book an essential read." --Wendy Smooth, The Ohio State University"This book is one I have been waiting for. With an impressive new theoretical formulation, Dowe offers an important corrective to theories of political ambition that fail to recognize the capacity of Black women to move from community service and grassroots activism to legislative policymaking and public office-holding. Her theory of Ambition on the Margins has indisputable value and magnificently captures said dynamic whereby Black women's voting and officeholding emerge as a paradox of participation." --Evelyn M. Simien, University of Connecticut"The Radical Imagination of Black Women is a necessary intervention into scholarly understandings of Black women's political ambition. Dowe centers Black women's culture, epistemology, and community commitment as the key factors that undergird their political ambition. This novel approach to traditional political science studies is what sets this book apart. While the uniqueness of the data and methodological framework is a key selling point, the theoretical underpinning of this text is the real star. Only Pearl Dowe could have written this masterpiece-one that is wholly encapsulated in the beauty of Black women's marginalities and wholenesses and can weave together the complexities of a structurally-driven but agentic-created origin story of Black women's political ambition." --Nadia E. Brown, Georgetown University