All Books

  • Product Of The Street: Union City Book 3

    by E. Bowser

    $19.99

    Fransisco ‘Faxx’ Wellington saw Crescent at Myth and knew she would become his obsession.
    Their connection created a soul tie he wasn’t prepared for. But secrets and hidden agendas reveal themselves, leaving Faxx teetering on the edge of darkness that only Cresent can pull him from.

    Crescent ‘Cent’ Johnson is questioning the authenticity of her connection with Fransisco. Deep-seated doubts and insecurities from her past plague her heart, casting a shadow over their vibrant connection. Forced into close proximity with him, it begins to get harder and harder to hide her sordid past. She doesn’t want the ghost of her past to show up on his doorstep, but it already looks like she’s too late.
    Will they be able to deal with their individual demons and prove their connection can stand strong through it all?

    Lakyn ‘Link’ Moore is determined to ensure he forgets all things Mala, but a chance encounter at Myth as the Black Wolf changes everything. Standing before a woman, lying with her hands tied above her head, waiting for him. When he heard the safe word was ‘Kite,’ that could be explained away, but when the woman lying before him moaned his name, he knew exactly who lay behind the mask. Payback was the sweetest revenge, and Link would ensure that payback included making Malikita remember the name “The Black Wolf.”

    Malikita ‘Mala’ Samuels was living a lie she couldn’t escape.
    Her heart beats only for Link, a man who had intensely captured her soul when they were teens. Their connection was undeniable, and while their love blossomed, promises were made, only to be broken. At eighteen, Mala found herself trapped in a web of obligations and deceit, torn between her desires and the damning evidence that her now fiancé, Charles, held against Link. Mala’s heartache grew with each passing day, torn between the love she craved and the fear of the consequences that would bury them.

    Will Mala risk it all, defy Charles, and embrace a love that burned with an intensity that could never be extinguished? Or will she sacrifice her own happiness to keep the man she loves safe?

    *** This book contains explicit language, graphic violence, and strong sexual content. It is intended for adults. ***

  • Mutiny
    $20.00

    Winner of the 2022 American Book Award
    Finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry 
    Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
    Finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
    Named one of the Best Books of 2021 by The Boston Globe and Lit Hub

    From the critically acclaimed author of Thief in the Interior who writes with "a lucid, unmitigated humanity" (Boston Review), a startling new collection about revolt and renewal

    Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

  • Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems
    $24.00

    From Cornelius Eady, one of America's most engaging voices, comes an exciting collection of poetry that at once delineates the arc of the poet's universe and highlights the range of his considerable talents.

    Cornelius Eady’s poems show him in full control of his considerable talents and displaying a rich maturity as he enters midlife. His poems are sly, unsentimental, and witty, full of truths that are intimate and profound.

    Hardheaded Weather ranges widely, reflecting the new found responsibilities Eady has assumed as he transitions from urban renter to nonplussed rural homeowner, as well as the sobering influence of war and the intimation of his own mortality. Yet even at his angriest, the poet has always had a depth of compassion rare in our polarized age, with a sense of humor that is both sophisticated and demotic. These poems will resonate deeply.

    As exciting as the new poems are, his selected earlier poems dazzle, too, as they demonstrate the arc of Cornelius Eady’s maturation and the originality of his voice. Taken together, Hardheaded Weather forms a moving—and sometimes searing—testament to the power of poetry.

  • The Black Poets
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    "The claim of The Black Poets  to being... an anthology is that it  presents the full range of Black-American poetry,  from the slave songs to the present day. It is  important that folk poetry be included because it is  the root and inspiration of later, literary  poetry. Not only does this book present the full range  of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in  depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet  neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks  is represented not only by poems on racial and  domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of  superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and  retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to  create a new poetry. This book records their  progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley  Randall

  • The Dark Forest
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    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    The Dark Forest is the second novel in the groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning series from China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu.

    In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion-in just four centuries' time. The aliens' human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.

    The Three-Body Problem Series
    The Three-Body Problem
    The Dark Forest
    Death's End

    Other Books by Cixin Liu
    Ball Lightning
    Supernova Era
    To Hold Up the Sky
    The Wandering Earth
    A View from the Stars

     

    (The Three-Body Problem Series, 2)

  • Certain Dark Things
    $18.99

    Use discount code: SALE to receive 30% off. 

    From Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic, comes Certain Dark Things, a pulse-pounding neo-noir that reimagines vampire lore.

    Welcome to Mexico City, an oasis in a sea of vampires. Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is just trying to survive its heavily policed streets when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, is smart, beautiful, and dangerous. Domingo is mesmerized.

    Atl needs to quickly escape the city, far from the rival narco-vampire clan relentlessly pursuing her. Her plan doesn’t include Domingo, but little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm. As the trail of corpses stretches behind her, local cops and crime bosses both start closing in.

    Vampires, humans, cops, and criminals collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive? Or will the city devour them all?

  • Death's End
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    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    The New York Times bestselling conclusion to the groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning series from China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu.

    Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

    Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

    The Three-Body Problem Series
    The Three-Body Problem
    The Dark Forest
    Death's End

    Other Books by Cixin Liu
    Ball Lightning
    Supernova Era
    To Hold Up the Sky
    The Wandering Earth
    A View from the Stars

  • Muscadine

    by A. H. Jerriod Avant

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    A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin    [that] teeth / pierce    breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout these pages, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness of deficit and bounty — appetite pains the stomach and delights the palette. In all seasons, the tongue’s subversive intelligence sculpts this masterwork of love, grace, conflict, and grief. This book tastes summer and the “ruins of / an afternoon” at once; it explores the language that testifies to loss while illuminating the abundance that loss obscures. Avant accentuates the sonic joys that Black Southern voices bring to bear on memorializing the present and commemorating the past. Don’t forget, he tells us. “Look how I hunger where // there is no hunger.” See how the weather changes swiftly and forever: “Look / how pops left    before we // thought he was done.” But notice, too, how an echo sounds remembrance: “Listen, / how the voice    of a dead man // can live.” He commands us to take the brief blooms with us, says, “Pack me    a bag / I can fit    in my heart.”
     

  • ABC Black History and Me: An inspirational journey through Black history, from A to Z
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    ABC Black History and Me presents 26 historical concepts, events, and people—from A to Z—that are important in Black American history.

    From A is for Advocate to Z is for Zest, each letter of the alphabet is paired with inspirational historical concepts in this 9x9-inch board book. Along with the upbeat, rhyming text covering both well-known and more obscure topics, are colorful illustrations that promote an excitement and curiosity about Black American history. Covering trailblazers from A to Z but also chronologically, this book features a visual timeline with additional information for more in-depth learning on the people, places, and events discussed.

    From Harriet Tubman and Fanny Jackson Coppin to Amanda Gorman and Ketanji Brown Jackson, ABC Black History and Me covers more than 170 years in a short board book appropriate for the little ones. This book is not only perfect for getting toddlers comfortable with their ABCs, but also for reflecting on how we are all affected by this history and how even the youngest of children will affect the future.

    With age-appropriate concepts and visuals, ABC Black History and Me is a perfect discussion starter for the whole family. Even adults will find something to learn in this board book!

    The ABC for Me series presents a world of possibilities from A to Z and everything in between! For all little kids with big dreams, the endearing illustrations and mindful concepts in this series pair each letter of the alphabet with words that promote big dreams, inclusion, acceptance, healthy living, and other key concepts important to emotional well-being. Other books in this series include:
     
    * ABC Love (2017)
    * ABC What Can She Be? (2018)
    * ABC Let’s Celebrate You & Me (2021)
    * ABC Bedtime (2022)

  • The Propagation Handbook : A guide to propagating houseplants

    by Hilton Carter

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    Ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days
    Not only a plant lover, Hilton is passionate about propagation, the process of growing a brand new healthy and happy plant from part of an existing one. In this, his fifth book, Hilton talks us through the process of propagation and explains all the necessary techniques, from the very simplest to more complex methods, such as air layering and grafting. He describes exactly which method to use for different types of plant, and lists the tools essential for the process. In Hilton's own words: “You hear so much about plant ‘parenthood’, but knowing how to propagate and then watching as your little plant takes shape and develops into a full-grown plant is the very definition of this.”

  • Half of a Yellow Sun

    by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    $19.00
    With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene.

    Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.
  • The House of Being

    by Natasha Tretheway

    $18.00
    In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a pasture: a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.
     
    In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.
  • Mahdi Ehsaei: AFRO-IRAN: THE UNKNOWN MINORITY
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    In seiner Serie Afro-Iran stellt der deutsch-iranische Fotograf Mahdi Ehsaei (*1989) eine Facette des Iran vor, die selbst Einheimischen weitgehend unbekannt ist: Im Süden des Landes gibt es eine ethnische Minderheit, die das Erbe ihrer afrikanischen Herkunft in Kleidungsstil, Musik und Tanz sowie in ihren mündlichen Überlieferungen und Ritualen bis heute aufrecht erhält und so die Kultur der gesamten Region beeinflusst hat. Für sein Projekt reiste Ehsaei in die südiranische Provinz Hormozgan am Persischen Golf, der Heimat der Nachfahren von Sklaven und Händlern aus Afrika. In dieser Gegend, reich and Traditionen und Geschichte, lebt einer der ethnisch vielfältigsten Bevölkerungsanteile in einer einzigartigen Landschaft. In seinem Buch präsentiert Ehsaei zahlreiche überraschende Porträts, die dem landläufigen Bild vom Iran nicht entsprechen. "Afro-Iran" zeigt vielmehr Details, die die Jahrhunderte alte Geschichte einer Bevölkerungsgruppe dokumentieren, die in der Geschichtschreibung des Iran häufig vergessen wird und die doch die Kultur des Südens entscheidend geprägt hat.

  • Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community
    $18.95

    *Ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

    “Camille Sapara Barton is a gift to all of us. ... This is what emergent strategy looks like at the precipice.”
    —adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism

    An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community—practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing loss

    We live in a culture that suppresses our ability to truly feel our grief—deeply, safely, and on our own terms. But each person’s experience is as unique as the grief itself. Here, Camille Sapara Barton’s take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer readers disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss.

    Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes rituals, reflection prompts, and exercises that help us process and metabolize our grief—without bypassing or pushing aside what comes to the fore. Sapara Barton includes exercises that can be done both alone and in community, including:

    * Altar practices to honor and connect with ancestors known and unknown
    * Locating, holding, and dancing your grief
    * Sharing circles for processing communal loss
    * Water, fire, and nature-based rituals
    * Honoring the survival utility of numbness—and knowing when it’s time to release it
    * Peer support and integration
    * Herbal medicines and plant-based healing

    Sapara Barton honors each and every experience: The loss of displacement from homelands, from severed lineages and ancestral ways of knowing. The grief of colonization and theft. The deep heaviness that burrows into our bodies when society tells us our bodies are wrong. Practical tools and rituals help readers feel into their grief, honor what comes up, and move forward in healing.

    Written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC readers, Tending Grief is an invitation to reconnect to what we’ve lost, to find community in our grief, and to tend to our own suffering for our individual and collective wellbeing.

  • Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
    $17.00

    *Ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—Ebony
     
    From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built.

    Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.

    The power black athletes have today is as limited as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are invisible.

    Praise for Forty Million Dollar Slaves
     
    “A provocative, passionate, important, and disturbing book.”—The New York Times Book Review
     
    “Brilliant . . . a beautifully written, complex, and rich narrative.”—Washington Post Book World
     
    “A powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.”—Los Angeles Times

  • We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures)
    from $18.95

    From the author of the New York Times bestseller Begin Again, a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary people can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and assume responsibility for what it takes to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.

    “Like attending a jazz concert with all of one’s favorite musicians…James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and more…Glaude brilliantly takes us on an epic tour through their lives and work.”
    ―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race

    We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.

    Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, the book begins with Glaude’s unease with the Obama years. He felt then, and does even more urgently now, that the excitement around the Obama presidency constrained our politics as we turned to yet another prophet-like figure. He examines his personal history and the traditions that both shape and overwhelm his own voice.

    Glaude weaves anecdotes about his evolving views on Black politics together with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, encouraging us to reflect on the lessons of these great thinkers and address imaginatively the challenges of our day in voices uniquely our own.

    Narrated with passion and philosophical intensity, this book is a powerful reminder that if American democracy is to survive, we must step out from under the shadows of past giants to build a better society―one that derives its strength from the pew, not the pulpit.

  • Faces At The Bottom Of The Well

    Derrick Bell

    $17.99

    The groundbreaking, "eerily prophetic, almost haunting" work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow).

    In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example—including the classic story "The Space Traders"—to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American struggles for equality are doomed to fail, he writes, so long as the majority of whites do not see their own well-being threatened by the status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress. Only then will blacks, and those whites who join with them, be in a position to create viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of racism.

    Now with a new foreword by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, this classic book was a pioneering contribution to critical race theory scholarship, and it remains urgent and essential reading on the problem of racism in America.

  • The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America

    Shawn D. Rochester

    $19.99

    *ships in 7 -10 business days*

    .While Black Americans have long felt the devastating effects of anti-black discrimination, they have often had great difficulty articulating and substantiating both the existence and impact of that discrimination to an American public who is convinced that it no longer exists. Professionals in academia, the media, and the business community, along with people in the general public have struggled to explain the significant and persistent gaps (in wealth, employment, achievement and poverty) between Black and White communities in what they perceive to be a post racial America.In his new book The Black Tax: The Cost of being Black in America, Shawn Rochester shows how The Black Tax (which is the financial cost of conscious and unconscious anti-black discrimination), creates a massive financial burden on Black American households that dramatically reduces their ability to leave a substantial legacy for future generations. Mr. Rochester lays out an extraordinarily compelling case which documents the enormous financial cost of current and past anti-black discrimination on African American households. The Black Tax, provides the fact pattern, data and evidence to substantiate what African Americans have long experienced and tried to convey to an unbelieving American public.Backed by an exceptional amount of research, Mr. Rochester not only highlights the extraordinary cost of the discrimination that African Americans currently face, but also explores the massive cost of past discrimination to explain why after 400 years Black Americans own only about 2% of American wealth. He then establishes a framework that Black Americans and other concerned parties can use to eliminate this tax and help create the 6 million jobs and 1.4 million businesses that are missing from the Black community.The Black Tax takes the reader through a complete paradigm shift that causes the reader to evaluate all forms of spending and investment in terms of the number of jobs created or businesses developed within the Black community.The Black Tax is immensely informative, thoroughly engaging and makes one of the most compelling and effective cases to commercialize Black businesses since the founding of the Negro Business League in 1910.

  • Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture

    Todd Boyd

    $18.95

    In Young, Black, Rich, and Famous, Todd Boyd chronicles how basketball and hip hop have gone from being reviled by the American mainstream in the 1970s to being embraced and imitated globally today. For young black men, he argues, they represent a new version of the American dream, one embodying the hopes and desires of those excluded from the original version.

     

    Shedding light on both perception and reality, Boyd shows that the NBA has been at the forefront of recognizing and incorporating cultural shifts—from the initial image of 1970s basketball players as overpaid black drug addicts, to Michael Jordan’s spectacular rise as a universally admired icon, to the 1990s, when the hip hop aesthetic (for example, Allen Iverson’s cornrows, multiple tattoos, and defiant, in-your-face attitude) appeared on the basketball court. Hip hop lyrics, with their emphasis on “keepin’ it real” and marked by a colossal indifference to mainstream taste, became an equally powerful influence on young black men. These two influences have created a brand-new, brand-name generation that refuses to assimilate but is nonetheless an important part of mainstream American culture. This Bison Books edition includes a new introduction by the author.

  • Sacred Creativity: Inspiration to Reclaim the Joy of Your God-Given Gifts

    by Jena Holliday

    $25.00

    In this gorgeous and inspiring book, the beloved artist behind Spoonful of Faith shows you how to overcome your fears and harness your own creative gifts as an act of worship.

    With thoughtful stories, powerful reflections, hand lettering, and beautiful original artwork, Jena Holliday invites you to discover how you uniquely reflect the heart of a creative God. Using the lessons she’s learned along the way and creative prompts throughout, Jena encourages readers to overcome the pressure to perform, face the fears of failure and imposter syndrome, believe in the gifts that God has given, step forward in creativity, and delight in the fruit that comes from freely creating as an act of worship.

    Each section provides space to digest what you’ve read with thoughtful questions to respond to in words or drawings, an affirmation to encourage you, and a prayer to guide you. With suggested songs to listen to as well, Sacred Creativity is the ultimate invitation to offer your God-given gifts back to the Creator in joyful worship. To yield to the One who Created all, and allow your art, creativity, and life to be a love offering.

  • Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)?: Adventures in Boyhood

    by Jay Ellis

    $29.00

    *ships in 7 - 10 business days*

    Jay Ellis, star of HBO’s Insecure, tells the story of growing up with an imaginary best friend you will never forget—part Dwayne Wayne from A Different World, part Will Smith from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—in this hilarious, vulnerable memoir.

    What to do when you’re the perpetual new kid, only child, and military brat hustling school to school each year and everyone’s looking to you for answers? Make some shit up, of course! And a young Jay Ellis does just that, with help from his imaginary friend, Mikey.

    A testament to the importance of invention, trusting oneself, and making space for creativity, Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)? is a memoir of a kid who confided in his imaginary sidekick to navigate parallel pop culture universes (like watching Fresh Prince alongside John Hughes movies or listening to Ja Rule and Dave Matthews) to a lifetime of birthday disappointment (being a Christmas-season Capricorn will do that to you) and hoop dreams gone bad. Mikey also guides Ellis through tragedies, like losing his teenage cousin in a mistaken-target drive-by and the shame and fear of being pulled over by cops almost a dozen times the year he got his driver’s license.

    As his imaginary friend morphs into adult consciousness, Ellis charts an unforgettable story of looking inward to solve to some of life’s biggest (and smallest) challenges, told in the roast-you-with-love voice of your closest homey.

  • And So I Roar: A Novel

    by Abi Daré

    $28.00

    *Ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

    A stunning, heartwrenching new novel from Abi Daré, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice

    When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother—terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria—and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades.

    Back home in Lagos a few days later, Adunni, a plucky fourteen-year-old runaway, is lying awake in Tia’s guest room. Having escaped from her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she’s finally found refuge with Tia, who has helped her enroll in school. It’s always been Adunni’s dream to get an education, and she’s bursting with excitement. 
     
    Suddenly, there’s a horrible knocking at the front gate. . . .

    It’s only the beginning of a harrowing ordeal that will see Tia forced to make a terrible choice between protecting Adunni or finally learning the truth behind the secret her mother has hidden from her. And Adunni will learn that her “louding voice,” as she calls it, is more important than ever, as she must advocate to save not only herself but all the young women of her home village, Ikati. 
     
    If she succeeds, she may transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve—and shout their stories to the world.

  • It's Elementary

    by Elise Bryant

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    A fast-paced, completely delightful new mystery about what happens when parents get a little too involved in their kids' schools, from NAACP Image Award nominee Elise Bryant.

    Mavis Miller is not a PTA mom. She has enough on her plate with her feisty seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, an exhausting job at a nonprofit, and the complexities of a multigenerational household. So no one is more surprised than Mavis when she caves to Trisha Holbrook, the long-reigning, slightly terrifying PTA president, and finds herself in charge of the school’s brand-new DEI committee.

    As one of the few Black parents at this California elementary school, Mavis tries to convince herself this is an opportunity for real change. But things go off the rails at the very first meeting, when the new principal's plans leave Trisha absolutely furious. Later that night, when Mavis spies Trisha in yellow rubber gloves and booties, lugging cleaning supplies and giant black trash bags to her waiting minivan, it’s only natural that her mind jumps to somewhere it surely wouldn’t in the light of day.

    Except Principal Smith fails to show up for work the next morning, and has been MIA since the meeting. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Mavis, along with the school psychologist with the great forearms (look, it’s worth noting), launches an investigation that will challenge her views on parenting, friendship, and elementary school politics.

    Brilliantly written, It's Elementary is a quick-witted, escapist romp that perfectly captures just how far parents will go to give their kids the very best, all wrapped in a mystery that will leave you guessing to the very end.

  • Someone Like Us: A Novel

    by Dinaw Mengestu

    $28.00

    *Ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

    The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.

    After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.

    With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.

  • The Unsettled: A Novel

    by Ayana Mathis

    $18.00

    Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’s searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Bonaparte, Alabama – once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark – a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out – his future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there. 
     
    In Mathis’s electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?

  • Blessings: A Novel

    by Chukwuebuka Ibeh

    $17.00

    Moonlight meets Purple Hibiscus in this searing debut of self-acceptance, sexual awakening, and first love set in a Nigeria on the verge of criminalizing same-sex relationships

    Obiefuna has always been the black sheep of his family—sensitive where his father, Anozie, is pragmatic, a dancer where his brother, Ekene, is a natural athlete. But when Obiefuna’s father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and another boy, his deepest fears are confirmed, and Obiefuna is banished to boarding school.

    As he navigates his new school’s strict hierarchy and unpredictable violence, Obiefuna both finds and hides who he truly is. Back home, his mother, Uzoamaka, must contend with the absence of her beloved son, her husband’s cryptic reasons for sending him away, and the hard truths that they’ve all been hiding from. As Nigeria teeters on the brink of criminalizing same-sex relationships, Obiefuna’s identity becomes more dangerous than ever before, and the life he wants drifts further out of reach.

    Set in post-military Nigeria and culminating in the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2013, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story that asks how to live freely in a country that forbids one’s truest self, and what it takes for love to flourish despite it all.

  • Innocent Intent

    by K.C. Mills

    $17.95

    When a wife becomes the prime suspect in her husband’s murder, this criminal psychologist must forget everything she thought she knew in order to clear her name in this debut psychological thriller, perfect for fans of Shanora Williams’ The Wife Before.

    Cassidy Evans is the blueprint. As a Criminal Psychologist, Cassidy is a savant. She spent years solving groundbreaking cases by shifting through the minds and behaviors of those driven by the darkness that controls them. After years of dedicated field work, Cassidy decides to retire and share her expertise of killers’ mentalities as a novelist.

    As a published author, she’s now happily married and spends most of her time traveling the world and sharing with others how to understand the twisted minds that drive bad behaviors. Unfortunately, with all of the knowledge that Cassidy is armed with, she somehow overlooks the lies of the person closest to her. When she tags along to a crime scene with and old colleague, Cassidy is shocked to discover that the victim is her husband. If that’s not enough to send her world spiraling, she also finds out that the identity of the murdered victim, doesn’t match the name on their marriage license.

    Things quickly escalate when Cassidy becomes the main suspect. Not knowing the man she is married to is the least of Cassidy’s problems. Everyone believes she is a murderer, and none more than the lead detective on the case¾Nathanial Davis. He is determined to find the truth while proving to the world that Cassidy isn’t who she claims to be. In doing so, he decides to keep Cassidy close while digging through her past to uncover all of her untold truths.

    While she’s hiding secrets that could totally destroy the world she spent years building, Cassidy learns that things are never what they seem. With such an intricate familiarity of seeing through lies, how is it that Cassidy is happily married to a man who she loves and adores, but doesn’t truly know? Suddenly, losing her career is far less important than maintaining her freedom. In the end, she may lose both.

  • Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership

    by Brea Baker

    $30.00

    Why is less than 1% of rural land in the U.S. owned by Black people? An acclaimed writer and activist explores the impact of land theft and violent displacement on racial wealth gaps, arguing that justice stems from the literal roots of the earth.

    “With heartfelt prose and unyielding honesty, Baker explores the depths of her roots and invites readers to reflect on our own.”—Donovan X. Ramsey, author of the National Book Award for Nonfiction semi-finalist When Crack Was King

    To understand the contemporary racial wealth gap, we must first unpack the historic attacks on Indigenous and Black land ownership. From the moment that colonizers set foot on Virginian soil, a centuries-long war was waged, resulting in an existential dilemma: Who owns what on stolen land? Who owns what with stolen labor? To answer these questions, we must confront one of this nation’s first sins: stealing, hoarding, and commodifying the land.

    Research suggests that between 1910 and 1997, Black Americans lost about 90% of their farmland. Land theft widened the racial wealth gap, privatized natural resources, and created a permanent barrier to access that should be a birthright for Black and Indigenous communities. Rooted traces the experiences of Brea Baker’s family history of devastating land loss in Kentucky and North Carolina, identifying such violence as the root of persistent inequality in this country. Ultimately, her grandparents’ commitment to Black land ownership resulted in the Bakers Acres—a haven for the family where they are sustained by the land, surrounded by love, and wholly free.

    A testament to the Black farmers who dreamed of feeding, housing, and tending to their communities, Rooted bears witness to their commitment to freedom and reciprocal care for the land. By returning equity to a dispossessed people, we can heal both the land and our nation’s soul.

  • Little Rot: A Novel

    by Akwaeke Emezi

    Sold out

    One weekend.


    The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city.


    A party that goes awry.


    A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed.

    Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.

  • Blood at the Root

    by LaDarrion Williams

    from $13.99

    A teenager on the run from his past finds the family he never knew existed and the community he never knew he needed at an HBCU for the young, Black, and magical. Enroll in this fresh fantasy debut unlike anything you've seen before.

    Ten years ago, Malik's life changed forever the night his mother mysteriously vanished and he discovered he had uncontrollable powers. Since then, he has kept his abilities hidden, looking out for himself and his younger foster brother, Taye. Now, at 17, Malik is finally ready to start a new life for both of them, far from the trauma of his past. However, a daring act to rescue Taye reveals an unexpected connection with his long-lost grandmother: a legendary conjurer with ties to a hidden magical university that Malik’s mother attended.

    At Caiman University, Malik’s eyes are opened to a future he never could have envisioned for himself— one that includes the reappearance of his first love, Alexis. His search for answers about his heritage, his powers, and what really happened to his mother exposes the cracks in their magical community as it faces a reawakened evil dating back to the Haitian Revolution. Together with Alexis, Malik discovers a lot beneath the surface at Caiman: feuding covens and magical politics, forbidden knowledge and buried mysteries.

    In a wholly unique saga of family, history and community, Malik must embrace his legacy to save what's left of his old family as well as his new one. Exploring the roots and secrets that connect us in an unforgettable contemporary setting, this heart-pounding fantasy series opener is a rich tapestry of atmosphere, intrigue, and emotion.

  • Pretty: A Memoir

    by KB Brookins

    Sold out

    By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

    Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.

    “I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?”

    Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other”

  • Kindred

    by Octavia Butler, Forward by Tomi Adeyemi

    $14.99

    “As you turn the pages of this novel and get lost in Dana’s story, allow yourself to relive the horrors of slavery....Allow yourself to know the pain of our nation’s past.”—Tomi Adeyemi, New York Times bestseller and Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, from the new foreword

    This brand new package for young adults includes a redesigned interior for better readability, specially commissioned cover art by Carlos Fama, metallic stock cover, and spot gloss on cover elements

    “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

    Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

    Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).

    “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” 
    —N. K. Jemisin

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