A self-care guidebook full of activities for Black men everywhere pursuing joy, creating connections, confronting racism, and working through intergenerational trauma.

Black men desperately need care and restoration. But what does that restoration look like when you’re a Black man in today’s world? How do you take care of your mental health when men who look like you die at the hands of police? How do you find peace and refuge when you’re not sure how to keep up with your partner? Or navigate a challenging workplace? While scrolling through social media feeds, you may feel like you don’t have access to wellness like women do. But Black men need a space for self-care too.

In Self-Care for Black Men, you will find practical answers to your questions. This book contains self-care strategies that address some of the most common issues Black men face, such as dealing with racism, navigating prejudice in the workplace, managing romantic relationships, and working through intergenerational trauma.

This is your guide to wellness and self-discovery written specifically for Black men. There will opportunities to learn new skills to manage your mental health, as well as do more deep reflection on your own terms. It’s time to take your health firmly within your own hands and Self-Care for Black Men will help you do that.

Between micro- and macro-aggressions at school, at work, and everywhere in between, it’s tough to prioritize physical and mental wellness as a Black woman, especially with a constant news cycle highlighting Black trauma. Now, with The Self-Care for Black Women you’ll find more than 150 exercises that will help you radically choose to put yourself first. Whether you need a quick pick-me-up in the middle of the day, you’re working through feelings of burnout, or you need to process a microaggression, this book has everything you need to feel more at peace.

You’ll find prompts like:
-Map out your feelings about a microaggression
-Make a list of your safe spaces
-Detail out an entire day dedicated to your self-care
-And more!

It’s time to put yourself first and prioritize your self-care once and for all—and this book is here to help you do just that.

Prioritize your mental, physical, and spiritual wellness with this empowering collection of 50 self-care activities curated specifically for Black women to promote self-love.

It’s time for Black women to put themselves first. In a world that systemically devalues both Black people and women, existing at the intersection of these two identities can be a constant struggle. Oludara Adeeyo’s Self-Care for Black Women Deck is here to help you prioritize you—and your mental, physical, and spiritual wellness. These 50 activity cards allow you to kickstart and maintain your self-care journey. You’ll find the self-confidence to celebrate what it means to be a Black woman, so you can live your most authentic life.

*ships in 7-10 business days*

An engaging, compassionate, encouraging, and empowering workbook that embraces the essence of today's Black woman and promotes self-love through prompts, exercises, and affirmation that offer guidance on nurturing her true self.

Show yourself a little TLC with self-love exercises for Black women

As a Black woman, the many roles you fill can leave little room to take care of yourself. Prioritize your own joy, healing, and growth with this self-care workbook for Black women, filled with empowering exercises and affirmations that help you nurture your authentic self and thrive.

• Embrace self-love—Lay the foundation for self-love as you reflect on your identity, explore experiences many modern Black women share, and learn what loving yourself truly means.
• Put it into practice—Discover writing prompts, affirmations, and other simple exercises that help you find inner peace and self-confidence.
• Explore key themes—Learn to love where you're at, practice self-compassion, let go of self-doubt, foster your self-worth, and build a community that empowers you.

Give yourself the gift of self-compassion with this uplifting choice in self-care books for Black women.

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction

Named one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

Limited Space Available

In celebration of The Obama Portraits Tour exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts,  Houston, this spring, the Living Witness Workshop for Senior Citizens seeks to highlight our own living icons in the Third Ward community. Over the course of three gatherings, participants will engage in reflective creative writing exercises focused on preserving personal narratives and memories of the people, places, and events that have developed this rich and historical Houston neighborhood over time. Anyone who considers themselves a senior citizen is invited to take part in this free workshop. No prior creative writing experience is necessary, just a passion to share and help preserve great stories.

This workshop series is sponsored by Kindred Stories, Museum of Fine Arts, Emancipation Park Conservancy, and Inprint.

Class Dates and Times:  

Session 1: April 26, 5:30 - 7:00 Pm at Emancipation Park

Session 2: May 3, 5:30 - 7:00 PM at Emancipation Park

Rehearsal: May 10, 5:30-7:00 PM at Project Row Houses

Visit and Present: May 14, 10:00 AM at The Museum of Fine Arts

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

A self-paced journal offering guidance to those seeking reconnection with their pleasure, featuring 150+ prompts to help readers define sensuality for themselves.

Pleasure transcends sexuality; Sensual Self is here to help you embrace it. This guided journal is a self-written manual for your unique sensuality. With interactive, thought-provoking questions, you’ll be guided to map and explore the inner landscape of your body—the textures, shapes, tempos, and temperatures that bring you bliss.

The bookclub meeting will take place on September 27, 2023 at 7:30PM in the Kindred Stories Reading Garden. Be sure to show up with the book read (or partially read) but you are always welcome to just come and take up space. 

Please support the space and opportunities we create by purchasing the book from our store. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Thursday, September 26 @ 7PM 

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend and RSVP WITH BOOK to purchase your book and support Adult Fiction Book Club 

ABOUT MARTYR

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.

 BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, September 17 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend the book club meeting and RSVP WITH BOOK to purchase your book and support Non Fiction Book Club 

ABOUT WHEN CRACK WAS KING

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, September 10 @ 7PM 

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend and RSVP WITH BOOK to purchase your book and support Romance Book Club 

ABOUT ONLY FOR THE WEEK

You are cordially invited to the wedding of Amerie Cross and Arnold Hightower.

And now a toast from the maid of honor, Janelle Cross!

Hi everyone, thank you for being here.

Some of you may know me as the sister of the bride.

Some of you may know me as the ex-girlfriend of the groom.

But I'm willing to bet none of you know me as the woman secretly sleeping with the best man.

I am.

I know, I'm just as surprised as you.

It was only supposed to be for the week; but every kiss, adventure, and stolen moment with Rome Martin feels like it could last forever.

Oh well. What happens in Tulum stays in Tulum.

Right?

SCI-FI/FANTASY BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Wednesday, September 18 @ 6:30 PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend and RSVP WITH BOOK to purchase your book and support the Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Club 

ABOUT THE DEAD CAT TAIL ASSASSINS

We're meeting to discuss Augustown by Kei Miller!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Thursday, September 25 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend. Support Fiction Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

ABOUT AUGUSTOWN

In the wake of Marlon James's Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Augustown-set in the backlands of Jamaica-is a magical and haunting novel of one woman's struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth. Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do. For the story of Kaia leads back to another momentous day in Jamaican history, the birth of the Rastafari and the desire for a better life.

We're meeting to discuss History Lessons by Zoe B. Wallbrook!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, September 24 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Romance Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

ABOUT HISTORY LESSONS

A college history professor must solve her superstar colleague's murder before she becomes the next target in this funny, romantic debut mystery, perfect for readers of Janet Evanovich, Kellye Garrett, and Ali Hazelwood.

As a newly minted junior professor, Daphne Ouverture spends her days giving lectures on French colonialism, working on her next academic book, and going on atrocious dates. Her small world suits her just fine. Until Sam Taylor dies.

The rising star of Harrison University’s anthropology department was never one of Daphne’s favorites, despite his popularity. But that doesn’t prevent Sam’s killer from believing Daphne has something that belonged to Sam—something the killer will stop at nothing to get.

Between grading papers and navigating her disastrous love life, Daphne embarks on her own investigation to find out what connects her to Sam’s murder. With the help of an alluring former-detective-turned-bookseller, she unravels a deadly cover-up on campus.

This well-crafted, voice-driven mystery introduces an unforgettable crime fiction heroine.

We're meeting to discuss You've Got a Place Here, Too edited by Ebony LaDelle!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, September 9 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Romance Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

ABOUT You've Got a Place Here, Too: An Anthology of Black Love Stories Set at HBCUs

A heartwarming and unforgettable collection of love stories set at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, exploring hope, endurance, and what it means to leave a legacy, from some of today’s most prominent Black writers and edited by the acclaimed author of Love Radio

Love can be messy, painful, and heartbreaking, but it can also be revolutionary, profound, and hopeful. For Celine, a forbidden crush on a professor evolves into a second chance at romance years later. Myra’s focus on a coveted audition for the Fisk Jubilee Singers is challenged by the handsome music major determined to help her. Kiese investigates the darker side to academia, love, and identity. Like most blessings, love emerges in the most unexpected places—in a training cockpit for new pilots, during a Mardi Gras celebration, or while gathering signatures to start the first-ever LGBTQ+ student organization officially recognized at an HBCU.

These are just a few of the heart-searing, tender, and transporting love stories collected in You’ve Got a Place Here, Too—a true celebration of Black love and the profound impact of HBCUs on the community.

Featuring stories by Elizabeth Acevedo, Jasmine Bell, Carla Bruce, Aaron Foley, Kai Harris, Ebony LaDelle, Kiese Laymon, Christine Platt, Farrah Rochon, Kennedy Ryan, Dawnie Walton, and Nicola Yoon.

Join us for our monthly book club. Our September pick is Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson 

Book club will happen Thursday, September 22 at 7:00 PM in the Kindred Stories Reading Garden. RSVP required. See ya'll there!

About the Book

Join us for our monthly book club. Our August pick is Zyla and Kia by Kristina Forest.

Book club will happen Wednesday, September 25 at 7:00 PM in the Kindred Stories Reading Garden. RSVP required. See ya'll there!

About the Book

A fresh love story about the will they, won't they—and why can't they—of first love. 

While on a school trip to the Poconos Mountains (in the middle of a storm) high school seniors, Zyla Matthews and Kai Johnson, run away together leaving their friends and family confused. As far as everyone knows, Zyla and Kai have been broken up for months. And honestly? Their break up hadn't surprised anyone. Zyla and Kai met while working together at an amusement park the previous summer, and they couldn't have been more different.
 
Zyla was a cynic about love. She'd witnessed the dissolution of her parents' marriage early in life, and it left an indelible impression. Her only aim was graduating and going to fashion school abroad. Until she met Kai.
 
Kai was a serial dater and a hopeless romantic. He'd put a temporary pause on his dating life before senior year to focus on school and getting into his dream HBCU. Until he met Zyla.
 
Alternating between the past and present, we see the love story unfold from Zyla's and Kai's perspectives: how they first became the unlikeliest of friends over the summer, how they fell in love during the school year, and why they ultimately broke up... Or did they?
 
Romantic, heart-stirring, and a little mysterious, Zyla & Kai will keep readers guessing until the last chapter. 

The second installment in the Healing Verses series from poet r.h. Sin introduces Serenity’s Song, a profound collection of restorative poetry woven together to address the intricate journey of healing from trauma.

Across the volumes of The Healing Verses, r.h. Sin delves deep into the heart of human suffering, offering solace, understanding, and pathways to recovery through the power of words. Each book is a beacon of hope, designed to guide readers through the darkness of their experiences and toward the light of resilience and self-renewal. The carefully selected writings within these pages explore themes of loss, grief, recovery, and the rediscovery of strength within oneself, making the series a compassionate companion for anyone navigating the challenging process of healing.
 
In Serenity’s Song, the second installment of the series, Sin explores the deep and profound desire for harmony that dwells within our collective and individual souls. Throughout his excavation of these feelings, he hopes readers of all backgrounds and lived experiences can find comfort in the knowledge that the peace we seek is already planted within us, we just need the tools to find it. May this series be the shovel on your journey of discovery.

Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents best-selling YA author Roseanne A. Brown's middle grade debut about a pre-teen vampire slayer with a strong helping of Ghanaian folklore.

For most kids, catching fireflies is a fun summer activity. For twelve-year-old Serwa Boateng, it's a matter of life and death.

That's because Serwa knows that some fireflies are really adze, shapeshifting vampires from the forests of Southeastern Ghana. Adze prey on the blood of innocents, possessing their minds and turning them into hulking monsters, and for generations, slayers like Serwa and her parents have protected an unknowing public from their threats.

Serwa is the best adze slayer her age, and she knew how to use a crossbow before she could even ride a bike. But when an obayifo (witch) destroys her childhood home while searching for a drum, do Serwa's parents take her with them on their quest to defeat her? No. Instead, they dump Serwa with her hippie aunt and cryptic-obsessed cousin in the middle of Nowheresville, Maryland "for her own safety." Now, instead of crossbows and battle armor, she's dealing with mean girls and algebra, and for the first time in her life she doesn't have to carry a staff everywhere she goes, which is . . . kind of nice, actually.

Just as Serwa starts to get the hang of this whole normal girl who doesn't punch vampires every day thing, an adze infiltrates her school. It's up to her to whip some of her classmates into monster-fighting shape before all of them become firefly food. And when she uncovers a secret that upends everything she thought she knew about her family's role in the slayer vs. adze war, Serwa will have to decide which side of herself--normal girl or slayer--is the right one.

After all, seventh grade is hard enough without adding vampires to the mix.

Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York.

When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry-or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since.

Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered. . .

With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual.

Severed: How Women Rise After Layoffs, Reorgs, and the End of a Career They Loved is an empowering, heartfelt guide for high-achieving women facing career disruption. Whether you're newly laid off, burned out, or choosing to start over, this book is your roadmap from loss to liberation.

Written by Shabaura Perryman, MPH, a public health professional, HIV advocate, and former corporate leader who's survived multiple layoffs, this book blends personal narrative, affirmations, strategy, and clarity. With honesty and heart, Severed walks women through the emotional aftermath of job loss and into the power of reinvention.

This book is for:

* Women entering or returning to Corporate America with eyes wide open
* Women ready to turn experience into entrepreneurship
* Women of color who are done surviving and ready to thrive
* Anyone healing from the identity crisis that comes with a sudden career loss

Readers will learn how to:

✔ Heal from job loss without losing themselves

✔ Rebuild their confidence, calling, and clarity

✔ Launch a new business or purpose-filled career path

✔ Rise in power, especially as a woman of color, in a shifting economy

Severed reminds readers: You are not starting over. You are starting from experience.

This fresh, voice-driven feminist anthology reimagines Helen Gurley Brown’s seminal work Sex and the Single Girl in time for its 60th anniversary, featuring twenty-four essays from acclaimed and bestselling authors, including Kristen Arnett, Morgan Parker, Evette Dionne, and Melissa Febos.

In May 1962, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. The future Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief’s book promoted the message that a woman’s needs, ambition, and success during her single years could actually take precedence over the search for a husband.  

While much of Brown’s advice is outdated and even offensive by today’s standards, her central message remains relevant. In this exceptional anthology, Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson bring together insights from many of today’s leading feminist thinkers and writers to pay homage to Brown’s original work and reinterpret it for a new generation. These contributors provide a much-needed reckoning while addressing today’s central issues, from contraception and abortion (topics the publisher banned from the original) to queer and trans womanhood, racial double standards, dating with disabilities, sexual consent, singlehood by choice, single parenting, and more. 

Written for today’s women, this revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit just as it celebrates and validates women’s sexual lives and individual eras of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied.

Sex is for sale in more ways than ever. It can be bought and sold online, in sex clubs, on the street, and around the world. As with many industries, discrimination, exploitation, and inequality persist in sex work. Yet it also offers autonomy, job satisfaction, and even pleasurable experiences for those involved. Sex Work Today explores these contradictions, offering an intimate look at the benefits and challenges of sex work across geographic contexts.

Featuring thirty-one original essays by sex workers, advocates, researchers, and activists, Sex Work Today is the first compilation of research on new forms of digital sex such as camming, sugar dating, and AI sex dolls. Providing a lens to understand contemporary labor dynamics and the nature of sex work itself, this collection captures formerly ignored aspects of the sex industry including: fatphobia and disability; transmasculine and nonbinary sex workers; racialized emotional labor in the digital sex industry; high job satisfaction among professional dominatrixes; and sex worker scholars.

With federal policies ostensibly aimed at combating sex trafficking–affecting all sex workers–understanding this industry is more vital than ever. Decentering Western, white, cisgender voices, Sex Work Today underscores the global repercussions of these misaligned policies, which make sex work more challenging and less safe, and provides valuable insights for those seeking to shape policies, challenge prejudices, and foster a safer and more equitable world for all.

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem—“the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.” Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his formation as a writer as well as the genesis of Invisible Man.

On every page, Ellison reveals his idiosyncratic and often contrarian brilliance, his insistence on refuting both black and white stereotypes of what an African American writer should say or be. The result is a book that continues to instruct, delight, and occasionally outrage readers.

"Alright, here's the game plan. I go out, stop some petty criminals, take out a gang or two, find the person or people that are kidnapping people, take out all those gross shadow things, and maybe, just maybe, get the world to like me. Yeah. Yeah that sounds like a good plan!"

Really, I wish I had lesser expectations of myself, but with this city's stupid high crime rate, a string of missing people, and these strange black creatures trying to tear down anything in their path? I feel like I have more than my work cut out for myself. However, I can't just sit down and do nothing with these powers I gained. This place needs a hero and I'm not gonna stop protecting this place till I save everyone. I just hope I can get all of this done before my mother and father ground me into the dirt.

The first complete and balanced history of the Black Panther Party--powerful and provocative

"Until The Shadow of the Panther there have been no serious book-length attempts to examine the Panthers' history and to evaluate their significance. . . . A Notable Book of the Year."--New York Times Book Review (front page)

"A keenly observed, often brilliant, Panther-busting book. . . . Pearson nevertheless portrays the Panthers' rise as an understandable reaction against . . . white chauvinism."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This book will awaken profound misgivings--about gun-barrel rhetoric, about armed rebellion, about the ambiguities of justice."--The New Yorker

"A bracing experience . . . Pearson has been able to present enough hard evidence to draw a chilling portrait of Murder Incorporated in revolutionary dress."--New York Newsday

"Pearson . . . set out to write a very different book about his boyhood hero [Huey Newton] but didn't blink at the truth . . . honest and compelling judgment."--Detroit News

Deluxe, expanded edition of an out-of-print early novel from Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor, with a brand-new introduction from the author

Niger, West Africa, 2074

It is an era of tainted technology and mysterious mysticism. A great change has happened all over the planet, and the laws of physics aren’t what they used to be.

Within all this, I introduce you to Ejii Ugabe, a child of the worst type of politician. Back when she was nine years old, she was there as her father met his end. Don’t waste your tears on him: this girl’s father would throw anyone under a bus to gain power. He was a cruel, cruel man, but even so, Ejii did not rejoice at his departure from the world. Children are still learning that some people don’t deserve their love.  

Now 15 years old and manifesting the abilities given to her by the strange Earth, Ejii decides to go after the killer of her father. Is it for revenge or something else? You will have to find out by reading this book.

I am the Desert Magician, and this is a novel I have conjured for you, so I’m certainly not going to just tell you here.