After battling the impossible, Zélie and Amari have finally succeeded in bringing magic back to the land of Orïsha. But the ritual was more powerful than they could’ve imagined, reigniting the powers of not only the maji, but of nobles with magic ancestry, too.

Now, Zélie struggles to unite the maji in an Orïsha where the enemy is just as powerful as they are. But when the monarchy and military unite to keep control of Orïsha, Zélie must fight to secure Amari's right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy's wrath.

With civil war looming on the horizon, Zélie finds herself at a breaking point: She must discover a way to bring the kingdom together or watch as Orïsha tears itself apart.

Children of Virtue and Vengeance is the stunning sequel to Tomi Adeyemi's New York Times-bestselling debut Children of Blood and Bone, the first book in her Legacy of Orïsha trilogy.

In the vein of The Pisces and The Vegetarian, Chlorine is a debut novel that blurs the line between a literary coming-of-age narrative and a dark unsettling horror tale, told from an adult perspective on the trials and tribulations of growing up in a society that puts pressure on young women and their bodies… a powerful, relevant novel of immigration, sapphic longing, and fierce, defiant becoming.

Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach is her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life.

But these are human concerns. These are the concerns of those confined to land, those with legs. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Creatures that called sailors to their doom. That dragged them down and drowned them. That feasted on their flesh. The creature that she’s always longed to become: the mermaid.

Ren aches to be in the water. She dreams of the scent of chlorine, the feel of it on her skin. And she will do anything she can to make a life for herself where she can be free. No matter the pain. No matter what anyone else thinks. No matter how much blood she has to spill.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides

As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.

Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

An introduction to traditional and modern Nigerian home cooking featuring 100 delicious recipes by food explorer, culinary anthropologist, and Nigerian native of @kitchenbutterfly fame, Ozoz Sokoh.
 
In Nigeria, the word “chop” is all about food and feasting and “chop chop” a nickname given to someone who loves to eat. And it's no surprise Nigeria has an entire vocabulary dedicated to eating—with more than 50 nationally recognized languages and over 250 ethnicities, Nigeria's food is as rich and diverse as its people. Despite the foodway's incredibly flavorful complexity, ingredients and recipes from all six regions have not been gathered and showcased in a highly photographic cookbook. 

In Chop Chop, author, culinary anthropologist, and Nigerian native Ozoz Sokoh celebrates classic and traditional Nigerian cuisine to underscore the ingredients, flavors, and textures that make it not only beloved, but delicious and easy for the home cook. Featuring:
* A COLLECTION OF CLASSIC AND MODERN NIGERIAN RECIPES: Think smoky spicy beef suya skewers, egusi soup with greens, restorative pepper soup, jollof rice studded with tomatoes, soft puff puff dough bites, and sweet-tart hibiscus drinks, and more from across the country.
* LEXICON OF NIGERIAN CUISINE: Learn how to shop and cook like a Nigerian as well as the ingredients integral to Nigerian cuisine and how they come together in the form of hearty soups and stews, steamed puddings, salads, rice dishes, fritters, and more.
* ILLUMINATING CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL EXPLORATIONS: With headnotes and sidebars that give important cultural and historical context, including how Nigerian cuisine travelled the globe leaving its mark, you will learn the roots behind each dish.
* STUNNING PHOTOGRAPHY: With gorgeous photos from Nigeria’s landscapes, food markets, and people, as well as beautiful photography of ingredients and finished dishes, Chop Chop is a cookbook to behold.

Written through the lens of Ozoz's deep connection to the region, Chop Chop will bring Nigeria's food-loving spirit to home kitchens everywhere, so you can travel, by plate.

She’s a preacher’s daughter, a runaway bride and now the (not quite) qualified nanny for a sexy tattoo artist with a beautiful daughter—and a dirty mouth.

What’s a bad boy to do with a woman like her?

Everything…

Aaliyah Montgomery isn’t just ditching her wedding. She’s also fleeing her suffocating small town and her family’s expectations. She’s got plans—for college, for finding herself. But landing a job in Chicago that fits her schedule isn’t easy. Good thing Von Howard is desperate to find a live-in nanny. Bad thing that he’s a gritty, grumpy, gorgeous tattoo artist carrying as much baggage as he has ink.

Von’s new hire is inexperienced and a fire hazard in the kitchen. She’s also all thick curls, thicker curves, and a distracting mix of innocence and sensuality. After the upheaval of a divorce, he just needs a nanny, not a sneaky link. Meanwhile, Aaliyah is bonding with his seven-year-old and showing an unexpected flair for tattoo art. Who could resist?

Yet deep down, Aaliyah’s still running—from her feelings and her fear of losing herself to someone else’s expectations again. Even as their pasts return to haunt them, their undeniable heat says maybe it’s time to stand and fight for a love they didn’t see coming.

From showing up to glowing up, the characters in Afterglow Books are on the path to leading their best lives and finding sizzling romance along the way. Don’t miss any of these other fun titles…

Frenemy Fix-Up by Yahrah St. John

Out of Office by A.H. Cunningham

Manila Takes Manhattan by Carla de Guzman

Fake Flame by Adele Buck

Reignite your purpose in Christ, restore your dignity, heal your pain, transform your rest, and learn how to flourish in today’s secular world as a Black Christian woman—from Bible teacher, speaker, and psychotherapist Dr. Sarita Lyons.

Black women are the hidden figures in the church. Despite at times being rendered invisible, uninvited, and unprotected in a racist and sexist world, they are valued image-bearers and influential instruments in God’s redemptive plan.

Church Girl invites you, as a Black woman, on a journey from the garden to the present day. Your unique story as a Black woman lies within the grand narrative of Scripture, and the message of the gospel is the light, lens, and love you need to help you see and live as God intends.

Church Girl helps answer some of your most internal pressing questions:

• How do I understand my identity in light of Scripture?
• How should I think about my purpose?
• How can I thrive despite the opposition from racism and sexism?
• How are Black women hurt in the church and how can I heal?
• Why am I always exhausted from working and where can I find real peace and rest?
• How can I flourish in a secular world and live out my faith with conviction and integrity?

With compassion and wisdom, Dr. Sarita Lyons invites Black women to tackle the unique issues they face in the church with prophetic boldness, priestly compassion, a church leader’s wisdom, a counselor's insight, and a sister's relatability and love.

*ships in 7 - 10 business days*

From award-winning author-illustrator duo Karina N. Gonzálezand Krystal Quiles comes Churro Stand, a heartwarming picture book celebrating love, community, and the POP, SIZZLE, and CRUNCH of a perfect churro—inspired by the author’s relationship with her own mother.
 
Everybody loves churros!
 
On a hot summer’s day, Lucía and her brother accompany their mother to sell delicious, sugary churros on the bustling streets of New York City. But when a thunderstorm rolls in, and the customers are chased away, Lucía’s mother must improvise with a little bit of magic and lots of amor.

"Cinnamon Sunrise"Black Tea Blend

Delight in the essence of a vibrant morning with our "Cinnamon Sunrise" black tea blend. Carefully crafted, it weaves the enchanting notes of blood orange and invigorating cinnamon into a base of Ceylon black tea, renowned for its bold character. The bright, zesty embrace of orange peel dances alongside the comforting spice of clove and the cozy sweetness of apple and allspice, creating a harmonious medley that is both revitalizing and soothing. As you sip, the symphony of blood orange and cinnamon takes center stage, while gentle hints of apple add a delightful undertone, making every cup a warm, flavorful awakening reminiscent of a sun-kissed morning. Allow "Cinnamon Sunrise" to grace your senses and infuse your day with the awakening spirit of a new dawn.

Think outside the box and use a Circle Sticky Note. 

• Circles measure 2.75 inches in diameter
  
• 25 sheets
• Self-adhesive

By Cloth & Paper 

*ships in 7-10 business days

Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender, showing that as a category, cisgender cannot capture how people depart from gender alignment and its coding as white.

In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.

Fifteen contemporary artists engage with the notion of space within Black culture

Following the eponymous exhibition at Gray Gallery, this publication gathers a selection of multimedia works by 15 artists exploring historical and emergent instances of Black space, including contributions by Dawoud Bey, McArthur Binion, Nick Cave, Coco Fusco, Theaster Gates and Rashid Johnson.

*ships in 7-10 business days*

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

A lyrical picture book from the award-winning author of Heavy, about three Black boys who form a deep connection during a transformative summer trip down South to visit family.

On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable.

Three Black boys spend one special summer exploring the Mississippi woods and woulds and coulds of sharing the kind of freeing friendship that is love.

Watched over and given space to discover by Grandmama and Mama Lara, New York, Country, and little C find camaraderie in their contrasts and all the unspoken things between them while playing games of marco polo in the thick garden and sledding on cardboard by the underpass.

With text brimming with love by award-winning author Kiese Laymon and deeply evocative illustrations by Ashley Franklin, City Summer, Country Summer illuminates the tenuous and tender bonds of friendship Black boys forge with one another.

2022 Best Book Award, Oral History Association

Hundreds of stories of activists at the front lines of the intersecting African American and Mexican American liberation struggle

Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth-century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. Far from the gaze of the national media, African American and Mexican American activists combated the twin caste systems of Jim Crow and Juan Crow. These insurgents worked chiefly within their own racial groups, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at times, came together in solidarity. The movements sought more than integration and access: they demanded power and justice.

Civil Rights in Black and Brown draws on more than 500 oral history interviews newly collected across Texas, from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and everywhere in between. The testimonies speak in detail to the structure of racism in small towns and huge metropolises—both the everyday grind of segregation and the haunting acts of racial violence that upheld Texas’s state-sanctioned systems of white supremacy. Through their memories of resistance and revolution, the activists reveal previously undocumented struggles for equity, as well as the links Black and Chicanx organizers forged in their efforts to achieve self-determination.

“In this taut psychological thriller, one woman’s desperate quest for answers reveals just how far she’s willing to go for love—or revenge. I devoured this book . . . utterly engrossing!”—Liv Constantine, New York Times bestselling author of The Next Mrs. Parrish

She’s been ghosted. But she won’t be forgotten.

Claire is excited to drop off a surprise workday lunch for her fiancé, Noah. It’s their anniversary, after all. But when the receptionist tells her that no one with Noah’s name works there, Claire thinks there must be a mistake.

Noah isn’t picking up her calls. Her texts go unanswered. It turns out Noah has a different life . . . one with a beautiful girlfriend, a beautiful house. Claire was never really in the picture.

Desperate to speak to Noah and convince him to return to their dream life, Claire plunges into a nightmarish journey of obsession that submerges her deeper into the murky waters of her own past—a past dominated by a manipulative mother who shattered her sense of self.

Will Claire break free from the ghosts that haunt her? Or will they become more costly than any of Noah’s lies?

*ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

A powerful novel in verse by award-winning and bestselling author Elizabeth Acevedo, about two sisters grieving the devastating loss of their father who learn about each other after his death and must grapple with what this bittersweet new bond means for them.

Camino Rios lives for the summers, when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this year, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people…

In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash.

Separated by distance—and Papi’s secrets—the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered.

And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other.

Eighth grader Drew Ellis is no stranger to the saying, “You have to work twice as hard to be just as good.” His grandmother has told him that his entire life. But lately he’s been thinking: Even if he works ten times as hard, he may never get the same opportunities that his privileged classmates at the prestigious Riverdale Academy Day School take for granted. Then, after a visit to his friend Liam’s house, Drew realizes that Liam is one of those privileged kids. He wants to pretend like everything is okay, but even his best friend, Jordan, can tell that something is up.

As the pressures build, and he starts to feel more isolated than ever, will Drew find a way to bridge the divide so he and his friends can truly accept each other? And more importantly, will he finally be able to accept himself?

Former NBA All-Star Caron Butler and acclaimed author Justin A. Reynolds deliver another superstar performance in this companion novel to Shot Clock about KO, a budding AAU basketball star as he attempts to find redemption on the court and reconnection with his incarcerated father.

Kofi “KO” Douglas knows how to handle pressure. After all, he is the newly announced #1 ranked AAU player in the country. On the court, his game is as good as it gets—even if his Wolves team lost to the Sabres in the national championship, KO always believes nobody can beat him one-on-one. That is, until his former best friend, Ripp, returns home, just in time for the biggest tournament of the summer, the McNabby. Ripp’s dad plays professional basketball overseas, and Ripp has been tearing up courts there—KO now has his toughest competition yet. 

As KO gears up for this latest challenge, there’s game-changing news at home. KO’s dad, who has been incarcerated for the last seven years, is getting out. It’s been KO and his mom for as long as he can remember, only now his dad is ready to reconnect. It’s another reunion KO isn’t sure he wants to happen, especially as Ripp keeps calling out KO to play him in the McNabby.

With the tournament on the horizon, KO decides to turn to Coach James and the Sabres for help. He may not love the idea of playing with Tony Washington and his former teammates again, but he needs them now more than ever. Can KO prove he’s still the best on the court as his family life turns upside down?

"Informative and full of big flavors, this is a delicious and accessible introduction to Caribbean food for novices; will be a welcome addition to library shelves." —Library Journal

Through 80+ recipes, Code Noir tells the interesting and complex story of Caribbean cuisines that are not only incredibly rich in flavor but also in history.

Code Noir is a cookbook steeped in history. Not just because of the title, which hits on a seventeenth-century decree in which King Louis XIV recorded how enslaved Africans in the French colonies were to be treated, but also because it deals with the food and the people that, through the gruesome course of history, came together in the Caribbean.

Inside, chef and culinary activist Lelani Lewis goes back to her Caribbean roots with classics like jerk chicken, salted cod fritters, pepperpot stew, and Guinness punch. She also shares new creations with typically Caribbean ingredients like cassava, corn, coconut, lime, plantain, and chilies: plantain with peanut and lime salsa, sweet potato gratin with ginger cream, and crème anglaise of creamed corn and caramelized guava.

We're celebrating the release of Black Crosswords! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Sunday, August 25 @ 10 AM

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

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your copy of Black Crosswords! 

ABOUT THE EVENT

For years, most of us have been doing crossword puzzles that didn't have much to do with Blackness. However, that will change with the release of Black Crosswords (forthcoming August 20, 2024). Together, we'll tackle some crosswords that has an emphasis on terms and clues from across the diaspora. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Frustrated by the dearth of Black people creating puzzles or appearing as clues, entrepreneur Juliana Pache created blackcrossword.com in early 2023. The site at once took off counting such regular players and fans as Academy Award winner Questlove, popular social activist Brittnay Packet Cunningham, and author and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib.

Now, to expand her platform, Pache is looking to bring her cultural crossword puzzles to book publishing. Like her site, the concept for the first BLACK CROSSWORD is a game that places emphasis on terms and clues from across the diaspora. By highlighting prominent cultural figures, movements, artistic achievements, and Black vernacular from across the globe, BLACK CROSSWORD on the page will serve as a simple yet impactful way for solvers to engage in the diaspora and celebrate Black culture.

In a crossword landscape that is predominantly white, BLACK CROSSWORD will provide puzzles to an underserved and passionate market. While the puzzles are meant to increase Black representation in crosswords, they also underscore the fact that this historically underserved market — Black solvers who would like puzzles that are culturally relevant to them—has the potential to become both a commercial hit and resonate with multiple generations of readers. BLACK CROSSWORD has the potential to become a series of books, including a general edition, a calendar edition, a pop culture edition across the diaspora, a Black History edition, and a trailblazer edition. While in a trade paperback format, BLACK CROSSWORD could have an elevated look/tone that would be a perfect gift or keepsake – the possibilities are endless.

Cold Thief Place speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems.

This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life—three times on three different continents—and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a greencard marriage in order to live a "normal life." One of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority, and free from old-world traditions.

This book speaks to dark side of this myth: of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them: their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point-of-view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American—that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.

This book highlights the history of the Third Ward neighborhood and Project Row Houses’ role in its development over the past 25 years. It addresses the idea of social art practice from the perspective of Project Row Houses’ 5 pillars: art and creativity, education, social safety net, good and relevant architecture, and economic sustainability. The book will also include a timeline of 25 important moments in PRH’s history, which include but aren’t limited to selected documentation of the 300+ artists who have participated in Artist Rounds since 1994 and 60+ mothers who have participated in the Young Mothers Residential Program since 1996; and selected photographs of community individuals and events throughout PRH's storied past.

Featured essays

• “Artists in Action” by Ryan N. Dennis, PRH Curator & Programs Director

• “Bound Up: Project Row Houses’ Covert Curriculum” by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

• “A Soft Place to Stand: Escaping the Interlocking Systems of Race, Class, and Gender” by Assata-Nicole Richards, PhD, Founding Director of the Sankofa Research Institute (SRI) and Young Mothers Residential Program alumna

• “The Collaboration of Rice Building Workshop and Project Row Houses” by Danny Samuels and Nonya Grenader, founders of the Rice Building Workshop (BRW) program

• “Neighborhood Development and Art-Based Community Making” by George Lipsitz, Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara

The Project Row Houses model for art and social engagement applies not only to Houston, but also to diverse communities around the world. This book speak to these ideas while offering insightful texts by important voices in the field.

*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

Discover a Christ-centered approach to antiracism that will empower you to be transformed as you transform your world.

Michelle Sanchez has discovered through her own journey that it’s impossible to separate racial discipleship from our relationship with God. In fact, deeper racial discipleship catalyzes a deeper relationship with God. Whenever we choose to courageously resist racism, we will discover new opportunities to encounter Christ in fresh and exciting ways.

Color-Courageous Discipleship is our guidebook to a deeper connection with God through the adventure of racial discipleship. Grounded in the gospel, this practical and thought-provoking book:

Paperback Release: July 15, 2025

"A riveting and exhilarating novel about making art and selling out…Senna is one of this country’s most thrilling writers.” –Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

A brilliant dark comedy about love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial- identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia

Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.

Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.

On February 17, 2022, Brittney Griner arrived in Moscow ready to spend the WNBA offseason playing for the Russian women’s basketball team where she had been the centerpiece of previous championship seasons. Instead, a security checkpoint became her gateway to hell when she was arrested for mistakenly carrying under one gram of medically prescribed hash oil. Brittney’s world was violently upended in a crisis she has never spoken in detail about publicly—until now.

In Coming Home, Brittney finally shares the harrowing details of her sudden arrest days before Russia invaded Ukraine; her bewilderment and isolation while navigating a foreign legal system amid her trial and sentencing; her emotional and physical anguish as the first American woman ever to endure a Russian penal colony while the #WeAreBG movement rallied for her release; the chilling prisoner swap with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout; and her remarkable rise from hostage to global spokesperson on behalf of America’s forgotten. In haunting and vivid detail, Brittney takes readers inside the horrors of a geopolitical nightmare spanning ten months.  

And yet Coming Home is more than Brittney’s journey from captivity to freedom. In an account as gripping as it is poignant, she shares how her deep love for Cherelle, her college sweetheart and wife of six years, anchored her during their greatest storm; how her family’s support pulled her back from the brink; and how hundreds of letters from friends and neighbors lent her resolve to keep fighting. Coming Home is both a story of survival and a testament to love—the bonds that brought Brittney home to her family, and at last, to herself.

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance

One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was―shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance.

Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film―and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors.

Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary Black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.

Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every female to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey she must choose to be truly free. Silencing our fears about becoming women who love too much, Communion answers all of our questions about the place of love in a woman’s life.

bell hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women’s full participation in the workforce, by the culture of self-help and by popular media forces such as television and movies. She celebrates the experiences of women over 30, shares collective wisdom, and the lessons learned as we practice the art of loving. Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman needs to hear.