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9781250774125NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time—war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race—in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all.

In a time when our political and cultural perspectives feel more polarized than ever, Tyson provides a much-needed antidote to so much of what divides us, while making a passionate case for the twin chariots of enlightenment—a cosmic perspective and the rationality of science.

After thinking deeply about how science sees the world and about Earth as a planet, the human brain has the capacity to reset and recalibrates life’s priorities, shaping the actions we might take in response. No outlook on culture, society, or civilization remains untouched.

With crystalline prose, Starry Messenger walks us through the scientific palette that sees and paints the world differently. From insights on resolving global conflict to reminders of how precious it is to be alive, Tyson reveals, with warmth and eloquence, an array of brilliant and beautiful truths that apply to us all, informed and enlightened by knowledge of our place in the universe.

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The National Book Award-winning author of Felix Ever After delivers a beautifully tender story of two grumpy/sunshine, fake-dating actors navigating their love story both on and offscreen—perfect for fans of Casey McQuiston and Alexis Hall.

Logan Gray is Hollywood's bad boy—a talented but troubled actor who the public loves to hate. Mattie Cole is an up‑and‑coming golden boy, adored by all but plagued by insecurities.

When Logan and Mattie are cast as leads in a new romantic film, Logan claims that Matt has “zero talent,” sending the film’s publicity into a nosedive. To create positive buzz, the two are persuaded into a fake‑dating scheme—but as the two actors get to know their new characters, real feelings start to develop. 

As public scrutiny intensifies and old wounds resurface, the two must fight for their relationship and their love.
 

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Change the way you think about cooking! In this epic guide to better eating, the chef, recipe developer, and video producer Sohla El-Waylly reimagines what a cookbook can be, teaching home cooks of all skill levels how cooking really works.

“The book I wish someone had handed me when I began my own journey as a cook.”—from the Foreword by Samin Nosrat

A practical, information-packed, and transformative guide to becoming a better cook and conquering the kitchen, Start Here is a must-have master class in leveling up your cooking.
Across a dozen technique-themed chapters—from “Temperature Management 101” and “Break it Down & Get Saucy” to “Go to Brown Town,” “All About Butter,” and “Getting to Know Dough”—Sohla El-Waylly explains the hows and whys of cooking, introducing the fundamental skills that you need to become a more intuitive, inventive cook.

A one-stop resource, regardless of what you’re hungry for, Start Here gives equal weight to savory and sweet dishes, with more than two hundred mouthwatering recipes, including:

• Crispy-Skinned Salmon with Radishes & Nuoc Cham
• Charred Lemon Risotto
• Chilled Green Tahini Soba
• Lemon, Pecorino & Potato Pizza
• Fruity-Doodle Cookies
• Masa & Buttermilk Tres Leches

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Social justice leader Tamika D. Mallory states her case for action in this searing indictment of America’s historical, deadly, and continuing assault on Black and brown lives.

From Minneapolis to Louisville, to Portland, Kenosha, and Washington, DC, America’s reckoning with its unmet promises on race and class is at a boiling point not seen since the 1960s. While conversations around pathways to progress take place on social media and cable TV, history tells us that meaningful change only comes with radical legislation and boots-on-the-ground activism. Here, Mallory shares her unique personal experience building coalitions, speaking truth to power, and winning over hearts and minds in the struggle for shared prosperity and safety.

An incisive, innovative, and inviting take on fighting oppression and fighting for racial justice.

Racism is a real and present danger. But how can you fight it if you don’t know how it works or where it comes from? Using a compelling mix of memoir, cultural criticism, and anti-oppressive theory, Khodi Dill breaks down how white supremacy functions in North America and gives readers tools to understand how racism impacts their lives. From dismantling internalized racism, decolonizing schools, joining social justice movements and more, Dill lays out paths to personal liberation and social transformation.

Vibrant, dramatic collages by stylo starr complement Dill’s propulsive voice. Fueled by joy and hope as much as by rage and sorrow, this groundbreaking book empowers racialized young people to be confident in their identities and embrace the fullness of their futures.

Twice unlucky in love, natural hair vlogger, Angela Strickland, has settled into a life centered around avoiding men and relationships like the plague. Unwilling to risk another broken heart, she resigns herself to being a perpetually single woman.Corporate man and self-professed womanizer, Ryan Boyé, doesn't believe in relationships or love and thinks anyone who does is a fool. But there's just something about Angela Strickland he can't shake...When these two cross paths, their attraction to one another is undeniable. Will they find that the love they've both evaded is exactly what they both need?

Discover your true power as you embrace the calling God has reserved just for you.

Does the pressure to do more, be more, and achieve more leave you feeling powerless?

In Staying Power, global ministry leader and New York Times bestselling author Sarah Jakes Roberts challenges you to let go of others' expectations and embrace the calling God has for you--with the power only He can give.

In this empowering guided teaching journal, you'll engage with the key themes and messages from Sarah Jakes Roberts' Power Moves, as well as take time for self-reflection through insightful questions and journaling prompts. Drawing on truths from her book, Power Moves, Sarah helps you:

* Bring your authentic self back to life
* Connect with God in new ways
* Disarm the fear that holds you back
* Understand how worthy, valuable, and loved you are
* Release your power to the world

Ideal for personal enrichment and for gifting, this guided journal includes:

* Bible passages for each chapter to help you ground your spirit in Scripture
* Thought-provoking messages from Sarah to stir your soul and inspire you to action
* Questions for self-reflection to help you cultivate personal growth
* Guided prompts to help you explore your experiences and feelings
* Space to write your ideas and insights so you can track your progress and spiritual maturity

Staying Power equips you to align your heart and mind to receive what is already yours. True power rests in authenticity, bravery, and commitment to continuous growth. Come be refilled, restored, and refueled as you harness the power God has reserved just for you

A wide-ranging collection from a rising poet that showcases her sharp, contemporary voice

In Stem, Stella Wong intersperses lyric poems on a variety of subjects with dramatic monologues that imagine the perspectives of specific female composers, musicians, and visual artists, including Johanna Beyer, Mira Calix, Clara Rockmore, Maryanne Amacher, and Delia Derbyshire. In such lines as “let me tell you how I make myself appear / more likeable,” “as I grow older I like looking at chaos,” and “I want to propose a hike / and also propose mostly,” Wong’s style is confident and idiomatic, and by turns contemplative and carefree. Whether writing about family, intimate relationships, language, or women’s experience, Wong creates a world alive with observation and provocation, capturing the essence and the problems of life with others.

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Stepmotherland is a tour-de-force debut collection about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America.

Winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.

Holnes’s poems experiment with macaronic language, literary forms, and prosody. In their inventiveness, they create a new tradition that blurs the borders between poetry, visual art, and dramatic text. The new legacy he creates is one with significant reverence for the past, which informs a central desire of immigrants and native-born citizens alike: the desire for a better life. Stepmotherland documents an artist’s evolution into manhood and heralds the arrival of a stunning new poetic voice.

In Stigma and Culture, J. Lorand Matory provocatively shows how ethnic identification in the United States—and around the globe—is a competitive and hierarchical process in which populations, especially of historically stigmatized races, seek status and income by dishonoring other stigmatized populations. And there is no better place to see this than among the African American elite in academia, where he explores the emergent ethnic identities of African and Caribbean immigrants and transmigrants, Gullah/Geechees, Louisiana Creoles, and even Native Americans of partly African ancestry.  
           
Matory describes the competitive process that hierarchically structures their self-definition as ethnic groups and the similar process by which middle-class African Americans seek distinction from their impoverished compatriots. Drawing on research at universities such as Howard, Harvard, and Duke and among their alumni networks, he details how university life—while facilitating individual upward mobility, touting human equality, and regaling cultural diversity—also perpetuates the cultural standards that historically justified the dominance of some groups over others. Combining his ethnographic findings with classic theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and others—alongside stories from his own life in academia—Matory sketches the university as an institution that, particularly through the anthropological vocabulary of culture, encourages the stigmatized to stratify their own.

A love letter to the Southern biscuit, honoring its place in Black culinary culture and beyond with over 70 delicious recipes.

Still We Rise is a tribute to the glories of flour, butter, and buttermilk baked tall, tender, and flaky. Erika Council is the founder and head baker of the renowned Bomb Biscuit Company in Atlanta, Georgia. The granddaughter of legendary soul food chef Mildred (Mama Dip) Council and a teacher and activist who cooked and baked to support the civil rights movement, Erika knows all about the power of the persistent biscuit.

Here, Erika has perfected traditional biscuit types alongside inventive new creations. Her recipes connect readers to stories of the family, friends, and Southern culinary icons who instilled in her a love of baking.

Through over 70 unique recipes for biscuits, spreads, sandwiches, and a convenient home biscuit mix that will have you whipping up fluffy biscuits and bis-cakes in minutes, Erika takes us on a journey through Black excellence, resilience, and heritage in the American South. Step into her world and enjoy her classic Bomb Buttermilk Biscuit, the lightest Angel Biscuits, and new favorites like Corn Milk Biscuits, Everything “Bagel” Biscuits, Hominy Honey Butter, and the Glori-Fried Chicken Biscuit Sandwich, (plus a mind-blowing Cinnamon Sugar and Pecan Biscuit).

From the author of The Sword and the Shield, this definitive biography of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael offers "an unflinching look at an unflinching man" (Daily Beast). 

Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century. 

A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision defined political radicalism and provoked a national reckoning on race and democracy.

A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called “one of the poetry stars of his generation” (Los Angeles Times).

“We sleep long, / if not sound,” Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, “Till the end/ we sing / into the wind.” In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South—one poem, “Kith,” exploring that strange bedfellow of “kin”—the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. “Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don’t know / are his dead.”
 
Whether it’s the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young’s home places and his dear departed, and to what of them—of us—poetry can save.

A rich and layered photographic exploration of the people and places that influenced Raven Jackson’s directorial debut film, Stories From a Place Where All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the companion book features lyrical writing, evocative photos, and contributions from voices that speak to the film’s quiet yet powerful themes and the rural Southern setting. Also includes the full script and incredible photography captured during the production. Includes a foreword by Kasi Lemmons; poetry by Alice Walker, Tracy K. Smith, Lucille Clifton, and Reginald Helms Jr.; essays and words by Sheila Atim, Kiese Laymon, Charleen McClure, Pamela Shepard, and many others; and an afterword by Marwa Helal.

Set in a Harlem high rise, a stunning debut about a tight-knit cast of characters grappling with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.

Like Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, Sidik Fofana’s electrifying collection of eight interconnected stories showcases the strengths, struggles, and hopes of one residential community in a powerful storytelling experience.

Each short story follows a tenant in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone’s mind. There is Swan in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend’s release from prison jeopardizes the life he’s been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, who hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe’s and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can’t seem to escape the building’s gravitational pull. We root for these characters and more as they weave in and out of each other’s lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs brilliantly captures the joy and pain of the human experience and heralds the arrival of a uniquely talented writer.

Paperback Release: June 10, 2025

Few can weather the storm.

As a thief on the streets of Cairo, Ororo Munroe is an expert at blending in—keeping her blue eyes low and her white hair beneath a scarf. Stealth is her specialty . . . especially since strange things happen when she loses control.

Lately, Ororo has been losing control more often, setting off sudden rainstorms and mysterious winds . . . and attracting dangerous attention. When she is forced to run from the Shadow King, a villain who steals people's souls, she has nowhere to turn to but herself. There is something inside her, calling her across Africa, and the hidden truth of her heritage is close enough to taste.

But as Ororo nears the secrets of her past, her powers grow stronger and the Shadow King veers closer and closer. Can she outrun the shadows that chase her? Or can she step into the spotlight and embrace the coming storm?

In her first speculative novel, New York Times bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson casts a breathtaking spell with one of Marvel's most beloved characters, and brings the super hero Storm to life as you've never seen her before.

In Partnership with the Houston Opera

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, February 18 at 1 PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden

How: RSVP to reserve you little's spot. Limited capacity

ABOUT EVENT

We are teaming up with the Houston Opera to bring you a special story time. This event is gear towards Pre-K through 2nd grade. 

America’s most popular sports media figure tells it like it is in this surprisingly personal book, not only dishing out his signature, uninhibited opinions but also revealing the challenges he overcame in childhood as well as at ESPN, and who he really is when the cameras are off.

Stephen A. Smith has never been handed anything, nor was he an overnight success. Growing up poor in Queens, the son of Caribbean immigrants and the youngest of six children, he was a sports-obsessed kid who faced a number of struggles, from undiagnosed dyslexia to getting enough cereal to fill his bowl. As a basketball player at Winston-Salem State University, he got a glimmer of his true calling when he wrote a newspaper column arguing for the retirement of his own Hall of Fame coach, Clarence Gaines.

Smith hustled and rose up from a high school reporter at Daily News (New York) to a general sports columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1990s, before getting his own show at ESPN in 2005. After he was unceremoniously fired from the network in 2009, he became even more determined to fight for success. He got himself rehired two years later and, with his razor-sharp intelligence and fearless debate style, found his role on the show he was destined to star in: First Take, the network’s flagship morning program.

In Straight Shooter, Smith writes about the greatest highs and deepest lows of his life and career. He gives his thoughts on Skip Bayless, Ray Rice, Colin Kaepernick, the New York Knicks, the Dallas Cowboys, and former President Donald Trump. But he also pulls back the curtain and talks about life beyond the set, sharing authentic stories about his negligent father, his loving mother, being a father himself, his battle with life-threatening COVID-19, and what he really thinks about politics and social issues. He does it all with the same intelligence, humor, and charm that has made him a household name.

Provocative, moving, and eye-opening, this book is the perfect gift for lovers of sports, television, and anyone who likes their stories delivered straight to the heart.

A debut poetry collection wrangling the various selves we hold and perform—across oceans and within relationships—told through a queer, Nigerian-American lens

At times surreal, at times philosophical, the poems of Strange Beach demarcate a fiercely interior voice inside of queer Black masculinity. Oluwaseun’s speakers—usually, but not specified, as two men—move between watery landscapes, snowy terrains, and domestic conflicts. Each poem proceeds by way of music and melody, allowing themes of masculinity, sex, parental relations, death, and love to conspire within a voice that prioritizes intimate address.

In announcing their acquisition of the UK edition, after a three-way auction, Strange Beach was described as “a wrangling of the various selves we hold and perform – across oceans and within relationships – through a highly patterned and textual lyrical play: it is a deeply moving and philosophical tapestry.”

Strange Beach often eschews meaning, preferring, in its deluge of images and emotions, to transmute messages straight to the mind to the reader. Oluwaseun’s poetic influences are clear: Claudia Rankine, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Carl Phillips, Kevin Young, Hannah Sullivan, John Ashberry, and Ocean Vuong. Strange Beach is a searching collection where land and water, body and mind, image and abstraction, are in productive tension, leading to third ways of considering intimacy, selfhood, and desire.

Good fences make good neighbors—except when a scorching shared past makes things complicated—in this delightful city-meets-country romance from Zuri Day.

She’s packing her bags—and her baggage.

Ten years ago, Genesis Washington made a very poor decision. At the time, it seemed great. Fantastic. Explosive. But the truth is, your one-night rebound should never be your younger brother’s rival. And he definitely shouldn’t be someone who allegedly only slept with you to gain the upper hand—even if the sex was amazing.

Now Genesis is blindsided when the farm she’s inherited just happens to be right next door to Jaxson King, the regrettable one-night stand she’s still painfully attracted to. This man has aged like the finest of wines, and what’s worse, he’s now a thoughtful and responsible father. Good thing Genesis has a (*cough* long-distance *cough*) boyfriend. Well, sort of. It’s complicated.

Jaxson and his hotness should be easy enough to ignore. But when city-girl Genesis discovers there’s a serious learning curve to her humble new home, it’s Jaxson who’s there to lend a very skilled helping hand. With every problem that arises, Jaxson is seemingly making all the right moves—both on the farm and when things heat up behind closed doors. But, surely, that doesn’t mean he’s right for Genesis, does it?

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

The Devil in Blue Jeans by Stacey Kennedy

Out of Office by A.H. Cunningham

Church Girl by Naima Simone

From Newbery Medal honoree and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds comes a hilarious, hopeful, and action-packed middle-grade novel about the greatest young superhero you’ve never heard of, filled with illustrations by Raúl the Third!

Portico Reeves’s superpower is making sure all the other superheroes—like his parents and two best friends—stay super. And safe. Super safe. And he does this all in secret. No one in his civilian life knows he’s actually…Stuntboy!

But his regular Portico identity is pretty cool, too. He lives in the biggest house on the block, maybe in the whole city, which basically makes it a castle. His mom calls where they live an apartment building. But a building with fifty doors just in the hallways is definitely a castle. And behind those fifty doors live a bunch of different people who Stuntboy saves all the time. In fact, he’s the only reason the cat, New Name Every Day, has nine lives.

All this is swell except for Portico’s other secret, his not-so-super secret. His parents are fighting all the time. They’re trying to hide it by repeatedly telling Portico to go check on a neighbor “in the meantime.” But Portico knows “meantime” means his parents are heading into the Mean Time which means they’re about to get into it, and well, Portico’s superhero responsibility is to save them, too—as soon as he figures out how.

Only, all these secrets give Portico the worry wiggles, the frets, which his mom calls anxiety. Plus, like all superheroes, Portico has an arch-nemesis who is determined to prove that there is nothing super about Portico at all.

Portico Reeves’s superpower is making sure all the other superheroes—like his parents and two best friends—stay super. And safe. Super safe. And he does this all in secret. No one in his civilian life knows he’s actually…Stuntboy! But his regular Portico identity is pretty cool, too. He lives in the biggest house on the block, maybe in the whole city, which basically makes it a castle. His mom calls where they live an apartment building. But a building with fifty doors just in the hallways is definitely a castle. And behind those fifty doors live a bunch of different people who Stuntboy saves all the time. In fact, he’s the only reason the cat, New Name Every Day, has nine lives. All this is swell except for Portico’s other secret, his not-so-super secret. His parents are fighting all the time. They’re trying to hide it by repeatedly telling Portico to go check on a neighbor “in the meantime.” But Portico knows “meantime” means his parents are heading into the Mean Time which means they’re about to get into it, and well, Portico’s superhero responsibility is to save them, too—as soon as he figures out how. Only, all these secrets give Portico the worry wiggles, the frets, which his mom calls anxiety. Plus, like all superheroes, Portico has an arch-nemesis who is determined to prove that there is nothing super about Portico at all.

From Newbery Medal honoree and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds comes the sequel to the hilarious, hopeful, and action-packed middle grade novel Stuntboy, in the Meantime about the greatest young superhero you’ve never heard of, jam packed with illustrations by Raúl the Third!

Portico Reeves is the greatest superhero a lot of people have never heard of. He likes it that way—then no one can get in the way of him from keeping other other people safe. Super safe. He’s Stuntboy. He’s got the moves. And the saves. Except. There’s been one major fail.

He couldn’t save his parents from becoming Xs. Which is a word that sounds like coughing up a hairball. But don’t talk to him about the divorce, because of the hairball thing, and also, it gives Portico the frets.

What’s also giving him frets is his parents living on two separate floors in their apartment building. He’s never fully with one parent or the other. He’s in-between, all the time. The in-between time. And the elevator is busted, so to get between floors means getting past the bullies who hang in the stairwells.

So when Portico and new friend, Herbert, and best best friend, Zola, discover an empty apartment, unlocked, they are psyched. It’s a perfect hideout, and hangout, and it’s not half anyone’s…it’s all theirs. So they decide to make it their own…let’s say with stunts of the drawing kind. Problem is, that gives some Grown Up People the frets, which leads to double frets for Portico. And he’s not sure his arsenal of stunts can combat that.

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A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.

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Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream―and work―toward a more capacious "we"

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

perched

i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.

under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.

if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.

        ―after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

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A novel by a critically acclaimed voice in contemporary fiction, praised by Ebony for its “unforgettable images, unique characters, and moving story that keeps the pages turning until the end.”

A young prostitute comes to Bigelow, Arkansas, to start over, far from her haunting past. Sugar moves next door to Pearl, who is still grieving for the daughter who was murdered fifteen years before. Over sweet-potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming both women's lives—and the life of an entire town.

Sugar brings a Southern African-American town vividly to life, with its flowering magnolia trees, lingering scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, and white picket fences that keep strangers out—but ignorance and superstition in. To read this novel is to take a journey through loss and suffering to a place of forgiveness, understanding, and grace.