A picture book edition of the board book about love, relationships, and families, offering adults the opportunity to begin important conversations with young children in an informed, safe, and supported way.

Now in a hardcover picture book! Developed by experts in the fields of early childhood and activism against injustice, this topic-driven book offers clear, concrete language and beautiful imagery that young children can grasp and adults can leverage for further discussion.
 
While young children are avid observers and questioners of their world, adults often shut down or postpone conversations on complicated topics because it's hard to know where to begin. Research shows that talking about issues like love, relationships, and families from the age of two not only helps children understand what they see, but also increases self-awareness, self-esteem, and allows them to recognize and confront things that are unfair, like discrimination and prejudice.
 
This fourth book in the series begins the conversation on love with a supportive approach that considers both the child and the adult. Stunning art accompanies the simple and interactive text, and the backmatter offers additional resources and ideas for extending this discussion.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

A beginner’s exploration of love, relationships, and families – the latest in the FIRST CONVERSATIONS board book series, which offers adults the opportunity to begin important conversations with young children in an informed, safe, and supported way.

Developed by experts in the fields of early childhood and activism against injustice, this topic-driven board book offers clear, concrete language and beautiful imagery that young children can grasp and adults can leverage for further discussion.

While young children are avid observers and questioners of their world, adults often shut down or postpone conversations on complicated topics because it's hard to know where to begin. Research shows that talking about issues like love, relationships, and families from the age of two not only helps children understand what they see, but also increases self-awareness, self-esteem, and allows them to recognize and confront things that are unfair, like discrimination and prejudice.
 
This fourth book in the series begins the conversation on love with a supportive approach that considers both the child and the adult. Stunning art accompanies the simple and interactive text, and the backmatter offers additional resources and ideas for extending this discussion.

*ships in 7-10 business days

Racial identity, pop culture, and delusions of perfection collide in an eye-opening and refreshingly frank memoir by fashion and beauty insider Danielle Prescod.

Danielle Prescod grew up Black in an elite and overwhelmingly white community, her identity made more invisible by the whitewashed movies, television, magazines, and books she and her classmates voraciously consumed. Danielle took her cue from the world around her and aspired to shrink her identity into that box, setting increasingly poisonous goals. She started painful and damaging chemical hair treatments in elementary school, began depriving herself of food when puberty hit, and tried to control her image through the most unimpeachable, impeccable fashion choices.

Those obsessions led her to relentlessly pursue a career in beauty and fashion—the eye of the racist and sexist beauty standard storm. Assimilating was hard, but she was practiced. And she was an asset. Their “Token Black Girl.” Toxic, sure. But Danielle was striving to achieve social cache and working her way up the ladder of coveted media jobs, and she looked great, right? So what if she had to endure executives’ questions like “What was it like to drive to school from the ghetto?” Or coworkers’ eager curiosity to know if her parents were on welfare. But after decades of burying her emotions, resentment, and true self, Danielle turned a critical eye inward and confronted the factors that motivated her self-destructive behaviors.

Sharp witted and bracingly candid, Token Black Girl unpacks the adverse effects of insidious white supremacy in the media—both unconscious and strategic—to tell a personal story about recovery from damaging concepts of perfection, celebrating identity, and demolishing social conditioning.

The poetry of Tom Postell, believed lost since a tragic death in 1980, appears here in its first authorized, comprehensive volume. While Postell ran with the masters of Beat, Black Power, and Hardbop in the 50's and 60's, he has remained elusive, enigmatic, unsung. His poems provide an astonishing look into how issues of race, music, and the political avant-garde intersect at this pivotal moment in post-WWII America. Essays and hybrid work by giovanni singleton, Derrick Harriell, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen complement interviews, typescripts, and archival photos, making this retrospective of Postell the first of its kind.

ABOUT TOM POSTELL

Tom Postell, born Thomas Freeman Postell Jr., was a Black American poet born in Cincinnati in 1927 and closely associated with the Beat Generation, Black Mountain School, and Black Arts Movement in New York City's Greenwich Village from 1953 to 1969. A close friend and mentor of poet Amiri Baraka, Postell's circle included musicians like Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp and fellow poets like Allen Ginsberg and Ted Joans. Hindered by institutionalization, mental health struggles, and substance abuse, Postell disappeared from the literary scene in 1970, leaving a trove of innovative work thought lost upon his death in 1980.

"Postell wrote moon poems that would concern the authorities. A nature poet, jazz poet, love poet, and surrealist raconteur. He was multitudinous, hilarious, occasionally terrifying and always interstellar. In the pages of this iridescent collection, his voice arrives as if from another planet, another place in space-time, to call us forward.” —Dr. Joshua Bennett

"Tom Postell emerged from the mid-1960s Village literary scene as a self-sculpted, deft, barely-listened-to imaginal incessance. And yet, with this surprising new collection of unheralded poems, his work continues to radiate with incantatory significance. —Will Alexander

“You wanna fly? You gotta give up the sh*t that weighs you down.” Toni Morrison

1.75 inches tall. 

Soft enamel with black metal plating. 

Pin comes with 2 rubber pin backs. 

A little boy wants a chance to shine on his own but discovers that being apart from his large and lively Native family isn’t necessarily better in this heartwarming and humorous picture book.

When Russell gets a part in the school play, he lights up like a shining star—and he can’t wait to tell his big, boisterous Native family the exciting news. But catching their attention when they all get together feels impossible; no matter where they go, they seem to be too noisy, too many, and just too much!

Russell decides to keep his big debut to himself and fly solo for once…but being alone may not be the answer. After all, there’s no such thing as too much love, and when he needs them most, his great big family knows how to be just enough.

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An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change 

Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment.

The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, Torn Apart argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities. 

Intergalactic visions, deadly threats, and explosive standoffs between mostly good and completely evil converge in a dystopian fantasy that could only be conceived by the inimitable Walter Mosley, one of the country’s most beloved and acclaimed writers

Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And he is the Cure.

Martin begins slipping into an alternate consciousness, with new physical strengths, to violently defend his family—the only Black family in their neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles— against pure evil. Think Octavia Butler meets Jeff VanderMeer meets Jordan Peele.

Expansive and innovative, sexy and satirical, Touched brilliantly imagines the ways in which human life and technological innovation threaten existence itself. 

A NEW MAN ON THE SCENE.

Aspiring comedian Abi has always been told that she’s too much, but never felt like enough. Until she meets Will, who changes everything she’s been made to believe by men, the media and her mum. He loves her just the way she is.

HIS KIDS.

But Will is a package deal and comes with two daughters from a previous relationship. Suddenly Abi finds herself thrown into the spotlight, and not just on the stage…

CAN SHE WIN OVER THIS TOUGH CROWD?

Abi is used to playing to difficult audiences, but step-parenting, and winning over the girls, is going to be her toughest challenge yet. Can she finally prove her critics wrong and triumph at her biggest gig to date?

A fun and feel-good romantic comedy about love, friendship and family for anyone who’s struggled to feel like enough and find their place. Fans of Beth O’Leary and Ruth Jones will love this warm and witty page-turner.

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An essential guide for frontline educators to address systemic racial oppression, repair harm, and foster safe, inclusive learning spaces for their students

For educators and readers of Bettina Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive, with a foreword by Leigh Patel, author of No Study Without Struggle

Toward Liberation is the timely and practical guide that pioneers new pathways for educators to repair harm and foster transformative learning spaces. This road map for liberatory pedagogy is replete with resources, tools, and strategies drawn from Jamilah Pitts's experiences as a young Black girl, a Black student, a teacher, a former school leader, and a consultant with schools across the country.

Educators will want to mark up and keep their copy of Toward Liberation at their desks for easy reference. In its pages, they will find

• Real-life examples and student writing from Pitts’s classroom
• Explorative questions for teachers to consider in their equity work
• Constructive charts that map out manifestations of harm
• Activities to engage students in liberatory learning
• Healing and self-care strategies for teachers—particularly Black women educators

Pitts infuses her writing with an extensive knowledge base of the education system, honed over years as a teacher, a coach, a dean, an assistant principal, and a national education consultant. The tenets of this book—rooted in truthtelling, activism, healing, wellness, self-care, and, ultimately, love— both inform and are inspired by the healing work Pitts does with educators to this day. In doing this work, she helps to reimagine the role of the critical teacher.

Toward Liberation equips teachers with the tools they need to carve a path toward liberatory educational practices, ensuring that students are afforded the full range of their humanity and their experience, in and out of the classroom.

This powerful collection of articles, essays, and letters spans the period between Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon’s landmark manifesto on the psychology of the colonized and the means of empowerment necessary for their liberation. These pieces display the genesis of some of Fanon’s greatest ideas — ideas that became so vital to the leaders of the American civil rights movement.

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles Shanahan’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

Perfect for fans of All Out and Black Enough, Transmogrify! is a YA anthology of fantasy stories by and about trans and nonbinary people that celebrates the magic of being queer.

A spell gone wrong

A righteous quest for revenge

A mirror that only shows the truth

The hidden power of a name

Transness is as varied and colorful as magic can be. In Transmogrify! you’ll embark on fourteen different adventures alongside unforgettable characters who embody many different genders and expressions and experiences—because magic is for everyone, and that is cause for celebration.

Celeste, a card sharp with a need for justice, takes on the role of advocatus diaboli, to defend her sister Mariel, accused of murdering a Virtue, a member of the ruling class of this mining town, in a new world of dark fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse.

The year is 1883 and the mining town of Goetia is booming as prospectors from near and far come to mine the powerful new element Divinity from the high mountains of Colorado with the help of the pariahs of society known as the Fallen. The Fallen are the descendants of demonkind living amongst the Virtues, the winners in an ancient war, with the descendants of both sides choosing to live alongside Abaddon’s mountain in this tale of the mythological West from the bestselling mastermind Rebecca Roanhorse.

EVENT DEETS

When: February 26 at 6:00 PM CST

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

How: RSVP to save your spot. Books will be on sale at the event!

ABOUT THE EVENT

ABOUT POETS

Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican-American poet, playwright, educator and award-winning author. Mendez has had poetry and essays published by The Acentos Review, The New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. She is an alumni of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and the author of several books for children and adults including Island of Dreams which won an International Latino Book Award in 2015. She is a faculty member with the Goddard College MFA Creative Writing Program and she lives in Houston, TX. 

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021 and forthcoming in Best of American Poetry 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body is forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2022. She lives in Harlem, NY.

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn,  sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, , profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work.  She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there.  She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.  

When a little girl can't follow her usual tradition, she turns to her New York City neighbors for help. This is a can't-miss celebration of generosity and community from bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson.

Janelle knows exactly what she wants to be for Halloween, but she has no idea how she'll celebrate—her mommy has to work and can't take her to trick-or-treat in the suburbs, and daddy has to run his store like always. But listening to her friends and neighbors' stories of Halloweens past and present, helps Janelle realize that there may be a way to celebrate the fall-iday that lets her give as much as she gets.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity. These two generations of men are haunted by the Mother-Spirit who did not survive enslavement’s post-traumatic stress violence. Trinity is the riveting story of the daughter-spirit born to stitch love back into the scattered wombs of her Black mothers and call love back into the fishing blues songs of her Black male kin. Lottie Rebecca Lee is the Divine spirited daughter born to set everything back up right again, in this daringly original novel.

*ships in 7-10 business days* 

Bestselling author Rick Riordan presents the second book in the New York Times best-selling and award-winning Tristan Strong trilogy by Kwame Mbalia, now in paperback.

"Mbalia's universe continues to excite through sheer conceptual brilliance, nonstop action and adventure, and--let's be honest--the comical aggression of sidekick god Gum Baby."--Booklist
When Tristan's Nana is abducted from the Strong family farm, our hero has to return to Alke to rescue her from a folktale villain with an ax to grind--er, make that a hammer.

Tristan Strong, just back from a victorious but exhausting adventure in Alke, the land of African American folk heroes and African gods, is suffering from PTSD. But there's no rest for the weary when his grandmother is abducted by a mysterious villain out for revenge.
Tristan must return to Alke--and reunite with his loud-mouthed sidekick, Gum Baby--in order to rescue Nana and stop the culprit from creating further devastation. Anansi, now a "web developer" in Tristan's phone, is close at hand to offer advice, and several new folk heroes will aid Tristan in his quest, but he will only succeed if he can figure out a way to sew broken souls back together.

*"Well-paced--just like the previous installment--this sequel focuses on themes such as the meaning of diaspora and the effects of trauma, making for a more nuanced and stronger story than the first. Packs a punch."--Kirkus (starred review)
Enhance your middle grade fantasy collection with these best-selling fan favorites:

• The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan
• The Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan
• Rick Riordan Presents Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez
• Rick Riordan Presents City of the Plague God by Sarwat Chadda

*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

The gripping finale of the bestselling award-winning Tristan Strong series. In book #3, our hero battles his way back to a satisfying conclusion in his hometown of Chicago, with lots of twists and turns along the way.

The talented team of Robert Venditti and Olivia Stephens brings to glorious full color the novel that best-selling author Jason Reynolds called "A brilliant action adventure rooted in African American lore."

Seventh grader Tristan Strong feels anything but strong ever since he failed to save his best friend when they were in a bus accident together. All he has left of Eddie is the journal his friend wrote stories in. Tristan is dreading the month he's going to spend on his grandparents' farm in Alabama, where he's being sent to heal from the tragedy.

But on his first night there, a sticky creature shows up in his bedroom and steals Eddie's notebook. Tristan chases after it--is that a doll?--and a tug-of-war ensues between them underneath a Bottle Tree. In a last attempt to wrestle the journal out of the creature's hands, Tristan punches the tree, accidentally ripping open a chasm into the MidPass, a volatile place with a burning sea, haunted bone ships, and iron monsters that are hunting the inhabitants of this world.

Tristan finds himself in the middle of a battle that has left Black American folk heroes John Henry and Brer Rabbit exhausted. In order to get back home, Tristan and these new allies will need to entice the god Anansi, the Weaver, to come out of hiding and seal the hole in the sky. But bartering with the trickster Anansi always comes at a price.

Can Tristan save this world before he loses more of the things he loves? Find out by diving into this stunning graphic novel adaptation of the original book.

Old secrets are brought to light when a family matriarch returns to Brazil after years away in this “original and highly immersive” (Good Morning America) debut that explores the heartbreak and hope of what it means to be from two homes, two peoples, and two worlds.

Daniel Cunha has a lot on his mind.

He got dumped by his pregnant girlfriend, his grandfather just dropped dead, and on the anniversary of the raid that doomed his drug-dealing aunt and uncle, his mother makes her unwanted return, years after she fled to marry another American fool like his father.

Misfortune, however, is a Cunha family affair, and no generation is spared. Not Daniel’s grandfather João—poor João—born to a prostitute and forced to raise his siblings while still a child himself. Not João’s wife, Marta, branded as a bruxa, reviled by her mother, and dragged from her Ilha paradise by her scheming daughter, Maria. And certainly not Maria, so envious of her younger sister’s beauty and benevolence that she took her vicious revenge and fled to the States, abandoning her children: Daniel and Lucia, both tainted now by their half-Americanness and their mother’s greedy absence.

There’s poison in the Cunha blood. They are a family cursed, condemned to the pain of deprivation, betrayal, violence, and, worst of all, love. But now Maria has returned to grieve her father and finally make peace with Daniel and Lucia, or so she says. As New Year’s Eve nears, the Cunha family hurtles toward an irrevocable breaking point: a fire, a knife, and a death on the sands of Copacabana Beach.

Amid the cacophony of Rio’s tumult—rampant poverty, political unrest, the ever-present threat of violence—a fierce chorus of voices rises above the din to ask whether we can ever truly repair the damage we do to those we love in this “fiery debut novel” (The Washington Post).