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- PRE - ORDER: Matriarch
PRE - ORDER: Matriarch
by Tina Knowles
$30.00PRE - ORDER. ON SALE DATE: April 22, 2025
A glorious chronicle of a life like none other—enlightening, entertaining, surprising, empowering—and a testament to the world-changing power of Black motherhood
“You are Celestine,” she said. She squatted to push the hair off my face and pull leaves off my pajama legs. “Like my sister and my grandmother.” And there under the pecan tree, as she did countless times, that day my mother told me stories of the mothers and daughters that went before me.
Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that.
Matriarch begins with a precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven. She is in love with her world, with extended family on every other porch and the sounds of Motown and the lapping beach always within earshot. But as the realities of race and the limitations of girlhood set in, she begins to dream of the world beyond. Her instincts and impulsive nature drive her far beyond the shores of Texas to discover the life awaiting her on the other side of childhood.
That life’s journey—through grief and tragedy, creative and romantic risks and turmoil, the nurturing of superstar offspring and of her own special gifts—is the remarkable story she shares with readers here. This is a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, of loss and perseverance, and of the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world. It’s one brilliant woman’s intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America—and the wisdom that women pass on to each other, mothers to daughters, across generations. - PRE-ORDER: The Summer I Ate the Rich
PRE-ORDER: The Summer I Ate the Rich
Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite
$19.99PRE-ORDER: ON SALE April 22, 2025
A bone-chilling contemporary YA horror about what happens when a Haitian American girl uses her previously hidden zombie abilities to exact revenge on the wealthy elites who’ve caused her family pain.
Brielle Petitfour loves to cook. But with a chronically sick mother and bills to pay, becoming a chef isn’t exactly a realistic career path.
When Brielle’s mom suddenly loses her job, Brielle steps in and uses her culinary skills to earn some extra money. The rich families who love her cooking praise her use of unique flavors and textures, which keep everyone guessing what’s in Brielle’s dishes. The secret ingredient? Human flesh.
Written by the storytelling duo Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite, The Summer I Ate the Rich is a biting, smart new horror inspired by Haitian zombie lore that scrutinizes the socioeconomic and racial inequity that is the foundation of our modern times. Just like Brielle’s clients it will have you asking: What’s for dinner?
- PRE-ORDER: Love in 280 Characters or Less
PRE-ORDER: Love in 280 Characters or Less
Ravynn K. Stringfield
$19.99PRE-ORDER: ON SALE April 15, 2025
Black college student Sydney Ciara navigates academics, love, and the online realm, in this coming-of-age romance told through her blog posts, messages, social media, and more!
Sydney Ciara Warren is excited as she starts her first year of college, but also nervous. With her best friend Malcolm attending a different university, she'll have to make new friends. And despite her interests in writing and fashion, she has no idea what path will ultimately be right for her.
As Sydney Ciara tries to figure out her place on campus and in the world, she finds solace in blogging about her life, putting together outfits with meaning, and spending time online. It’s within the digital space that she connects with someone who goes by YoungPrinceX. She may not know “X” in real life, but that doesn’t stop her from developing a crush on him. Except things get complicated, as she also navigates her first romantic relationship with a sweet boy on campus named Xavier (who maybe could be X?).
Can Sydney Ciara not only make it through her first semester, but thrive in real life, as much as she seems to be thriving online?
Here is a swoony love letter to Twitter, to Black girls who think they won’t get chosen, and to those who take too long finding the perfect words!
- PRE-ORDER: Where Shadows Meet: A Novel
PRE-ORDER: Where Shadows Meet: A Novel
Patrice Caldwell
$20.00PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: April 1, 2025
The dark and thrillingly romantic debut vampire fantasy that questions what it truly means to sacrifice for love.
You have no idea what I’ve done for love. Just as you have no idea what you may one day do.
Once long ago, a girl named Favre sacrificed her wings for love. Thana, the young goddess she so willingly gave them up for, sacrificed that same love for power. But everything has a cost.
Favre never got over the loss of her wings. And Thana’s choices led to a life of eternal night, and later, their destruction. Favre has bided her time ever since, waiting for the chance to resurrect the girl she loves who turned her into the creature she hates.
Now, a thousand years later, Leyla, the crown princess of a vampire nation, must travel to Nekros, the island of the dead, when her best friend is captured during an attack on her nation’s capital. But nothing is as it seems. The closer she gets to her goal, the more she risks awakening an ancient evil and destroying everything she holds dear.
Set in the aftermath of a war between vampires, humans, and the gods that created them, Patrice Caldwell’s devastatingly romantic fantasy debut, Where Shadows Meet, centers the heart-wrenching pain of loss and the struggle of self-discovery to ask: do we choose our fates, or do our fates choose us?
- PRE-ORDER: All the Blues in the Sky
PRE-ORDER: All the Blues in the Sky
Renée Watson
$17.99PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: February 4, 2025.
# 1 New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor author Renée Watson explores friendship, loss, and life with grief in this poignant novel in verse and vignettes.
Sage's thirteenth birthday was supposed to be about movies and treats, staying up late with her best friend and watching the sunrise together. Instead, it was the day her best friend died. Without the person she had to hold her secrets and dream with, Sage is lost. In a counseling group with other girls who have lost someone close to them, she learns that not all losses are the same, and healing isn't predictable. There is sadness, loneliness, anxiety, guilt, pain, love. And even as Sage grieves, new, good things enter her life-and she just may find a way to know that she can feel it all.
In accessible, engaging verse and prose, this is a story of a girl's journey to heal, grow, and forgive herself. To read it is to see how many shades there are in grief, and to know that someone understands.
- PRE-ORDER: Everywhere You Are
PRE-ORDER: Everywhere You Are
Victoria Monét
$18.99PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: June 24, 2025
From multi Grammy-award winning artist and songwriter Victoria Monét comes a lyrical picture book that's perfect for children with separation anxiety, while also offering some healing for hard working parents.
I’ll always be your moon
You’ll always be my starJust keep me in your heart and
I’ll be everywhere you areIn this melodic picture book from chart-topping musical sensation Victoria Monét, a gentle moon comforts a young star as night ends and they separate. Paired with the whimsical and imaginative art of Alea Marley, Everywhere You Are reminds us that even when someone isn’t right next to us, their love still carries on in our hearts.
- Prosperity Mantras: Modern Affirmations for Abundance
Prosperity Mantras: Modern Affirmations for Abundance
Destiny Taylor and Cat Willett
$20.00An accessible, inspiring tool for attracting abundance into your life, featuring 52 affirmations paired with vibrantly illustrated archetypes inspired by real women and femmes and their chosen paths to prosperity.
Rich in spirit, rich in love, rich in community, rich in fortune.
This 52-card deck and guidebook set was designed to assist you in creating the prosperous life of your dreams. Focused on career development, financial expansion, community building, and personal well-being, it inspires each of us to be bold and resourceful as we forge our paths and define what abundance means to us.
* Aspirational icons: Each card highlights an archetype inspired by real women and femmes on their chosen paths to prosperity, from programmers, archeologists, healthcare practitioners, and historians, to artists, strategists, CEOs, and spiritual conjurers.
* Illustrated affirmations: Each card features a gorgeous illustration paired with an affirmation.
* Deluxe set: This set includes 52 full-color illustrated cards (3 x 5 inches), shrink wrapped and housed in a card box; a 96-page illustrated guidebook (3 x 5 inches); and a keepsake magnetic closure box (3-1/2 x 5-3/8 inches).
* Illustrated guidebook: The enclosed guidebook includes guidance on using the deck and interpreting the meanings of the cards and their mantras, as well as words of wisdom from the women and femmes who inspired the archetypes.
* Journal prompts: Each card’s entry in the guidebook also includes a writing prompt for deeper reflection. - PRE-ORDER: Happy Land
PRE-ORDER: Happy Land
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
$29.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: April 8, 2025
A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand.
Nikki Berry hasn’t seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can.
But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.
It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.
Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.
- Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America
Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America
by Joel Edward Goza
$34.99Like many well-intentioned white people, Goza once believed that he could support Black America’s struggle for equality without supporting reparations. Reparations, he thought, were altogether irrelevant to the real work of racial justice.
This is a book about why he was wrong. In fact, any effort to heal our nation’s wounds will fail without reparations.
In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza exposes lesser-known aspects of racism in American history and how Black people have consistently been depicted as responsible for their own oppression to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and gross inequality. Goza’s iconoclastic and incisive account exposes how revered figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln embedded white supremacy deep into our nation’s consciousness—and how Ronald Reagan manipulated this ideology so that society cheered as he advanced a set of policies that wounded our nation and intensified Black America’s suffering.But Rebirth of a Nation is not merely about accountability. It is also about hope. A reparations process is not a utopian dream; Goza offers a practical path toward closing the racial wealth gap. Rebirth of a Nation shows readers how they can join the reparative process, working toward the creation of a more perfect union.
- PRE-ORDER: Under the Neon Lights
PRE-ORDER: Under the Neon Lights
by Arriel Vinson
$19.99PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: June 3, 2025
Sixteen-year-old Jaelyn Coleman lives for Saturdays at WestSide Roll, the iconic neighborhood roller rink. On these magical nights, Jae can lose herself in the music of DJ Sunny, the smell of nachos from the concession, and the crowd of some of her favorite people—old heads, dance crews, and other regulars like herself. Here, Jae and other Black teens can fully be themselves.
One Saturday, as Jae skates away her worries, she crashes into the cutest boy she’s ever seen. Trey’s dimples, rich brown skin, and warm smile make it impossible for her to be mad at him though. Best of all, he can’t stop finding excuses to be around her. A nice change for once, in contrast with her best friend’s cold distance of late or her estranged father creeping back into her life.
Just as Jae thinks her summer might change for the better, devastating news hits: Westside Roll is shutting down. The gentrification rapidly taking over her predominantly Black Indianapolis neighborhood, filling it with luxury apartments and fancy boutiques, has come for her safe-haven. And this is just one trouble Jae can’t skate away from.
- PRE-ORDER: Only For The Week (The Forever Falling Series)
PRE-ORDER: Only For The Week (The Forever Falling Series)
Natasha Bishop
$18.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: December 10, 2024
The buzzy, viral sensation Only For The Week, is the first book in Natasha Bishop’s The Forever Falling series, featuring Black love, messy family dynamics, sexy banter, and sweet and spicy romance.
You are cordially invited tothewedding of Amerie Cross and Arnold Hightower.
A destination wedding in Tulum should be a breeze, but Dr. Janelle Cross―thesister ofthebride andthe ex-girlfriend ofthegroom―can’t catch a break. Between her maid of honor duties, her sister’s Bridezilla antics, and her family tiptoeing around her non-existent feelingsforher ex, Janelle is desperate to let off some steam. So, whenthebest man, Rome, proposesthey give intotheir undeniable chemistry, Janelle agrees, under one condition:their affair canonlylast aweek.
What happens in Tulum doesn’t always stay in Tulum . . .
ForRome Martin, Janelle has always been off limits. She’s his best friends ex, and Rome is nothing if not loyal. But he’s never been able to get her off his mind, and now he might finally have a chance to win her over.
As thewedding bringsthem together, every kiss, adventure, and stolen moment feels right. Janelle and Rome agreed to live inthemoment, but arethey willing to risk it allforforever?
Tropes:
Friends with benefits
He falls first
Vacation romance
Family drama
Black joy
Forced proximity
Forbidden love
Fling to forever - Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba
Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba
Basma Ghalayini, Mazen Maarouf, Selma Dabbagh
$15.95Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 – a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event – which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes – reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians?
Covering a range of approaches – from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce – these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, and peace treaties that span parallel universes. Published originally in the United Kingdom by Comma Press in 2019, Palestine +100 reframes science fiction as a place for political justice and the safekeeping of identity.
- PRE-ORDER: Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World
PRE-ORDER: Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World
by Quito Swan
Sold outPRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: December 3, 2024
Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.
Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. - PRE-ORDER: A Misrepresented People : Manhood in Black Religious Thought
PRE-ORDER: A Misrepresented People : Manhood in Black Religious Thought
by Darrius D'Wayne Hills
$30.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: January 21, 2025
Although much Black religious scholarship has engaged with feminist theory and womanist thought, a gap remains where little work has been done in religious studies to investigate the Black male experience. A Misrepresented People explores how African American men grapple with identity and masculinity in relation to Black religious thought. This book counters the dominant portrayal of Black men in American society as suspicious, morally defective, and irredeemable, and showcases the strength and relevance of Black religious thought in developing alternative notions of Black manhood.
Drawing on womanist discourses, African American religious thought, literature, and Black male studies, as well as an examination of the writings and sermons of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr., Darrius D’wayne Hills offers a vision of Black male identity that is grounded in interpersonal relationships and connection. Positioning identity formation as a religious concern, Hills expands the application of religious scholarship toward the complex social and material realities faced by Black men. In doing so, this volume offers a much-needed new model for understanding Black male gender identity, illustrating how religious thought fosters more holistic and livable futures for African American men. - PRE-ORDER: Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century
PRE-ORDER: Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century
by Angela Jones
$35.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: November 19, 2024
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. - PRE-ORDER: Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women's Health
PRE-ORDER: Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women's Health
by Wylin D. Wilson
Sold outPRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: January 28, 2025
Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies.
Womanist Bioethics addresses this crisis from a bioethical standpoint. It offers a critique of mainstream bioethics as having embraced the perspective of its mainly white, male progenitors, limiting the extent to which it is positioned to engage the issues that particularly affect vulnerable populations. This book makes the provocative but essential case that because African American women– across almost every health indicator– fare worse than others. We must not only include, but center, Black women’s experiences and voices in bioethics discourse and practice.
To this end, Womanist Bioethics develops the first specifically womanist form of bioethics, focused on the diverse vulnerabilities and multiple oppressions that women of color face. This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable. It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances. At its core, the volume offers a new, broad-based approach to bioethics that is meant as a corrective to mainstream bioethics’ privileging of white, particularly male, experiences, and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women. - PRE-ORDER: Ghana to the World: Recipes and Stories That Look Forward While Honoring the Past
PRE-ORDER: Ghana to the World: Recipes and Stories That Look Forward While Honoring the Past
by Eric Adjepong and Korsha Wilson
$40.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: March 11, 2025
A transportive, highly personal cookbook of 100 West African-influenced recipes and stories from Top Chef finalist Eric Adjepong.
“Sankofa” is a Ghanaian Twi word that roughly translates to the idea that we must look back in order to move forward. In his moving debut cookbook, chef Eric Adjepong practices sankofa by showcasing the beauty and depth of West African food through the lens of his own culinary journey.
With 100 soul-satisfying recipes and narrative essays, Ghana to the World reflects Eric’s journey to understand his identity and unique culinary perspective as a first-generation Ghanaian American. The recipes in this book look forward and backward in time, balancing the traditional and the modern and exploring the lineage of West African cooking while embracing new elements. Eric includes traditional home-cooked meals from his mother, like a deeply flavorful jollof rice and a smoky, savory kontomire stew thick with leafy greens, alongside creative dishes influenced by his culinary education, like a sweet summer curried corn bisque and sticky tamarind-glazed duck legs.
Full of stunning photography shot in Ghana and remembrances rooted in family, tradition, and love, Ghana to the World shows readers how the unsung story of a continent’s cuisine can shine a powerful light on one person’s exploration of who he is as a chef and a man.
- PRE-ORDER: All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (Revised Edition)
PRE-ORDER: All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (Revised Edition)
by Emily L. Thuma and Sarah Haley
$19.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: November 12, 2024
A vital history of organizing within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons in the 1970s, illuminating a crucial chapter in today’s abolition feminist struggles.
This new edition of an award-winning book features a foreword from acclaimed scholar-activist Sarah Haley and an afterword by Thuma.
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Scholar-activist Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, imprisoned and institutionalized people’s rights, and gender and sexual liberation.
All Our Trials chronicles the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence.
Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, coalition organizing, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, All Our Trials reveals a vibrant culture of opposition to interpersonal and state violence that both transforms our understanding of 1970s social movements and illuminates the history of present struggles for transformative justice.
- PRE-ORDER: Behind the Waterline
PRE-ORDER: Behind the Waterline
by Kionna Walker LeMalle
$27.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: March 25, 2025
Winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize,Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.
When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle's masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric's street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric's grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric-in a dream, a hallucination, or something else-discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people-those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.
- PRE-ORDER: Dancing Woman
PRE-ORDER: Dancing Woman
by Elaine Neil Orr
$28.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: January 21, 2025
Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose.
It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural village where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.
Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?
- PRE-ORDER: Cold Thief Place
PRE-ORDER: Cold Thief Place
by Esther Lin
$24.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: March 11, 2025
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.
- PRE-ORDER: If I Gather Here and Shout
PRE-ORDER: If I Gather Here and Shout
by Funto Omojola
$17.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: November 12, 2024
A deft, musical debut poetry collection about the disabling effects of illness, rupture, and inheritance—informed both by Yoruba divinatory systems and violent Western medical understandings of the Black body.
If I Gather Here and Shout summons Yoruba divinatory rituals into a hospital room. Incantatory verses accumulate alongside personal and historical “figures” of illness and death to illuminate the tensions between legibility and meaning-making that emerge when an ill Black body is processed through a Western medical context. With intimate knowledge of how ancestral memory aches and sings in the body, Funto Omojola invokes a lamenting chorus in the ceremony of survival.
- PRE-ORDER: Permanent Record
PRE-ORDER: Permanent Record
by Naima Yael Tokunow
$22.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: February 11, 2025
A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices.
Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow’s research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Recordasks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity.”
- PRE-ORDER: TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever / The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington
PRE-ORDER: TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever / The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington
by James Ijames
$19.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: December 10, 2024
Two whip-smart satirical plays by the Pulitzer-winning author of Fat Ham that examine the racism at the root of America’s founding—and its fruits in our present.
In The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, the widow of George Washington and self-proclaimed “Mother of America” lies helpless in her bed, ravaged by illness and cared for by the very slaves that will be free the moment she dies. In the terrifying and fantastical fever dream that follows, Martha is called to account for her lifelong dependence on the labor of enslaved people. A wildly theatrical, gleefully anachronistic play that puts Martha Washington’s life and legacy on trial.
In a present-day reimagining of the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever takes place at Commonwealth of Virginia University, where a modern education is rooted in the nation’s “complicated” history. As the campus wrestles with its antebellum legacy, undergraduate student Sally finds herself locked in a more personal battle with Dean TJ, the white dean of students named after Thomas Jefferson, who shares his namesake’s predilection for grossly abusing his position of power over women of color. Amidst a swirl of marching bands, step teams, and bubbly tour guides, Sally must struggle to rewrite this too-familiar narrative, dismantle the wall of oppression, and embrace the dope ass future that waits beyond it.
- PRE-ORDER: Tsunami: Women’s Voices from Mexico
PRE-ORDER: Tsunami: Women’s Voices from Mexico
by Heather Cleary, Gabriela Jauregui, Julia Sanches, Diana J. Torres, Sara Uribe, and Zapatista Army for National Liberation
$25.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: February 11, 2025
Merging waves of feminist thought from established and emerging Mexican women writers, Tsunami arrives with seismic, groundbreaking force.
Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, dismantling its Eurocentric roots and directing its critical thrust towards current affairs in Mexico today. Asserting plurality as a political priority, Tsunami includes trans voices, Indigenous voices, Afro-Latinx voices, voices from within and outside academic institutions, and voices spanning generations. Tsunami is the combined force and critique of the three feminist waves, the marea verde (“green wave”) of protests that have swept through Latin America in recent years, and the tides turned by insurgent feminisms at the margins of public discourse.
Contributors include Marina Azahua, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Dahlia de la Cerda, Lia García, Margo Glantz, Jimena González, Fernanda Latani M. Bravo, Valeria Luiselli, Ytzel Maya, Brenda Navarro, Jumko Ogata, Daniela Rea, Cristina Rivera Garza, Diana J. Torres, Sara Uribe, and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation.
- PRE-ORDER: Daughters of the Nile
PRE-ORDER: Daughters of the Nile
by Zahra Barri
$18.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: December 3, 2024
A bold multi-generational debut novel exploring themes of queerness, revolution and Islamic sisterhood.
Paris, 1940. The course of Fatiha Bin-Khalid’s life is changed forever when she befriends the Muslim feminist Doria Shafik. But after returning to Egypt and dedicating years to the fight for women’s rights, she struggles to reconcile her political ideals with the realities of motherhood.
Cairo, 1966. After being publicly shamed when her relationship with a bisexual boyfriend is revealed, Fatiha’s daughter is faced with an impossible decision. Should Yasminah accept a life she didn’t choose, or will she leave her home and country in pursuit of independence?
Bristol, 2011. British-born Nadia is battling with an identity crisis and a severe case of herpes. Feeling unfulfilled (and after a particularly disastrous one-night stand), she moves in with her old-fashioned Aunt Yasminah and realises that she must discover her purpose in the modern world before it’s too late.
Following the lives of three women from the Bin-Khalid family, Daughters of the Nile is an original and darkly funny novel that examines the enduring strength of female bonds. These women are no strangers to adversity, but they must learn from the past and relearn shame and shamelessness to radically change their futures.
- PRE-ORDER: Speakin O' Christmas and Other Christmas Poems (Mint Editions (Black Narratives))
PRE-ORDER: Speakin O' Christmas and Other Christmas Poems (Mint Editions (Black Narratives))
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
$14.99PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: November 12, 2024
“Breezes blowin’ middlin’ brisk, / Snowflakes thro’ the air a-whisk, / Fallin’ kind o’ soft an’ light, /Not enough to make things white, / But jest sorter siftin’ down / So ’s to cover up the brown /Of the dark world’s rugged ways / ’N’ make things look like holidays. /Not smoothed over, but jest specked, / Sorter strainin’ fur effect, / An’ not quite a-gittin’ through / What it started in to do. / Mercy sakes! It does seem queer / Christmas day is ’most nigh here. / Somehow it don’t seem to me /Christmas like it used to be,― / Christmas with its ice an’ snow, / Christmas of the long ago.”
Once praised by Frederick Douglass as “the most promising young colored man in America,” Paul Laurence Dunbar was an exceptionally gifted poet who helped lay the foundation of African American literature and was the first African American poet to achieve major success across the color line. Published posthumously nearly ten years after his untimely death, Speakin’ O’ Christmas and Other Christmas Poems, collects over a dozen of his most festive, holiday-themed verses into a single volume, including, “Chrismus is A-Comin’,” “Soliloquy of a Turkey,” “Christmas in the Heart,” and the titular, “Speakin’ O’ Christmas.”
Celebrating both the spirit of the holiday season and the talent of the “Negro dialect” poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Speakin’ O’ Christmas and Other Poems is a delightful collection of poetry for readers of all ages.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
- PRE-ORDER: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
PRE-ORDER: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
by Amos Tutuola
$17.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: May 20, 2025
Amos Tutuola’s second novel recounting the fate of mortals who stray into the world of ghosts, now available in a standalone volume
First published in 1954, now acclaimed as a modern classic, and named one of TIME’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time,” My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the second novel by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. A small boy finds himself lost in the heart of an impenetrable African forest, populated with fantastical beings and ghosts. As every hunter and traveler knows, it is almost impossible to leave the bush—yet the appearance of the television-handed ghostess may offer him a rare opportunity for escape. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a masterpiece of the surreal that blends Tutuola’s native Yoruba culture with the encroaching influences of British and Christian colonialism in West Africa, a picaresque and darkly funny journey that is unique in literature.
- PRE-ORDER: The Palm-Wine Drinkard
PRE-ORDER: The Palm-Wine Drinkard
by Amos Tutuola
$17.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: May 20, 2025
Amos Tutuola’s masterful first novel of a nightmarish quest into the land of the dead, now available in a standalone volume with an introduction by Wole Soyinka
Widely considered to be his masterpiece, Amos Tutuola’s debut novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard was first published in 1952. Named one of TIME’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time” and introduced here by Wole Soyinka, the novel tells the phantasmagorical story of a wealthy alcoholic who drinks 225 kegs of palm wine a day. When the man’s personal tapster dies and leaves him without any remaining supply of alcohol, the man desperately follows the tapster into the nightmarish Dead’s Town. Drawing on Yoruba folklore and narrated with a unique voice that mixes West African oral traditions with the Colonial British English that Tutuola learned at school, The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a seminal work of African literature from one of Nigeria’s most influential writers and an important part of the global literary canon.
- PRE-ORDER: The Poppy War Collector's Edition: A Novel (The Poppy War, 1)
PRE-ORDER: The Poppy War Collector's Edition: A Novel (The Poppy War, 1)
by R. F Kuang and JungShan
$45.00PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: November 26, 2024
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface comes an all-new, fully illustrated, collector’s edition of R. F. Kuang’s debut novel, The Poppy War. Considered one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time, the story of orphaned Rin’s rise to power gets a fresh look with a full-wrap illustrated jacket and black-and-white interior art by JungShan Chang throughout, plus embossed case, designed end papers, and sprayed edges.
When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising.
But surprises aren’t always good.
Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.
For while the Nikara Empire is at peace, the Federation of Mugen still lurks across a narrow sea. The militarily advanced Federation occupied Nikan for decades after the First Poppy War, and only barely lost the continent in the Second. And while most of the people are complacent to go about their lives, a few are aware that a Third Poppy War is just a spark away . . .
Rin’s shamanic powers may be the only way to save her people. But as she finds out more about the god that has chosen her, the vengeful Phoenix, she fears that winning the war may cost her humanity . . . and that it may already be too late.
- PRE-ORDER: Before We Forget Kindness: A Novel (Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series, 5)
PRE-ORDER: Before We Forget Kindness: A Novel (Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series, 5)
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
$21.99PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: Novemner 5, 2024
In the fifth book in the sensational, cozy Before the Coffee Gets Cold series translated from Japanese, the mysterious café where customers arrive hoping to travel back in time welcomes four new guests:
- The father who could not allow his daughter to get married
- A woman who couldn't give Valentine's Day chocolates to her loved one
- A boy who wants to show his smile to his divorced parents
- A wife holding a child with no name . . .They must follow the café's strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold. Another moving and heartwarming tale from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, in Before we forget kindness our new visitors wish to go back into their past to move on their present, finding closure and comfort so they can embark on a beautiful future.
Catch up on the rest of the captivating Before the Coffee Gets Cold series:
* Before the Coffee Gets Cold
* Tales from the Cafe
* Before Your Memory Fades
* Before We Say Goodbye - PRE-ORDER: Church Girl
PRE-ORDER: Church Girl
by Naima Simone
$12.99PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: November 26, 2024
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
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