From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Heart Talk (named “The Millennial Oprah” by New York magazine) comes an essential book of daily wisdom, a secular devotional designed to uplift and comfort readers across 365 days.

In a World of Sunrises is an entirely new collection of poetry, Heart Talkesque prose, and inspiring quotes designed to uplift and comfort Cleo Wade’s readers over 365 days: ideas you will want to savor; mantras that motivate you to hold onto hope; and quotes from authors that helped shaped her.

The entries will remind readers that change is always possible, not only within ourselves but in the world around us. This book is about feeling good, and feeling like wherever you are in your life is okay and wherever you want to go is possible. It’s about smiling through our tears, it’s about miracles and joy. Befriending each other and ourselves, lightening up, and giving ourselves (and everyone else) grace because life rains its challenges on all of us.

Finally, as with all of Cleo’s books, it’s a hug. A friend who is always happy to see you.

While more and more people are looking to log off social media to find calm and encouragement, In a World of Sunrises is designed to fit easily into daily life. The pages are filled with loving, wise, and warm ways to start, end, or find pause throughout the day. As Cleo has learned from her Heart Talk readers over the years, what people need most, is a small moment to themselves. Life is so complicated, inspiration at its best and most helpful feels simple and easeful. In a World of Sunrises gives readers that gift...every day.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

An exciting account of the international adventures of fashion model Pat Cleveland—one of the first black supermodels during the wild sixties and seventies.

“Taking her reader through fifty years of fashion from the intersection of the Civil Rights Movement, the disco era's decadence, and the grandeur of Hollywood’s late 70s renaissance, Cleveland provides a glimpse at some of design’s most important moments—and her own personal history.” —Vogue

“Pat Cleveland is to fashion what Billie Holiday is to the blues; a muse for all ages.” —Essence

Chronicling of the glamorous life and adventures of Pat Cleveland—one of the first black supermodels—this compelling memoir evokes the bohemian lifestyle and creative zeitgeist of 1970s New York City and features some of today’s most prominent names in fashion, art, and entertainment as they were just gaining their creative footage.

New York in the sixties and seventies was glamorous and gritty at the same time, a place where people like Warhol, Avedon, and Halston as well as their muses came to pursue their wildest ambitions, and when the well began to run dry they darted off to Paris. Though born on the very fringes of this world, Patricia Cleveland, through a combination of luck, incandescent beauty, and enviable style, soon found herself in the center of all that was creative, bohemian, and elegant. A “walking girl,” a runway fashion model whose inimitable style still turns heads on the runways of New York, Paris, Milan, and Tokyo, Cleveland was in high demand.

Ranging from the streets of New York to the jet-set beaches of Mexico, from the designer drawing rooms of Paris to the offices of Vogue, here is Cleveland’s larger-than-life story. One minute she’s in a Harlem tenement making her own clothes and dreaming of something bigger, the next she’s about to walk Halston’s show alongside fellow model Anjelica Huston. One minute she’s partying with Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, the next she’s sharing the dance floor next to a man with stark white hair, an artist the world would later know as Warhol. In New York, she struggles to secure her first cover of a major magazine. In Paris, she’s the toast of the town. And through the whirlwind of it all, she is forever in pursuit of love, truth, and beauty in this “riveting, celeb-drenched account of her astonishing life in fashion” (Simon Doonan, author of The Asylum).

*ships in 7-10 business days

Birthing Liberation presents reproductive justice as the pathway to equity and the birthplace of liberation.

Sabia C. Wade, renowned radical doula and educator, speaks to the intersections of systemic issues—such as access to health care, house transportation, and nutrition—and personal trauma work that, if healed, have the power to lead us to collective liberation in all facets of life.

Collective liberation rests on the idea that in order for us all to have equity in this world—from the safety of childbirth, to the ability to bring a baby home to a safe community, to having access to resources, safety, and opportunities over the long term—we must all become liberated individuals.

Birthing Liberation creates a path to social and systemic change, starting within the birthing world and expanding far beyond.

Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap—introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gay—reckons with complexities of racial identity, masculinity, recovery, and spirituality, revealing the narrative and psychic evolution of a poet who has found himself in the language.

Wade’s evocative debut swaggers through time, through family, through love, through the perseverance of growing up in the deep South as a Black son with a white mom. Illustrating the strangeness and cacophony of his native New Orleans, he divines sweet relief in small mercies—a rosary strung with Mardi Gras beads, a Sunday football game, Nigel Hall covering Frankie Beverly in Lafayette Square, bare feet in a stream, a mother kneading dough. In intimate, nuanced portraits of loved ones, in requiems and broken sestinas, he pushes past his trauma, troubling the years he spent in addiction or resenting his father.

As he maps out the parts he played in his life’s most formative moments, he can’t help but “retune the heart / strings of hard men,” teaching us how to become more human, often in the face of inhumanity. Here, he manages to land, not a crushing blow, but a love tap—the softest way to knuckle another’s cheek.

Their love was supposed to last forever. But when life delivered blow after devastating blow, Yasmen and Josiah Wade found that love alone couldn’t solve or save everything.

It couldn’t save their marriage.

Yasmen wasn’t prepared for how her life fell apart, but she’s is finally starting to find joy again. She and Josiah have found a new rhythm, co-parenting their two kids and running a thriving business together. Yet like magnets, they’re always drawn back to each other, and now they’re beginning to wonder if they’re truly ready to let go of everything they once had.

Soon, one stolen kiss leads to another…and then more. It's hot. It's illicit. It's all good—until old wounds reopen. Is it too late for them to find forever? Or could they even be better, the second time around?

Award-winning and bestselling "powerhouse" author Kennedy Ryan is at her absolute best in this compelling, scorching novel about hope and healing, and what it truly means to love for a lifetime (USA Today).

Cleopatra tells her own story in this evocative and sensuous historical epic from the bestselling and award-winning author of Faebound and The Final Strife.

This stunning edition includes designed endpapers and a custom case stamp.

YOU KNOW MY NAME, BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW ME.

Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love's thrall.

Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves.

Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children.

How wilfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, and divinely blessed to rule.

Death will silence me no longer.

This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.

Celebrate the release of The Black Madonna with Christena Cleveland!

EVENT DEETS

When: Monday, September 21 @ 6:30 PM CST

Where: Virtual via Zoom. (We'll send you the Zoom link!)

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your spot.
• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your spot and purchase a copy of The Black Madonna, supporting both the author and our store programming. The book will be available for pickup or shipped on the day of the event.

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your book. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event. If you do not retrieve your event book , it will be returned to the publisher and you are not eligible for a refund. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Meet Black Madonna—Mother of Abundance, Holy Insurrectionist, Our Lady of F Around and Find Out

This bold reclamation of the divine feminine offers a new vision of Black Madonna as a unifying figure of refuge, resistance, and renewal. When we are exhausted and burned out, Black Madonna invites us to surrender to her protective embrace and be revitalized by her subversive life force. When disillusionment takes hold, Black Madonna offers radical belonging—urging us to reclaim our own sacred power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christena Cleveland, Ph.D. is a social psychologist, public theologian, author, and activist. A weaver of Black liberation and the Divine Feminine, Dr. Cleveland embraces the archetype of the Black Madonna as she guides people of all races and genders into freedom, wholeness, and embodied justice. She is the founder of the Black Madonna Freedom School, which nurtures courageous and compassionate people who are uprooting white patriarchal religious conditioning in themselves and their communities, while skillfully planting intersectional divine feminine wisdom. Her latest book is The Black Madonna: Icon of Resistance & Nourisher of Souls where she explores the miraculous, liberating, and zany ways that the Black Madonna has protected, empowered, and nourished people around the globe and throughout history. An award-winning researcher and former professor at Duke University’s Divinity School, Christena lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can discover more about the Black Madonna and Christena at www.christenacleveland.com.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, PhD., is an African Diasporic literature professor and writer. Her first academic book was Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman (Palgrave 2011). Gordon-Chipembere has been published in various academic presses, including Callaloo and Small Axe and also writes public facing non-fiction, which has been published in Essence. She has been the recipient of three Fulbright Fellowships, where she conducted research and taught at the University of Nairobi Kenya (1992-1993), Chancellor College, the University of Malawi (June-August 2010) and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (June-July 2025). She continues to serve as a co-editor of the AfroLatin@Diasporas Book Series at Palgrave/Springer, as a founder with the late Miriam Jimenez-Roman and Juan Flores. Born and raised in New York to Costa Rican and Panamanian parents, Gordon-Chipembere relocated to Costa Rica with her husband and two children in 2014. In Costa Rica, Gordon-Chipembere focuses on promoting the Afro-descendant  legacy.  For five years, she wrote a monthly column on race and diversity, "Musings from an AfroCosta Rican¨ for the Tico Times, the longest established English language newspaper in Costa Rica. Her first historical fiction novel, Finding La Negrita (part one in a trilogy on AfroCosta Ricans) was published in 2022 (Jaded Ibis Press). It is a re-writing of the Black Madonna narrative in Costa Rica from an Africanist perspective.  Finding La Negrita won the 2023 Silver IPPY Award for Best Historical Fiction and was nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Best Debut Novel in 2023. Her second work-in-progress, 1710, focuses on the shipwrecks of two Danish slave ships on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica on March 2, 1710. Gordon-Chipembere is the founder and host of the annual Tengo Sed Writing Retreat for writers of color in Costa Rica. She co-edited with Yndia Lorick-Wilmont, Tengo Sed: An Anthology of Works Celebrating Black Voices, Identities, and Personhood (University of Illinois Press 2026), which documents the artistic production of Tengo Sed participants since its inception in 2015. Gordon-Chipembere is a member of a large AfroCosta Rican women advocacy group (CostaRicaAfro) in San Jose which provides mentorship, community discussions and cultural events to highlight the legacy of AfroCosta Ricans, who are not highly visible in the country. Dr. Gordon-Chipembere lectures widely on these issues nationally and internationally.

Celebrate the release of Good Spirits with Tiffanie Barriere! This special evening will feature an author conversation with Tiffanie and Chef Dominic Lee, owner of Augustine’s, followed by a cocktail tasting featuring recipes from the book. Join us for an engaging evening of conversation, cocktails, and good spirits!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, December 10 @ 7PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St., HTX 77004)

How: 

• RSVP ONLY
  Reserve your seat and participate in the tasting.

  RSVP WITH BOOK
  Reserve your seat and purchase a copy of Good Spirits, supporting both the author and our store programming. Your book will be available for pickup at the event. Includes the tasting.

  RSVP (I ALREADY HAVE THE BOOK)
  Reserve your seat and let us know you plan to bring a copy of Good Spirits that you previously purchased from another bookseller. Includes the tasting.

Please Note: Generally books purchased from other retailers are not permitted in the bookstore and are not eligible for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must either purchase a copy from Kindred Stories or select the RSVP: I Already Have the Book ticket option, which allows you to bring a copy purchased elsewhere. If you already purchased your book from Kindred Stories, you may select the RSVP Only ticket option and bring your Kindred Stories copy to the event.

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your book. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event. If your book is not retrieved it will be returned to the publisher and will not be available for pick up in the future.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The must-have companion for classic cocktails, mocktails, and creative drinks, plus historical insights, from a celebrated industry icon.

Good Spirits is a culture-rich cocktail exploration that seamlessly blends practiced technique with deep historical knowledge. For master bartender and cocktail educator Tiffanie Barriere, the bar has always been a place where history, creativity, and community combine. From gold-standard martinis and expert Manhattans to drinks inspired by mood, the cocktail curious will learn not only how to skillfully mix and pour with joy, but also about the fascinating and often untold history behind our favorite drinks and spirits.

In addition to the backstories and recipes for 125 cocktails, enthusiasts will find illuminating essays about choosing and using spirits and the legacies (both bitter and sweet) behind them; important historical figures who invented our favorite drinks, liqueurs, and bar tools; and truths that track the impact of trends and cocktail movements. Zero-proof variations abound thanks to the ingenious concept of cocktail “stock”, while dozens of bold-flavored syrups, shrubs, and infusions make it just as easy and exciting to take a drink in a no-alcohol direction as a boozy one. Insights on tools, garnishing, ice types, and the difference between shaking, rolling, and aerating set you up to hone your mixology and make drinks with confidence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tiffanie Barriere is a bartender’s bartender and award-winning mixologist, educator, and hospitality leader. The former beverage director at One Flew South, the “Best Airport Bar in the World,” she has been honored as a Food & Wine Game Changer and a Tales of the Cocktail Visionary Award recipient. She has contributed cocktail recipes to several cocktail books and cookbooks, including Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice and Modern Classic Cocktails. Her work has also been featured in Imbibe, Forbes, Essence, and Southern Living. She is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Rooted in the unique tapestry of Creole culture, Chef Dominick Lee’s culinary journey pays heartfelt homage to his New Orleans heritage. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Lee’s passion for cooking led him to The Art Institute of Houston, where he received the inaugural “Underbelly Scholarship” from James Beard award-winning chef Chris Shepherd. His journey to his Bachelors in Culinary Management included roles as sous chef at Bay Oaks Country Club, Executive Sous Chef under James Beard semifinalist Chef Kiran Verma at Kiran’s and stages at some of the most highly acclaimed restaurants in the country, including Alinea (2 Michelin Stars), Next (1 Michelin Star), and Blue Hill at Stone Barns (2 Michelin Stars). At 29, Lee became one of the youngest executive chefs in Houston, taking the helm at Poitín Bar & Kitchen where he earned accolades such as Texas Monthly’s 2019 Best New Restaurants and a number of “Rising Star Chef” distinctions.

In 2021, Lee relocated to Europe to study Creole food derivatives and served as head chef at Villa Lena in Tuscany. Two years later, he returned back to The States, opening Alligator Pear in New York City, which showcased a New American menu inspired by New Orleans. Now, Lee has returned to Houston to open Augustine’s, a progressive Creole restaurant exploring the many dimensions of his Creole heritage — debuting Summer 2026.

Gail Simmons will be in conversation with Chris Shepherd on November 17th at the Hobby Center as part of her official book tour.  Get tickets HERE!

From author, culinary expert, and Top Chef judge Gail Simmons comes a fun, informative, and trailblazing guide to a rarely-explored side of hospitality: how to be a great guest.

Countless influential voices have written books about hosting, offering tips for what to cook, how to set the perfect table, mix the best drinks and create the most welcoming vibes. But hospitality, by definition, involves at least two people; where is the advice for guests?

Culinary expert and perennial Top Chef judge Gail Simmons is something of a professional on the subject. As a tastemaker and lifestyle authority, she is invited to countless social events running the gamut from world-class fine dining and international affairs to neighborhood potlucks. Through it all, she knows that for any gathering to be a success, guests must rise to the occasion and actively embrace their role.

In Guesting, Gail unpacks the reciprocal nature of this relationship and explores the sometimes-tricky choreography that governs its dance. She also shares her essential tenets of guesting, and proven strategies for navigating any social situation (yes, even assigned seating). From dinner parties to weddings, religious observances to restaurants, Guesting guides readers through all types of “get-togethers” with confidence and grace. It also connects the vital role guesting plays in our wellbeing and the integrity of our collective culture, at a moment when technology and the temptation for short-term comfort have diminished our inherent need to create―and maintain―human relationships.

And since any good guest knows that bringing something to the table is always the right move, Gail shares ideas and recipes for thoughtful store-bought contributions, homemade food gifts, and favorite dishes to share with a crowd. Whether you’re visiting an old friend, going out for dinner, or attending a milestone celebration, Gail has the answers and inspiration to help you become the consummate guest.