"This illuminating volume will liberate many women from self-suppression and its frequent consequence, physical illness."— Gabor Maté M.D. New York Times bestselling author of The Myth of Normal

Foreword by Dr. Richard Carmona MD, MPH, FACS, 17th Surgeon General of the United States

The inspirational, deeply researched wellness journey by the award-winning filmmaker, activist, and founder of Women Rising, shining a light on how too many girls are trained to self-silence and serve others—and how we can heal.

For generations, women have been told to be “good”—to put others first, to silence their own voices, to neglect their own needs. But a new groundswell of evidence reveals the cost: when our lives are compromised, so are our immune systems.

Raised in a big Texas-Lebanese family as the eldest and only daughter, Sara Hirsh Bordo grew up caring for everyone else’s needs at the expense of her own. Later, as an acclaimed director lifting up other women’s stories, she watched her own body collapse under the weight of autoimmune disease and cancer. Only when she finally reclaimed sovereignty over her own voice, did she heal.

Determined to understand this link, Sara funded the first quantitative research at the intersection of female empowerment and autoimmunity. The results were groundbreaking: women raised in caretaker roles—especially eldest daughters—are disproportionately likely to develop autoimmune diseases such as Hashimoto’s, lupus, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and more. This study, endorsed by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona, garnered national media attention and has been shared across 20 countries.

In these pages, you will find:

* How compromised girlhood identities create compromised immune systems in womanhood—and how to rewrite your story.
* Impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on autoimmunity and poor health.
* Stunning findings from her research, such as more than 6 in 10 women with autoimmune diseases were raised as the oldest or only daughter in their families
* What radically changes in health when authenticity, environment, and self-permission finally align.
* Inner girlhood work, including re-mothering through modern and mystical feminine archetypes.
* How to unlearn your primary role as a caregiver and practical guides for evolving from “good” to “real” at any age.

Weaving together memoir, exclusive expert interviews, evidence-based findings, and women’s personal stories, Autoimmunity and the Good Girls is a rousing testament to the missing modality in women’s health— sovereign self-permission to speak up, to transform, and heal.

Celebrate the release of Expecting Inequity with Khiara M. Bridges! The event will feature a moderated conversation, audience Q&A, and book signing, followed by a community art activation led by The Call Me Mother Experience.

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, October 29 @ 7PM CST

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

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat.
• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your seat and purchase a copy Expecting Inequity, supporting both the author and our store programming. The book will be available for pickup at the event.

Please Note: 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 purchase a copy from Kindred Stories. 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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Khiara M. Bridges is the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley School of Law. 

She is a nationally-recognized expert on the intersection of race, class, and reproductive rights. Her scholarship has appeared in the most influential law reviews in the country, including the flagship law journals at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, among many others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019, 2026). Her fourth book, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans, was released in March 2026.

Bridges graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically-trained ballet dancer who danced professionally in New York City for twenty years before moving to the Bay Area.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton is a multi-modal storyteller whose work documents, examines, and celebrates the complexities of Black American life. She has authored Newsworthy (Bloomsday Literary, 2019), Black Chameleon (Henry Holt & Co., 2023), which won the Carr P. Collins award for Best Nonfiction through the Texas Institute of Letters, and Hush Hush Hurricane (Kokila Books, 2027). This three-time TEDx speaker has contributed to Glamour, Texas Monthly, and ESPN's Andscape and written theatrical works that have premiered at Chicago Opera Theater, the Kennedy Center, and National Sawdust. Her upcoming immersive art installation, The Call Me Mother Experience, amplifies the Black Maternal Health crisis.

A fun, exciting, and informative guide to sexual health, wellness, and pleasure for women of color

In Pleasure, Please! The Black Woman's Guide to Unapologetic Pleasure and Confidence, certified sex educator Ashley Cobb delivers a comprehensive and empowering new exploration of sexual wellness for women of color (and especially Black women). Cobb draws on her extensive experience and expertise in women's health, sexuality, and activism to walk you through everything from individual empowerment to effective ways to confront and overcome the barriers and stigma that Black women face.

You'll discover expert advice interwoven with real stories from real women who have been in your shoes and dealt with the same issues you deal with every day. You'll also find answers to the questions women most frequently ask the author to answer, as well as crystal-clear, informative guidance you can apply in your own life and relationships to help you make your life better now.

Pleasure, Please! also includes:

* Tips and advice on self-love, body positivity, and improving your sense of sexual agency
* Techniques for pleasure and self-exploration to help you enhance your sexual pleasure and explore what you desire – and how to best satisfy those desires
* Specific guidance for navigating the unique sexual health and pleasure challenges that Black women often face

Perfect for all women of color who want to improve their sexual health and get more fulfilment, enjoyment, and pleasure from their bodies, Pleasure, Please! is also an essential read for the partners of those women who want to help and support their partners' sex education and body positivity.

A compassionate guide to navigating generational mother wounds and strained relationships with mothers, helping you grieve and move forward in healing through biblical wisdom and practical strategies—from the bestselling author of Church Girl.

Whether you seek to improve your relationship with your mother, recover from past hurts, or simply be a mother who doesn't deeply wound your own child, Honor Thy Mother is your companion on this courageous journey of healing your heart, finding true peace, and drawing closer to God.

Dr. Sarita T. Lyons serves as an honest and compassionate guide, showing you how to confront the difficulties between your idealized mother and reality, shedding light on various mother archetypes, helping you grieve the mother you wish you’d had, and more.

Full of biblical wisdom, hope, and practical advice, this book empowers you to recognize and address your unique maternal challenges. With actionable strategies, like owning your experience, engaging in therapy, practicing spiritual disciplines, building community support, committing to peace, and identifying a spiritual mother, along with discussion questions, journal prompts, and ways to move toward a realistic plan for restoration, you'll find the tools you need to start your journey and learn what it really means to honor your mother. Dr. Lyons offers a path to healing and peace and will ultimately help you bring you the freedom and blessings you long for.

Former CNN News anchor Poppy Harlow and Saturday TODAY's Laura Jarrett celebrate how love comes in many forms—now in board book!

If love were a color, what color would it be?

Everyone in Ms. Clementine's class has a different answer, but Grace doesn't know which color to choose. Love could be blue like her favorite pair of shoes or yellow like the daffodils that grow in her neighborhood. As Grace and her classmates share what love looks like to them, they learn that it comes in many forms.

Former CNN news anchor Poppy Harlow and Saturday TODAY's Laura Jarrett have created a warmhearted tale that encourages young readers to celebrate the many meanings of love.

From Playboy to Jay-Z, the racial origins of toxic masculinity and its impact on women, especially Black and “insufficiently white” women

More men than ever are refusing loving partnerships and commitment, and instead seeking out “situationships.” When these men deign to articulate what they are looking for in a steady partner, they’ll often rely on superficial norms of attractiveness rooted in whiteness and anti-Blackness.

Connecting the past to the present, sociologist Sabrina Strings argues that following the Civil Rights movement and the integration of women during the Second Wave Feminist movement, men aimed to hold on to their power by withholding love and commitment, a basic tenet of white supremacy and male domination, that served to manipulate all women. From pornography to hip hop, women—especially Black and “insufficiently white” women—were presented as gold diggers, props for masturbation, and side-pieces.

Using historical research, personal stories, and critical analysis, Strings argues that the result is fuccboism, the latest incarnation of toxic masculinity. This work shows that men are not innately “toxic.” Nor do they hate love, commitment, or sex. Instead, men across race have been working a new code to effectively deny loving partnerships to women who are not pliant, slim, and white as a new mode of male domination.

The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.

Thirty years after its original publication, this newly imagined edition brings the work and musings of fifteen Black literary luminaries in conversation with a new generation of writers and readers.

The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Barbara Neely, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world, including Donika Kelly, Safiya Sinclair, Diamond Sharp, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, among others. This new edition also includes an introductory poem by Morgan Parker, a foreword by Salamishah Tillet, and a new author’s note. The new contributors carry the torch of the original interviewees’ lives and words with heart, rigor, gratitude, and radical imagination, illuminating how these conversations are about more than just writing―they are about life, relationships, joy, gratitude, wellness, and self-preservation.

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.

A path-breaking work of biography of two American giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives would forever be altered by the Cold War, and would explosively intersect before its most notorious weapon, the House Un-American Activities Committee — from one of the best sports and culture writers working today. 

Kings and Pawns is the untold story of sports and fame, Black America and the promise of integration through the Cold War lens of two transformative events. The first occurred July 18, 1949 in Washington, D.C., when a reluctant Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star who integrated the game and at the time was the most famous Black man in America, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor — himself once the most famous Black man in America. The testimony would be a defining moment in Robinson’s life and contribute heavily to the destruction of Robeson’s iconic reputation in the eyes of America.

The second occurred June 12, 1956, in the midst of the last, demagogic roar of McCarthyism, when a battered, defiant Robeson – prohibited from leaving the United States – faced off in a final showdown with HUAC in the same setting Robinson appeared in seven years earlier. These two moments would epitomize the ongoing Black American conflict between patriotism and protest. On the cusp of a nascent civil rights movement, Robinson and Robeson would represent two poles of a people pitted against itself by forces that demanded loyalty without equality in return – one man testifying in conflicted service to and the other in ferocious critique of a country that would ultimately and decisively wound both.

In a time of great division, with America in the midst of a new era of retrenchment and Black athletes again chilled into silence advocating for civil rights, the story of these two titans reverberates today within and beyond Black America. From the revival of government overreach to curb civil liberties to the Cold War-era rhetoric of “the enemy within” levied against fellow citizens, Kings and Pawns is a story of a moment that remains hauntingly present.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

Until now, you've only heard one side of the story: how slavery began, and how America split itself in two to end it. Here's the true story of America from the African American perspective.

From the moment Africans were first brought to the shores of the United States, they had a hand in shaping the country. Their labor created a strong economy, built our halls of government, and defined American society in profound ways. And though the Emancipation Proclamation wasn't signed until 300 years after the first Africans arrived, the fight for freedom started the moment they set foot on American soil. 
This book contains the true narrative of the first 300 years of Africans in America: the struggles, the heroes, and the untold stories that are left out of textbooks. If you want to learn the truth about African American history in this country, start here.

Poetry. African & African American Studies. California Interest. Curated by Tureeda Mikell. Cover art by John Sims. The PATRICE LUMUMBA anthology collects the liberatory words of 24 authors, many of whom call Oakland, California, home. Herein are explorations of contemporary colonization, the racial/physical/mental/physic abuses of power, locations of home, alternative modes of work, the health profession, and the healing powers of history. These poems are a call to action for collective change— now. Contributors include Dee Allen, Sarai Bordeaux, James Cagney, Dajuan Carter-Woodard, Meilani Clay, Jeneé Darden, Sarah Dudzic Iyer, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Lynsie Falco, QR Hand Jr., Alie Jones, Melissa Jones, Joan Tarika Lewis, Brandon Logans, Tureeda Mikell, Ayodele Nzinga, Adrienne Oliver, Halima Olufemi, Joy Priest, Tolbert Small, Landon Smith, and Mimi Tempestt.