We're using puzzle making as an excuse to be in community with you all!!!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, November 14 at 6PM

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

How: $5 to reserve your spot and libations. 

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us as we attempt to complete PLANT WORLD 1,000 Piece Puzzle, illustrated by  Hye Jin Chung. She puts her fantastical spin on botanica with a larger than life celebration of plants.

We'll provide the puzzles, trays, and drinks. We encourage bringing your favorite snacks or  anything to make you feel cozy and comfortable!

Note: This event is intended for adults!

Celebrate the release of Chronicles of Ori with Harmonia Rosales!

EVENT DEETS

When: Friday, November 21 @ 7PM

Where: Kindred Stories(2310 Elgin St, Unity 2, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming.

ABOUT THE BOOK

From the acclaimed fine artist Harmonia Rosales, a sweeping retelling of African myth illustrated throughout with Rosales’s spectacular paintings.

In Chronicles of Ori, her debut book, Harmonia Rosales retells the African myths she has long treasured, crafting an enthralling epic that spans the birth of the universe to the modern world of colonialism and resistance. She writes of the powerful, temperamental deities called the Orishas; of the founding of Yorubaland by the shrewd leader Oduduwa; of the young heroine Eve, born in a time of violence and despair, who would help her people regain their past splendor; and of shimmering serpents and monstrous shadows who stalk the lands of mortals. At the center of these linked tales is the bond, sometimes fraying, between the Orishas and the humans who worship them. It was the Orishas who made humans, and who gave them their most precious resource: their Oris, or destinies. Vividly brought to life by Rosales’s artwork, Chronicles of Ori will enlighten and delight readers for years to come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Harmonia Rosales is a Chicago-born, Afro-Cuban American artist and author whose work centers the visibility and empowerment of Black women in Western art. Growing up visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, Rosales was captivated by Renaissance painting—but years later, her daughter’s simple observation that “they don’t look like me” exposed the exclusion at the heart of that tradition.

That moment sparked Rosales’s artistic journey: reimagining Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces with Black protagonists and centering West African spirituality. Since 2017, her work has visualized the Orishas, the deities of the Yoruba tradition, and explored the survival of their stories across the Middle Passage. With bold, uncompromising imagery and prose, Rosales challenges Eurocentric ideals of beauty, power, and divinity, reshaping both art history and cultural consciousness. 

Rosales has previously been the subject of exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN; the Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; the Wright Museum, Detroit MI, among others. Her work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, Washington D.C.; Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and others.

Her debut novel, CHRONICLES OF ORI: An African Epic, will be available beginning October 14, 2025; it is published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

EVENT DEETS:

When: February 4, 2023, at 6:30 PM (Door Open at 6:00 PM)

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

How: Purchase your ticket TODAY! Each ticket comes with entry as well as two cocktails. THIS EVENT IS FOR ADULTS (21+) ONLY!

ABOUT THE SPELLING BEE:

Contestants will be asked to spell words that speak to the theme of Black History Month over the course of four rounds. If you misspell the word, you are out!  As the words get harder, you might be able to Phone a Friend or Battle to earn your place back into the competition. The last three contestants standing will receive a prize!

Fun and music-filled, this event is for folks looking for something BLACKITY BLACK to do on a Saturday night! 

If you have any questions please reach out to laniseharris@gmail.com or chanecka@kindredstorieshtx.com.

Join us at Kindred Stories to celebrate two legendary authors: Beverly Jenkins and Brenda Jackson!

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, October 25 @ 7PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, #2, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming

*Attendees are required to purchase at least one recent release by one of the attending authors.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

Calling All Blessings

Tamar July, town matriarch of Henry Adams, KS, is being haunted by dreams of her humiliating wedding day, sixty years ago, when she discovered her intended, Joel Newton, was already married. The truth left her furious, heartbroken, and carrying a child, her son Malachi “Mal” July. Why are these dreams coming to her now? And is the great horned owl perched on her backyard shed somehow connected? When Joel’s legitimate son comes to Henry Adams wanting to meet his half-brother, Mal, Tamar must deal with her past, her anger, and explore what it means to truly forgive.

Tamar isn’t the only one being tested. Teenager Devon July wants to be anyone but himself. When he first arrived in Henry Adams, as an eight-year-old foster child, he wanted to be a preacher. Then, to be like his adopted brother, Amari. Now, he’s decided to be a variant of James Brown—wig included—rather than who he really is, a boy who lost his beloved grandmother and is the son of a mentally challenged woman. Will Tamar be able to guide his spirit quest and place him on the road to finally being at peace within himself?

As the big August 1^st celebration nears, town owner Bernadine Brown has a lot on her plate, chief among them, what to do with former mayor Riley Curry’s monstrous tribute to his hog Cletus. There are no secrets in Henry Adams, but there’s never a dull moment either. 

Spilling the Tea

After sustaining injuries in Iraq, Chancellor Madaris was told he’d never walk again. Chance credits his great-grandmother Mama Laverne with giving him the will to heal and prove the doctors wrong. He has a healthy respect for her meddling ways and knows he’ll eventually end up next on her matchmaking list.

When Zoey Pritchard was eight, she survived a car accident that took the lives of her mother and father, and was sent to live with her great-aunt who refused to speak about her parents. Zoey has no memory from before the crash, but she’s been having the same dream over and over…

Searching for answers, Zoey travels to Houston, where she uncovers a scandal involving her parents and the wealthy and powerful Madaris family. Her trail leads her straight to Chance’s door. The dislike and intense attraction are instant and simultaneous. But to help Zoey restore her memory, he grudgingly introduces her to his great-grandmother…

Was it chance, or Mama Laverne’s plan, that threw this pair together?

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

We're using puzzle making as an excuse to be in community with you all!!!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, November 20 at 6:30PM

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

How: $5 to reserve your spot and libations. 

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us as we explore puzzles that celebrate fall energy and community spirit!

We'll provide the puzzles, trays, and drinks. We encourage bringing your favorite snacks or anything to make you feel cozy and comfortable!

Note: This event is intended for adults!

Join us for a community-centered writing workshop that blends craft, creativity, and conversation. Led by Dr. La-Toya Scott, professor and founder of In House Scholar, this series brings the structure and depth of a college-level writing class into an accessible and supportive public space. Each session includes a short craft lecture, guided discussion of a sample text, dedicated writing time, and space to share work with fellow writers. Whether you’re new to writing or returning to the page, The Writer’s Table offers tools, prompts, and encouragement to help you develop your voice, sharpen your craft, and write with intention.

Workshop 1: “Intro to Writing: Who Am I as a Writer?”

EVENT DEETS

When: Wednesday, January 28 @ 6 PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP reserve your spot 

Celebrate the release of Pretty: Memoir with author, KB Brookins!

EVENT DEETS

When: Wednesday, May 29 @ 7:30 PM CST

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

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP with book to support the author and our programming. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.  

“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?” 

Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KB BROOKINS is a Black, queer, and trans writer and cultural worker from Texas. They are the author of Freedom House and How to Identify Yourself with a Wound. Brookins has poems, essays, and installation art published in Academy of American Poets, Teen Vogue, Poetry Magazine, Prizer Arts & Letters, Okayplayer, Poetry Society of America, Autostraddle, and other venues. They have earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, Equality Texas, and others.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

Presented in partnership with Project Row Houses

Join us for a virtual author talk in celebration of Clint Smith's newest book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which debuted as a #1 New York Times Bestseller. This conversation will be moderated by Clint's former history teacher, Mr. Jeffrey Page.  

Event Deets:

When: Monday, September 20 at 7:00 pm CST

Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

How:  Registration is required by adding a ticket to your cart and checking out.  There are 3 options for securing a ticket to the event.  Use the dropdown to the right to select the following ticket types:

1) Select TICKET & BOOK to receive a book with your ticket.  Your book will be shipped within 14 days after the event.

2) Select TICKET & DONATION to receive a ticket to the event.  This option allows you to make a $5 donation to our store.  These events are not free to execute so we appreciate your support!

3) Select TICKET ONLY to receive a ticket to the event only.  This ticket option does not include a book.

We hope to see you there!

About the Book:

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark work of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.

About the Author:

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

About the Moderator:

Jeffrey Page is a native of Detroit, Michigan. He recently retired from The Awty International School where he taught History and Global Politics beginning in 2004. He has also served as an Adjunct Instructor of History at Texas Southern University and Houston Community College. In addition, he was an administrator at the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services (Children's Protective Services), served as the Assistant Director of Children’s Division of the Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County Texas, and has worked at Memorial Hermann Heights Hospital as a Medical Social Worker. He also worked as a Hospice Social Worker at the Hospice at the Texas Medical Center.

About Project Row Houses:

Project Row Houses is a community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape. We engage neighbors, artists, and enterprises in collective creative action to help materialize sustainable opportunities in marginalized communities.

Project Row Houses occupies a significant footprint in Houston’s Historic Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. The site encompasses five city blocks and houses 39 structures that serve as home base to a variety of community-enriching initiatives, art programs, and neighborhood development activities. PRH programs touch the lives of under-resourced neighbors, young single mothers with the ambition of a better life for themselves and their children, small enterprises with the drive to take their businesses to the next level, and artists interested in using their talents to understand and enrich the lives of others. Although PRH’s African-American roots are planted deeply in Third Ward, the work of PRH extends far beyond the borders of a neighborhood in transition. The Project Row Houses model for art and social engagement applies not only to Houston, but also to diverse communities around the world.

To learn more or to make a donation to Project Row Houses visit www.projectrowhouses.org

Join us to celebrate the release of TWO books, Storm: Goddess of Dawn by Tiffany D. Jackson and Barda by Ngozi Ukazu! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Tuesday, June 4 @ 7PM

Where: 2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004

How: Purchase your TICKET ONLY or RSVP WITH STORM or RSVP WITH BARDA or RSVP WITH BUNDLE (with both books)

Please reach out if you, your kids or students would like to attend but are not in the financial place to do so. 

ABOUT THE STORM

Few can weather the storm.

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

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

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

ABOUT BARDU

Darkseid is…and life on Apokolips is tough—but then, it is hell after all. And no one knows this better than Barda, Granny Goodness’s right hand warrior.

But Barda has a secret…she is in love. Or she is drawn to the idea of it anyway, whether it be the beauty of a flower, her affection for her closest friend, Aurelie, or the mysterious and fierce enemy warrior, Orion, who is the only match for Barda’s strength.

But when Granny decides Barda is becoming too soft, she assigns Barda a task that might be more than she can handle—to break the seemingly unbreakable Scott Free. And as Barda questions why Scott has such hope and what he might have done to promote such hatred from Granny, she finds herself drawn to him in a way she never expected.

The only thing is, we do not speak of love on Apokolips…

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Celebrate the release of The Wilderness with Angela Flournoy!

EVENT DEETS

When: Monday, October 6 @ 7PM

Where: 2310 Elgin Street, Unit 2, Houston, Texas, 77004

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming

Please note that only copies of The Wilderness purchased from Kindred Stories will be allowed in the signing line. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division.

Laymon’s memoir Heavy won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. Heavy was also named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years and one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable—an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family. In a starred review, Kirkus wrote, “Laymon skillfully couches his provocative subject matter in language that is pyrotechnic and unmistakably his own…. A dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways.” Heavy was named a best book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year.

Join us an interactive conversation surrounding Do The Work by W. Kamau Bell & Kate Schatz. 

Event DEETS: 

When: August 17, 2022 at 7:00 PM

Where: MATCH (3400 Main Street, HTX 77002)

How: Limited in person seating is available. Every ticket will include a signed copy of Do the Work! 

About the Book

Do the Work! is a hands-on workbook for anyone overwhelmed by racial injustice, who feels shocked by all the American histories they never learned, and who keeps asking the question “what can I DOOOOOO?!” Packed with humorous, thought-provoking activities—all are rooted in history and contemporary social justice concepts—the book helps readers move from "What can I do?" to... you know... actually doing the work.

About the Authors