Celebrate the release of Plus Size Player with Danielle Allen!

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, June 14 @ 5 PM

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

How: Get your ticket now! Each ticket comes with a copy of Plus Size Player!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Julie Murphy's If the Shoe Fits meets Talia Hibbert's Take a Hint, Dani Brown―USA Today bestselling author Danielle Allen brings another steamy, witty novel about finding the perfect partner―and how sometimes what you're looking for is right in front of you.

“I only spend time with people I enjoy. I only do things I want to do. I only have sex with people who get me off. So, my time is never wasted and my energy stays high.”

Nina Ford doesn’t like to put all her eggs in one basket. She works multiple jobs, she enjoys multiple hobbies, she dates multiple men.

In her thirty years of life, Nina has never come across a man who has all the things she’s looking for.

She loves fun and excitement―and she has a man for that.

She loves confidence and humor―and she has a man for that.

She loves intelligence and ambition―and she has a man for that.

She loves passion and romance―and she has a man for that.

She’s always been content rotating a few men in and out of her life to get her needs met. But when an opportunity presents itself, Nina finds herself in a bit of a predicament. Because if everything she’s ever wanted in a partner collides with everything she’s ever wanted in a career, her eggs are bound to get cracked.

Like her back.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Danielle Allen is the USA Today bestseller of Curvy Girl Summer, in additon to being an educator, and life coach. Living authentically has been the key to her living her best life. With a background in social sciences, helping people better understand themselves so they can become the best version of themselves is one of her passions. Writing contemporary romance novels that aims to change the status quo of the genre is another. 

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Writing is where Zee thrives, finding peace and purpose. Her journey began at thirteen with a black-and-white composition book, later blossoming on Wattpad, where she captivated over two million readers. In December 2023, she released her debut novel, All In, and was nominated for the 2023 Black Girl Who Writes Best New Author award. By November 2024, Zee became a National Best-Selling Author with the release of When He’s Not There, her third book.

Crafting urban fiction and romance, Zee transforms raw emotions into powerful stories. Her characters are deeply personal, each carrying a piece of her spirit. She is grateful for the opportunity to share her God-given talent and hopes readers will feel the same passion in her words as she does in writing them.
When not writing, Zee enjoys spending time with family, doing nails, and cheering (or stressing) over Saints football. She's a firm believer that balance is key and that joy can be found in the little things that make life richer.

A comprehensive and inspiring collection of essays by Larry Neal, a founder of the seminal Black Arts Movement

“The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.”
—Larry Neal, The Drama Review, 1968

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to produce work that was politically oriented, rooted in the Black experience, and written for the Black community. Engaging with fiction, music, drama, and poetry in his texts, he challenged the dominance of the Western art-historical canon and charged Black artists and writers with reshaping artistic traditions according to their own history. As he proclaimed in his essay “The Black Writer’s Role,” written in 1966, “Black writers must listen to the world with their whole selves––their entire bodies. Must make literature move people. Must want to make our people feel, the way our music makes them feel.”

The writer Allie Biswas, who selected the texts Neal wrote from 1964 to 1978 included here, introduces the volume, illuminating the rich and varied context in which he produced his work.

Celebrate The Day God Saw Me as Black with Passuh Danyelle! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Tuesday, January 7 @ 7PM 

Where: 2310 Elgin Street, HTX, 77004

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve you seat and signed copy! 

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D. Danyelle Thomas is a Black faith and spirituality writer, speaker, and digital faith leader. The founder of Unfit Christian, her work and words have been featured in Essence, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Rewire.News, Splinter, and NBC News. She holds both a master's in Public Policy and a bachelor's in African American Studies from Georgia State University. She is on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) via @UnfitChristian

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Daphne (she/her) is passionate about helping people leave harmful and abusive situations so she shares her experience as a way to offer hope to others who may be in the same position. She created Golden Daph to share the things she's learning to refine her life and build it into something she's proud of. She shares what she's learned from her divorce, emotional and spiritual abuse, and her faith deconstruction and decolonization. She has found so much freedom on my journey and she hopes to share it with you.

In her day-to-day life you can find her working in the social justice field in Houston, Texas. When she's not doing that, you can find her spending time with family and friends, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, or watching reality TV shows. She's also a co-host of the Love is a Trip Podcast with her good sis Ash!

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.

Let's celebrate a few of the new-ish Black women mystery writers! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Monday, August 11, 2025 @ 6:30 PM CT

Where: Virtual! Sign up and we'll send you the link to the Zoom. 

How: RSVP ONLY to get the link to the Zoom! RSVP WITH BUNDLE to get a copy of each of the authors' book and support the bookstore!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Zoe B. Wallbrook is a recently tenured professor whose academic research has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times and The New Yorker. She was selected for mentorship by LA Times bestseller Elizabeth Little, and History Lessons, her first novel, was a runner-up for the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award. Zoe’s hobbies include beginning all emails with, “My sincerest apologies for my slow reply,” pretending to understand how astrological signs work, and crying at the end of every Call the Midwife episode. She and her husband live with their stalker, a black lab/pittie mix named Sophie.

SANDRA JACKSON-OPOKU is the author of Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him and the award-winning novel The River Where Blood is Born. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works have been published and produced in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, storySouth, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others.

Elise Bryant is the NAACP Image Award-nominated author of Happily Ever Afters, One True Loves, Reggie and Delilah’s Year of Falling, and It’s Elementary. For many years, Elise had the joy of working as a special education teacher, and now she spends her days reading, writing, and eating dessert. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Long Beach, California. You can visit her online at www.elisebryant.com.

For all the girls in your life who are inspired, deserving, and worthy, bestselling author Marshawn Evans Daniels’ debut picture book Worthy Girl offers a lyrical, inspirational message about believing in yourself and realizing God’s higher purpose for your life.

From early on, young girls seek to find their place and voice in a complex world that tells them who they’re supposed to be. Worthy Girl uses soaring language to combat the forces trying to keep girls small and instead awaken their ambition and instill in them an unshakeable sense of self-worth, confidence, and identity bathed in possibility. This beautifully illustrated picture book anchors girls in God’s promises and challenges them to believe—even at a young age—that God made them for such a time as this.

Worthy Girl is perfect for:

* Any girl at any time, but especially for birthdays, graduations, and milestones that celebrate a girl’s life and potential.
* Parents desiring to inspire their daughters to embrace their uniqueness.
* Reassuring girls that God has a plan for their lives and there are limitless possibilities ahead of them.

Spring is in the air, and love is on the page. Join D.W. Brooks, Alexandra Lechelle, and Zee Renee at Kindred Stories for a celebration of local romance authors.

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, May 23 @ 6PM

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

How: RSVP WITH BOOK to support the authors and our store programming. There are four options available: you can choose to support an individual author or select the Romance In Spring Bundle, which includes one book from all participating authors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

D. W. Brooks

D. W. Brooks  is an author who has independently published three romantic suspense books and two contemporary romance novels. In addition to writing books, D. W. is also a retired ophthalmologist and a kidney transplant recipient of over eight years. She is originally from Alabama but now lives in Texas with her husband and daughter.

Alexandrea LeChelle

Alexandrea LeChelle is a contemporary romance author whose stories explore love, grief, healing, and the complicated beauty of human connection.

Her novels unfold between Houston and Louisiana and center Black characters navigating family legacies, emotional vulnerability, and the quiet courage it takes to love deeply and unapologetically.

Through rich, emotional storytelling and cinematic detail, Alexandrea writes the kind of love stories she rarely saw growing up and entering adulthood. Stories where Black characters are allowed to be flawed, passionate, and deeply human.

What began as a way to process emotions and channel creativity through her own healing journey, slowly evolved into something much bigger: an urge to create and share stories about love, healing, and the complicated paths of life that bring people together.

Her stories often explore themes such as emotional healing, family dynamics, grief and growth, healthy Black love, the courage to begin again. Every story is planted in the belief that love, in all its forms, has the power to change us for the better.

When she’s not reading, Alexandrea can be found working her way through her own TBR, journaling or planning new creative projects, adding recipes to her personal cookbook, and listening to playlists that eventually inspire new stories.

At the heart of everything she creates is a simple hope: That readers will find pieces of themselves in her stories.

Zee Renee

Writing is where Zee thrives, finding peace and purpose. Her journey began at thirteen with a black-and-white composition book, later blossoming on Wattpad, where she captivated over two million readers. In December 2023, she released her debut novel, All In, and was nominated for the 2023 Black Girl Who Writes Best New Author award. By November 2024, Zee became a National Best-Selling Author with the release of When He’s Not There, her third book.

Crafting urban fiction and romance, Zee transforms raw emotions into powerful stories. Her characters are deeply personal, each carrying a piece of her spirit. She is grateful for the opportunity to share her God-given talent and hopes readers will feel the same passion in her words as she does in writing them.

Join us to celebrate the release of Decent People with Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winner, De'Shawn Charles WInslow & MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow, Kiese Laymon. 

EVENT DEETS

When: January 18 at 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden, 2304 Stuart Street, Houston, TX 77004

How: RSVP for a free ticket or RSVP with book to support the author and our programming. 

ABOUT DECENT PEOPLE

From prizewinning author De’Shawn Charles Winslow, a sweeping and unforgettable novel of a Black community reeling from a triple homicide, and the secrets the killings reveal.

In the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina, in 1976, Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon—three enigmatic siblings—are found shot to death in their home. The people of West Mills— on both sides of the canal that serves as the town’s color line—are in a frenzy of finger-pointing, gossip, and wonder. The crime is the first reported murder in the area in decades, but the white authorities don’t seem to have any interest in solving the case.

Fortunately, one person is determined to do more than talk. Miss Josephine Wright has just moved back to West Mills from New York City to retire and marry a childhood sweetheart, Olympus “Lymp” Seymore. When she discovers that the murder victims are Lymp’s half-siblings, and that Lymp is one of West Mills’s leading suspects, she sets out to prove his innocence. But as Jo investigates those who might know the most about the Harmons’ deaths, she starts to discover more secrets than she’d ever imagined, and a host of cover-ups—ranging from medical misuse to illicit affairs—that could upend the reputations of many.

For readers of American Spy and Bluebird, Bluebird, Decent People is a powerful new novel about shame, race, money, and the reckoning required to heal a fractured community.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

God is everywhere. Show your child how to find God in the small, everyday moments of life with kid motivational speaker Luke Tillman’s (@according_2luke) devotional that walks them through the joys and trials of life, all while teaching them about God’s Word and helping them grow in their faith.

It can be hard to feel close to God in the mundane moments like getting ready for school, picking up your room, family game night, and even arguing with siblings. But through it all God is there--and when we draw close to His Word, we can learn more about Him and how to live the life He calls us to. This 90-day devotional is rooted in the Bible and organized by topic: faith, values, identity, family, emotions, friendship, and responsibility. And each day shares the experiences of Luke Tillman, an ordinary kid who helps your child apply each message to their own life.

In Finding God Every Day, you will find:

* simple, relatable lessons based in Scripture, written for kids ages 6-10.
* “According to Luke,” a feature that provides lesson applications from Luke himself, based on things he’s personally learned and discovered about having a relationship with God.
* devotions that are great for kids reading on their own, family devotions, or church Sunday school.

A Better Way to Live Is Within Reach

Number one national bestselling author and trusted financial expert Anthony O'Neal provides the practical tools and everyday habits needed to build margin even if you're starting from zero. Drawing from his own story and years of coaching thousands toward financial freedom, Anthony shows you how to create real breathing room and finally take control of your money. Through simple, proven steps, you'll learn how to:

* Stabilize your finances and cast a vision for the goals that will guide you forward
* Eliminate all consumer debt and regain control of your spending
* Save three to six months of take-home pay and create habits that protect your progress
* Invest with confidence so your money starts working harder than you do
* Pay off your home, lock in your family's legacy, and start building wealth that blesses the people you love most

If you're tired of the stress and exhaustion of barely getting by, this book offers a proven roadmap to break the cycle for good. You don't need more shame. You need a plan and someone to walk with you while you take the first step. This is your fresh start.