Celebrate the release of Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days with Blair LM Kelley!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, June 18 @ 7PM

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

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

*Please note outside copies of the book will not be allowed in the bookstore and you will not be eligible for the signing/photo line. You must buy a book from Kindred Stories.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative from an award-winning historian.  
 
For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is also the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kelley is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (2010) which was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize and Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), which received the 2024 Brooklyn Library Book Award, the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History. Her latest book, Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days, will be published June 2, 2026.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Melanye Price is the inaugural Director of The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Price is an Endowed Professor of Political Science and served as the Principal Investigator for the African American Studies Initiative and the HBCU Student Voting Rights Lab. She has secured grants for the Simmons Center and her own research from various foundations including Mellon, Ford, LUMINA, and others. Price is the author of two books: The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) and Dreaming Blackness:  Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009). She is currently working on her third book project on the five decade history of voting rights activism at Prairie View.  She also served as a Special Assistant to Ruth J. Simmons in her last year as President of Prairie View.

Dr. Price completed her B.A. magna cum laude in geography at Prairie View A&M University and her MA and PhD in political science at The Ohio State University. Dr. Price was recently named the 2024 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Price has been a Black History Month lecturer for the US Embassy in Germany where she lectured at universities and community organizations across the country. Professor Price was one of the contributors to Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Obama: Through the Fire, which aired on BET. She has been a regular contributor for The New York Times Opinion section and also done political commentary for various local and national outlets.  Dr. Price has also served as a consultant and commenter for the audio tour of two major exhibits at the Museum Fine Arts Houston—Philip Guston Now and Kehinde Wiley’s Archaeology of Silence. 
In her free time, Melanye is an avid watcher of television, supporter of all things Black and Houston, and intrepid gardener! 

Celebrate the release of The Book of Chuck with LaToya Watkins!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, August 20 @ 7PM CST

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

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to grab your copy of the book, support the author and our store programming.

Please note outside copies of The Book of Chuck will not be allowed in the bookstore and you will not be eligible for the signing/photo line. You must buy a book from Kindred Stories.

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaToya Watkins is an award-winning author of two books. Her short story collection, Holler, Child, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the winner of Reading the West Book Award in Fiction and the Writer’s League of Texas Book Award in Fiction. Her debut novel, Perish, was published to great acclaim in 2022. LaToya’s writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Sun, McSweeney’s, and the Kenyon Review, among other publications.

Celebrate the release of Black Girls Breathing with Jasmine Marie!

EVENT DEETS:

When: Thursday, February 6th @ 7PM

Where: Hogan Brown Gallery, 2310 Elgin St, HTX, 77004

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

ABOUT THE BOOK:

As a Black woman, Jasmine Marie knows the impact that intergenerational trauma and systemic racism have had—and continue to have—on her community. Those experiences, along with her own journey through chronic stress, are why she created black girls breathing®, a movement dedicated to helping Black women understand the power of the mind‑body connection and its impact on their holistic health, one breath at a time.  

In Black Girls Breathing, Jasmine Marie offers you the power of breathwork, and the revolutionary nature of slowing down and turning inward. With each intentional breath, you’ll learn how to sink deeper into your body to begin to undo the trauma that’s long been stored. Sharing exercises from her unique somatic philosophies proven by data and utilized by tens of thousands of participants to date, Jasmine Marie will also help you:

• Connect more fully to your body
• Give yourself permission to rest
• Heal the chronic stress you carry in your body and nervous system
• Address emotional pain
• Rebuild your sense of self and your community

This is a long-overdue resource for every Strong Black Woman—the woman ready to break cycles of trauma, heal the internalized beliefs of perfectionism and conditional self‑worth, and follow the wisdom of her inner voice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jasmine Marie is a speaker, breathwork practitioner, and founder of black girls breathing®, a wellness platform that provides Black women with tools to heal trauma in the body and reduce chronic stress and anxiety. An alum of NYU Stern School of Business, Jasmine Marie’s work has been featured in Good Morning America, VOGUE, Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Glamour, Nylon Mag, Black Enterprise, Oprah Magazine, Well + Good, Wall Street Journal, Bust Magazine, Goop, MindBodyGreen, Refinery29, Pix11 NY, The Cut, FoxSoul, Cosmopolitan, and PopSugar Fitness, among others.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER:

Raveen Johnson is a Wellness Writer, Registered Yoga Teacher, Journaling Workshop Guide and a deep advocate for Mental/Emotional Health.
Raveen has been hosting journaling workshops in Houston since 2016, and has since expanded the offering locally and internationally. She offers the practice of journaling as a form of expression that supports mental, emotional and even physical healing. The intention is to be able to use our words in ways that compassionately support the lives that we desire for ourselves.
Raveen's yoga journey began in 2016 as a student. The practice re-introduced her to herself in way that was more empowering, strong and gracious than before. Raveen knew she wanted to effectively share the practice with others so she received her 200HR-RYT certification in 2020 at BIG Power Yoga in Houston, Texas. Four years later in 2024, Raveen received another 200HR certification under the guidance of Sarah Montross and Gioconda Parker so that she could further expand her knowledge and practice of yoga.
Journaling and yoga offer a relationship with ourselves and others that is loving, accepting and trustworthy; these are important ingredients in the recipe of following your gut and being present to your life. Raveen is delighted to use these tools to support the mental, spiritual and physical aspects of your personal healing journey.

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.

EVENT DEETS

When: Sunday, April 23, 2023 at 5PM CST

Where: Hogan Brown Gallery (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

How: RSVP ONLY for TICKET or RSVP WITH BOOK to get your copy of THE HOUSE OF EVE!

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sadeqa Johnson is the award-winning author of four novels, including Yellow Wife. Her accolades include the National Book Club Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the USA Best Book Award for Best Fiction. She is a Kimbilio Fellow, former board member of the James River Writers, and a Tall Poppy Writer. Originally from Philadelphia, she currently lives near Richmond, Virginia, with her husband and three children. To learn more, visit SadeqaJohnson.net.

UPDATE: We have added a waitlist for this event. Waitlist tickets are not guaranteed. If a ticket becomes available, you will receive an email with steps to get a ticket 

Celebrate the release of Rich and Rotten with Jahquel J!

EVENT DEETS

When: Friday, May 1 @ 6PM

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

What: This event is a signing only. You will have the opportunity to get a signed copy of Rich and Rotten and take a photo with the author. Each Signing Line Ticket comes with a copy of the book of Rich and Rotten.

How: Purchase a SIGNING LINE TICKET to guarantee a spot in the signing line. Each Signing Line Ticket comes with a copy of the book of Rich and Rotten. You can bring up to 5 previous books by Jahquel that you would like signed. Please note that each ticket is for entry of ONE person. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Explosive, sensual, and unapologetically raw, Rich and Rotten delivers Jahquel J.’s signature blend of passionate romance and high-stakes family drama—where love is the most dangerous game, and trust is the rarest luxury.

In Greenwich Pointe’s world of Black wealth and power, Tatiana Rich has everything money can buy—except freedom. When her kingpin father forces her into a strategic marriage with the Sterling dynasty’s heir, she begs Nazir Kane—the man she fell for during her college years—to run away with her.

By morning, he’s vanished without a word.

A decade later, Tatiana is rebuilding her life after her husband Karim’s tragic death. While raising their daughter and growing her luxury spa empire, an assassination attempt on her father brings an unexpected guardian: Nazir Kane—now a powerful security specialist assigned to protect her family.

Living under the same roof as the man who shattered her heart is torture enough. But as old flames reignite, darker truths emerge about the father who controlled her and the husband she mourned.

With enemies closing in and whispers that her husband’s death wasn’t an accident, Tatiana must decide if the man who once betrayed her is the only one who can save her now . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Join us for the official launch event of Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood & Myth with author, Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton and artist, Delita Martin. 

Event DEETS

When: March 7, 2023 at 7PM CST

Where: Project Row House Community Gallery (2521 Holman Street, HTX 77004)

How: Please RSVP reserve your spot. Checkout for RSVP with Book to support our store and the author/artists. 

About Black Chameleon

In the literary tradition of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, this debut memoir confronts both the challenges and joys of growing up Black and making your own truth.

Growing up as a Black girl in America, Deborah Mouton felt alienated from the stories she learned in class. She yearned for stories she felt connected to—true ones of course—but also fables and mythologies that could help explain both the world and her place in it. What she encountered was almost always written by white writers who prospered in a time when human beings were treated as chattel, such as the Greek and Roman myths, which felt as dusty and foreign as ancient ruins. When she sought myths written by Black authors, they were rooted too far in the past, a continent away.

Mouton writes, “The phrases of my mother and grandmother began to seem less colloquial and more tied to stories that had been lost along the way. . . . Mythmaking isn’t a lie. It is our moment to take the privilege of our own creativity to fill in the gaps that colonization has stolen from us. It is us choosing to write the tales that our children pull strength from. It is hijacking history for the ignorance in its closets. This, a truth that must start with the women.”

Mouton’s memoir is a song of praise and an elegy for Black womanhood. With a poet’s gift for lyricism and poignancy, Mouton reflects on her childhood as the daughter of a preacher and a harsh but loving mother, living in the world as a Black woman whose love is all too often coupled with danger, and finally learning to be a mother to another Black girl in America. Of the moment yet timeless, playful but incendiary, Mouton has staked out new territory in the memoir form.

About Deborah DEEP Mouton

Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally known writer, educator, activist, and performer and the first Black poet laureate of Houston, Texas. She was formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World (PSI). Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination, was named a finalist for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award, and received an honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. Its German translation, under the title Berichtenswert, was released in Summer 2021 by Elif Verlag. The opera Marian’s Song, for which she wrote the libretto, debuted in 2020. 

About Delita Martin

Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and an MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formerly a member of the fine arts faculty at UA Little Rock in Arkansas, Martin currently works as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press. Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently Martin’s work was included in the State of the Arts: Discovering American Art Now, an exhibition that included 101 artists from around the United States. Her work is in numerous portfolios and collections.

The paperback of How to Say Babylon is here and we're celebrating the power of Saifya Sinclair's memoir! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Sunday, July 28 @ 3PM CST

Where: Project Row Houses (2521 Holman Street, HTX, 77004)

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

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SAFIYA SINCLAIR was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, a finalist the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Non-Fiction and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. How to Say Babylon was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the year by the New York Times, a Top 10 Book of 2023 by the Washington Post, one of The Atlantic’s 10 Best Books of 2023, a TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2023, a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick, and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023. How to Say Babylon was also named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, and Barnes & Noble, among others, and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year. The audiobook of How to Say Babylon was named a Best Audiobook of the Year by Audible and AudioFile magazine.

She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. 

Sinclair’s other honours include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Granta, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

CONVERSATION PARTNER

francine j. harris’ third collection, Here is the Sweet Hand, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as Consulting Faculty Editor at Gulf Coast.