Join us as we celebrate author, Chenicia Higgins & the release of D'Vaughn & Kris Plan a Wedding!

Event Deets:

When: Friday, March 18 at 7:00 pm CST

Where:  Project Row Houses Community Gallery - 2521 Holman Street, Houston, TX 77004

How:  Limited in-person tickets are available.  You have the option to grab a ticket for free or purchase the book and ticket.  Only books purchased at the event will be eligible to be signed by the author.

We hope to see you there!

About the Book

D’Vaughn and Kris have six weeks to plan their dream wedding.

Their whole relationship is fake.

Instant I Do could be Kris Zavala’s big break. She’s right on the cusp of really making it as an influencer, so a stint on reality TV is the perfect chance to elevate her brand. And $100,000 wouldn’t hurt, either.

D’Vaughn Miller is just trying to break out of her shell. She’s sort of neglected to come out to her mom for years, so a big splashy fake wedding is just the excuse she needs.

All they have to do is convince their friends and family they’re getting married in six weeks. If anyone guesses they’re not for real, they’re out. Selling their chemistry on camera is surprisingly easy, and it’s still there when no one else is watching, which is an unexpected bonus. Winning this competition is going to be a piece of wedding cake.

But each week of the competition brings new challenges, and soon the prize money’s not the only thing at stake. A reality show isn’t the best place to create a solid foundation, and their fake wedding might just derail their relationship before it even starts

About the Author

Chencia Higgins hails from the big city of Houston in the greatest state of Texas. Writing has been her my passion since she was a young girl, when her subject matter were visions of middle school drama with her group of girlfriends.

She entered the world of publishing in May 2016 with an erotic novella that set the stage for a career in which she would craft engaging tales of Black women being loved up on. She continues to write for women who love to read but are tired of never seeing themselves in the story. 

Higgins proud to be a part of an indie and self-published author community 

When she's not writing, you can find her reading a book (or two, or three), saving recipes that she'll never make on Pinterest, and traveling as much as possible with her family.

About the Moderator

Hailin and Hollin, Kadiedre Henderson is a Black, Queer, Lesbian, and Houston native. She is most precious about the care she brings to herself and others. Through deep listening to the world and stars,  Kadie extends care by providing space for folks to tell their own stories. A lover of stories and storyteller at heart, Kadie started working with books back in 2019 and hasn't left since. A self-proclaimed optimist, Kadie loves Queer YA, Romance, Biographies, and Magic! She is especially excited by stories that speak to navigating grief, trauma, and Black Femme Eroticism. They are so happy to be a team member of the Kindred Stories staff. 

Join us for a virtual author talk in celebration of Stacey Abrams' debut children's picture book, Stacey's Extraordinary Words! This event will be moderated by Cleo Wade.

*SIGNED COPIES available while supplies last*

Event Deets:

When: Tuesday, December 28 at 6pm CT/7pm ET

Where: Virtual (watch link will be sent no more than 24 hours prior to the start of the event)

How:  Registration is required.  You have the option to get a free ticket or a ticket that includes one signed copy of the book.  Books will ship on December 28, the book's release date.

We hope you can join us!

About the Book:

Iconic voting rights advocate and former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams is adding children’s book author to her résumé with the publication of her debut picture book, Stacey’s Extraordinary Words. The story, which addresses themes of perseverance and bravery, is based on Abrams’s experience participating in several spelling bees while in elementary school.

“Words have always been important to me,” says Abrams. “I loved competing in spelling bees as a young girl. With this book, I want to inspire children to speak up for themselves and for others—and to keep trying if they don’t succeed the first time around.”

The young Stacey in the book, who loves words and spelling, is asked by her teacher to compete in a spelling bee. Her excitement quickly evaporates when she discovers that she’ll be competing against Jake, the class bully. Abrams recalls of her childhood, “Like Jake, some kids picked on me and others who were different. Over the years, I learned how to use my words to do good, even when I am most afraid.”

About the Author:

Stacey Abrams is the three-time New York Times bestselling author of While Justice Sleeps, Our Time Is Now, and Lead from the Outside; an entrepreneur; and a political leader. A tax attorney by training, she served eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Minority Leader, and became the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, where she won, at the time, more votes than any other Democrat in the state’s history. She has launched multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social issues at the state, national, and international levels. She is the founder of Fair Fight, Fair Count, and the Southern Economic Advancement Project. Abrams is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and sits on the boards of Climate Power 2020, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, the Center for American Progress, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. She has received degrees from Spelman College, the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, and Yale Law School.

About the moderator:

Cleo Wade is a writer, poet, and the New York Times Best-selling author of What The Road Said, Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life, and Where To Begin: A Small Book about Your Power to Create Big Change. Her work is dedicated to exploring love, freedom, self-care and the power of community. She has been called the poet of her generation by Time Magazine, one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company and sits on the board of The Lower East Side Girls Club, the National Black Theater in Harlem, and the Women’s Prison Association. Cleo is from New Orleans, Louisiana and currently lives in California with her family.

Click below to purchase books by Cleo Wade:

Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life

Where to Begin:  A Small Book about Your Power to Create Big Change

What the Road Said

Celebrate the final installment of Attica Locke's Highway 59 Series, Guide Me Home! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Wednesday, September 11, 2024 @ 7 PM

Where: Holy Family HTX (3719 Navigation Blvd, HTX, 77004) 

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support Attica Locke and the bookstore! 

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Attica Locke is a NY Times best-selling author of six novels, including Guide Me Home.  She is also a winner of an Edgar Award and the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and she has been short listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and nominated for an LA Times Book Prize and an NAACP Image award for her work as a novelist. Locke is also a screenwriter and TV producer, with credits that include Empire, When They See Us and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She co-created and executive produced an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home for Netflix. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

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.

Join us as we celebrate the release of Nobody's Magic by Destiny O. Birdsong.  

EVENT DEETS:

When: Wednesday, February 23 at 6:30 PM CST

Where: Virtual via Crowdcast.  You can register using this event page or directly through Crowdcast.

How:  Registration is required.  You can RSVP with a book purchase or without a book purchase.  We appreciate your support of our store by purchasing the book with us.  This empowers us to continue bringing amazing author programming to Houston and beyond.

Like Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, Nobody's Magic is set against a backdrop of complicated social and racial histories, and it explores the region’s culture and its relationship to Blackness and Black womanhood. It is also a testament to the power of family—the ones you're born in and the ones you choose. And in the three narratives of Nobody’s Magic, among the yearning and loss, each of these women finds a seed of hope for the future.

Debut author, Destiny O. Birdsong’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Catapult, among other publications. She has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Richard G. Peterson Poetry Prize. Her critically‑acclaimed debut collection of poems, Negotiations, was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award and published by Tin House Books.

Hailin and Hollin, Kadiedre Henderson is a Black, Queer, Lesbian, and Houston native. She is most precious about the care she brings to herself and others. Through deep listening to the world and stars,  Kadie extends care by providing space for folks to tell their own stories. A lover of stories and storyteller at heart, Kadie started working with books back in 2019 and hasn't left since. A self-proclaimed optimist, Kadie loves Queer YA, Romance, Biographies, and Magic! She is especially excited by stories that speak to navigating grief, trauma, and Black Femme Eroticism. They are so happy to be a team member of the Kindred Stories staff. 

Learn about the art of coming home to your body with Lyvonne Briggs!

EVENT DEETS

When: April 5 @ 7PM CST

Where: 3719 Navigation Blvd, HTX 77003 (Holy Family HTX)

How: RSVP ONLY to grab your free ticket or support our programming, author, and store by RSVP WITH BOOK. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lyvonne Briggs, MDiv, ThM, an Emmy Award winner, is a body- and sex-positive womanist preacher, speaker, coach, and creator. Briggs is the host of the Sensual Faith podcast and the founder of beautiful scars, a healing- centered storytelling
agency focused on fostering pleasure and resiliency; visionary of The Proverbial Experience; and now curator of Sensual Faith Sunday, a series of virtual spiritual gatherings to nourish your soul. She has been featured in Essence, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post, and Sojourners named her one of “11 Women Shaping the Church.” Briggs, a New York City native and proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, is currently based in New Orleans, Louisiana.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Wale (@theehotgirlbooks)is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor working with folks in New York and Texas. She has a double masters degree in mental health counseling from Teachers College Columbia University. After practicing in New York for a few years, Wale moved back to her hometown Houston and started her own therapy practice in 2020. Wale currently works with individuals and couples on a weekly basis.

Registration is closed via our website, but please register directly via Crowdcast

ORDER South to America here for an exclusive signed copy!

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In SOUTH TO AMERICA: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, one of our most important thinkers and critics, acclaimed author Imani Perry tackles her most ambitious project yet, moving across the color line to grapple with the mix of intimacy and racial violence in Southern and American history, showing that what it means to be American is inextricably linked with the South.  

Imani Perry will be in conversation with Dr. Melanye Price of Prairie View University

Event Details

When: Tuesday, February 1 @ 6:30 PM CST

Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

How:  Register here or on Crowdcast.  Although the event is free, we encourage you to support our store and future programming by purchasing the book here.

About the Author: 

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where she also teaches in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Law and Public Affairs and Jazz Studies. She has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D in the history of American civilization from Harvard University. Perry is the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the Bograd-Weld Biography Prize of 2019 from the Pen America Foundation. She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, which was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Nonfiction. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside of Philadelphia with her two sons.

About the Moderator:

Dr. Melanye Price is Endowed Professor of Political Science at Prairie View A&M University and principle investigator for their African American Studies Initiative, which is funded by grants and gifts from the Mellon Foundation. Her research/teaching interests include black politics, public opinion, political rhetoric, and social movements. Her most recent book, The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) examines the multiple and strategic ways that President Obama uses race to deflect negative racial attitudes and engage with a large cross-section of voters. Her first book, Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009) examined contemporary support for Black Nationalism. Her new project is called “Mountaintop Removal: Martin Luther King, Trump and the Racial Mountain,” which uses MLK’s “Mountaintop Speech” as a lens for understanding the rise of Trump and the 2016 election.

2 inch round button with pin back

N. E. Davenport is the Science Fiction/Fantasy author of the Blood Gift duology. She attended the University of Southern California and studied Biological Sciences and Theatre Arts. She also has an M.A. in Secondary Education. She teaches English and Biology to amazing students. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys vacationing with her family, skiing, and being a huge foodie. She’s an advocate for diverse perspectives and protagonists in literature. You can find her on Twitter @nia_davenport, or on Instagram @nia.davenport, where she talks about binge-worthy TV, killer movies, and great books. She lives in Texas with her husband and kids

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.

Celebrate your bookish era in style with our exclusive “In My Book Era” enamel pin. Thoughtfully designed for readers who take pride in their stories, this pin perfectly captures the joy, calm, and confidence of getting lost in a good read.

This vibrant pin adds a joyful pop to totes, jean jackets, lanyards, or your favorite book bag. Its sturdy backing ensures it stays secure through every bookstore visit, author event, and cozy reading session.

Whether you’re gifting it to a fellow reader or treating yourself, this pin is a charming reminder to stay unapologetically in your book era—today and always.

A must-have accessory for book lovers, Kindred fam, and nyone who believes in the magic of representation on the page and beyond.

Size: 1.5 "