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  • Virtual Author Talk: Weightless with Evette Dionne & Morgan Jerkins-December 7 @ 7PM CST
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    Join us on a screen near you to celebrate the release of Weightless with author, Evette Dionne and Morgan Jerkins.


    EVENT DEETS: 

    When: December 7 at 7 PM CST

    Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

    How: Grab a free ticket or support the author and the store by purchasing a ticket with book. You can self register here or we will send you a link before the event. 

    About the Book

    My body has not betrayed me; it has continued rebounding against all odds. It is a body that others map their expectations on, but it has never let me down.

    In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black woman are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to diagnosis with heart failure at age twenty-nine, Dionne tracks her relationships with friendship, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image.

    Along the way, she lifts back the curtain to reveal the subtle, insidious forms of surveillance and control levied at fat women: At the doctor’s office, where any health ailment is treated with a directive to lose weight. On dating sites, where larger bodies are rejected or fetishized. On TV, where fat characters are asexual comedic relief. But Dionne’s unflinching account of our deeply held prejudices is matched by her fierce belief in the power of self-love.

    An unmissable portrait of a woman on a journey toward understanding our society and herself, Weightless holds up a mirror to the world we live in and asks us to imagine the future we deserve.

    About Author

    Evette Dionne is a journalist, editor, and pop culture critic. She is the National Book Award–nominated author of Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, a middle-grade nonfiction book about Black women suffragists, and the former editor in chief of Bitch Media. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Time, the New York Times, the Guardian, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. A graduate of Bennett College, Dionne is based in Los Angeles, where she works at Netflix.

    About Conversation Partner 

    Morgan Jerkins is the author of Caul Baby, Wandering in Strange Lands and the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing and a Senior Culture Editor at ESPN’s The Undefeated. Jerkins is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader in media, and her short-form work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Elle, Esquire, and the Guardian, among many other outlets. She is based in Harlem. 

  • IRL AUTHOR TALK: City Summer, Country Summer with Kiese Laymon - April 6 @ 2PM

    Kiese Laymon

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    Celebrate the release of City Summer, Country Summer with Kiese Laymon!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Sunday, April 6 @ 2PM

    Where: 2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004

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

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    A lyrical picture book from the award-winning author of Heavy, about three Black boys who form a deep connection during a transformative summer trip down South to visit family.

    On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable.

    Three Black boys spend one special summer exploring the Mississippi woods and woulds and coulds of sharing the kind of freeing friendship that is love.

    Watched over and given space to discover by Grandmama and Mama Lara, New York, Country, and little C find camaraderie in their contrasts and all the unspoken things between them while playing games of marco polo in the thick garden and sledding on cardboard by the underpass. 

    With text brimming with love by award-winning author Kiese Laymon and deeply evocative illustrations by Ashley Franklin, City Summer, Country Summer illuminates the tenuous and tender bonds of friendship Black boys forge with one another.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    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. He is the co-host of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

  • IRL Author Talk: Sensual Faith with Lyvonne Briggs & Wale-April 5 @7PM CST
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    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

    An invitation for women to discover a healthier approach to spirituality and sexuality that centers pleasure rather than shame, from body- and sex-positive preacher and author Lyvonne Briggs

    “Home is not an address. Home is where you feel safe. And your body is aching to be your home.”

    How you view your body and your sexuality is informed and strengthened by spiritual practices, but how many of us can say that religion has drawn us closer to our bodies? That’s because worship spaces that are intended to be spiritual safe houses have not historically been welcoming to our bodies, forcing us to leave our flesh at the door. This ideological amputation is at best a disservice and at worst a sin. The remedy? Radical self-hospitality.

    In Sensual Faith, Lyvonne Briggs charts a path for us to practice spiritual wellness that aligns and harmonizes our bodies with pleasure and sexuality. By centering the rich traditions of ancient West African spirituality, Sensual Faith offers a radically inclusive model of companioning one’s self. Filled with wellness rituals, journal prompts, affirmations, and practices, Sensual Faith shows us how to celebrate our bodies as our very homes.

    “Pleasure is your birthright,” writes Briggs, so whether it’s accepting your flesh, nurturing your intuition, learning the language of consent, or sumptuous self-care, let radical self-hospitality guide you to healthy sexuality.

    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.

  • November Adult Book Club: The Sun of Mr. Suleman by Eric Jerome Dickey
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    Join us for our monthly book club meeting!
    This month, we will be reading Erick Jerome Dickey's last novel, The Son of Mr. Suleman. 
    MEETING Deets
    When: November 30 at 7:00 PM
    Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden 
    How: RSVP to reserve your spot or RSVP with book to reserve you spot and support our store. 
    About the Book
    It’s the summer of 2019, and Professor Pi Suleman is a Black man from Memphis with a lot to endure—not only as a Black man in Trump’s America but in his hard-earned career as an adjunct professor. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague’s prejudices and microaggressions. At the same time, he’s being blackmailed by a powerful professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted her, when in fact the truth is just the opposite, trapping him in a he-said-she-said with a white woman that, in this society, Pi knows he will never win.
     
    When he meets Gemma Buckingham, a sophisticated entrepreneur who has just moved to Memphis from London to escape a deep heartbreak, things begin to look up. Though Gemma and Pi hail from separate cultures, their differences fuel a fiery and passionate connection that just may consume them both.
     
    But Pi’s whirlwind romance is interrupted when his absentee father, a celebrated writer, passes away and Pi is called to Los Angeles to both collect his inheritance and learn about the man who never acknowledged him. With the complicated legacy of his famous father to make sense of, Gemma’s visa expiration date looming, and the threats of his colleague becoming increasingly intense, Pi must figure out who he is and what kind of man he will become in his father’s shadow.
     
    In The Son of Mr. Suleman, Eric Jerome Dickey takes readers on a powerful journey exploring racism, colorism, life as a mixed-race person, sexual assault, microaggressions, truth and lies, cultural differences, politics, family legacies, perceptions, the impact of enslavement and Jim Crow, code-switching, the power of death, and the weight of love. It is an extraordinary story, page-turning and intense, and a book only Dickey could write
  • An Evening with Zora Neale Hurston moderated by Morgan Jerkins - Jan 12 @ 7:30 PM CT
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    Register at https://www.crowdcast.io/e/an-evening-with-zora

    We're celebrating the release of the boxed set of Zora Neale Hurston's collection of works, all with reimagined covers illustrated by incredible Black artists, and her newest release of essays, You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays.

    NYT bestselling author, Morgan Jerkins, will moderate a conversation with Lucy Ann Hurston (scholar and niece of Zora Neale Hurston), Patrick Dougher (cover artist for Their Eyes Were Watching God), and Genevieve West (co-editor of You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays).

    About the Boxed Set:

    Available for the first time, this amazing boxed set includes 10 repackaged Zora Neale Hurston classics--each with a newly imagined cover by a popular contemporary Black artist. It's a beautifully-imaged package at a very affordable price point.

    Cover artists are: Charly Palmer    , Toyin Ojih Odutola, Jerome Lagarrigue, Patrick Dougher, Diana Ejaita, Jeff Manning, Samira Addo, Terry Lynn, Jamilla Okubo, and Tizta Berhanu.

    Books included in the set:

    • Dust Tracks on a Road
    • Jonah's Gourd Vine
    • Mules and Men
    • Tell My Horse
    • The Complete Stories
    • Every Tongue Got to Confess
    • Moses, Man of the Mountain
    • Seraph on the Suwanee
    • Mule Bone
    • Their Eyes Were Watching God

    About You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays:

    Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author.

    “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison

    One of the most acclaimed artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted novelist, playwright, and essayist. Drawn from three decades of her work, this anthology showcases her development as a writer, from her early pieces expounding on the beauty and precision of African American art to some of her final published works, covering the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing a white doctor. Among the selections are Hurston’s well-known works such as “How It Feels to be Colored Me” and “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience.” 

    The essays in this essential collection are grouped thematically and cover a panoply of topics, including politics, race and gender, and folkloric study from the height of the Harlem Renaissance to the early years of the Civil Rights movement. Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer’s work, You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer’s development and a window into her world and time.

  • Solange Button
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    2 inch round button with pin back

  • IRL Author Talk: If My Flowers Bloom with DeShara Suggs - Joe - May 24 @ 6:30PM
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    Celebrate the release of If My Flowers Bloom with DeShara Suggs!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Friday, May 24 at 6:30 PM

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

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

    This event is in collaboration with OQUPI HTX.

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    If My Flowers Bloom is about desire. Is there room to bloom or does the harvest only come in the afterlife? Is it okay to be Black and queer and woman in this world?

    Overflowing with love and aching for more space, DeShara Suggs-Joe questions the powers that be while longing for space carved out for her flourishing.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    DeShara is a queer, Black poet and visual artist. She co-founded Daughter’s Tongue (an all-women writing collective), worked as the Creative Director of Workshops at Winter Tangerine, and is a former member of the Youth Speaks Collective. She received her MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts and fellowships from Callaloo, the Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door. In 2021, she was nominated for “Best of the Net.” She has published poems in Apogee Lit, Voicemail Poems, Tinderbox Journal, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. She has also been featured on Button Poetry’s YouTube platform and has performed at the likes of Spotify, Yahoo, and Pinterest


  • IRL AUTHOR TALK: Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood & Myth with Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton & Delita Martin- March 7@ 7PM CST
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    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.

  • IRL Author Talk: Guide Me Home with Attica Locke - September 11 @ 7 PM
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    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

    Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn’t sure he’s been a good cop, but believes he’s got a shot at being a good man—if he manages to dodge the potential indictment hanging over his head and if he, from here on out, pledges allegiance to the truth. It’s a virtue the country appears to have wholly lost its grip on, but one Darren sees as his salvation. He is in the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves, hoping for the peace of country living at his beloved farmhouse, when he is visited by someone who couldn’t hold the truth on her tongue if it was dipped in sugar, a woman who’s always been bent of tearing his life apart. His mother. Armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera (whose white sorority sisters insist she isn’t missing at all). Darren must decide if his can trust his mother is telling the truth—and what her ulterior motive may be, and what if that motive has to do with a grand jury deciding his fate.

    Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera’s family and her hometown that are odd at best, vaguely sinister at worst. Hamstrung by local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers who likewise doubt the account of a missing girl, if Darren wants answers, he’ll need help from the person whom he swore to never trust again—his mother.

    In this emotionally stirring conclusion to the singular Highway 59 series, set three years after the events of Heaven, My Home, Darren reckons with his life’s purpose as he’s forced to choose between his own peace and the higher call to do good.

     

    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

    ReShonda Tate is the national bestselling author of more than 50 books, including her latest The Queen of Sugar Hill, based on the life of Hattie McDaniel. Her novel, Let the Church Say Amen, was made into a film directed by actress Regina King, and produced by TD Jakes and Queen Latifah. Her book, The Secret She Kept, was also made into a TV One movie starring Kyla Pratt. ReShonda made appearances in both movies. She wrote a movie, Christmas with my Ex, which will run on TV One this winter. A well-respected journalist and former TV News Anchor, ReShonda is currently Managing Editor for the Defender Newspaper and also works as a professional editor, ghostwriter, and literary consultant. A highly sought-after motivational speaker and award-winning poet, ReShonda is the recipient of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature.

     

  • January 2023 Adult Book Club: Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
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    Join us for our monthly book club meeting/discussion! 

    MEETING DEETS
    When: January 26, 2022 at 7:00 PM CST
    Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden (2304 Stuart Street, HTX 77004)
    How: RSVP to reserve your spot if you already own the book or RSVP with book to support our store and programming.  
    ABOUT THE BOOK
    Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

     

  • Portrait of Devotion: The Spiritual Life of Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitananda cover image
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    “The life and teachings of Swamini Turiyasangitananda are precious spiritual jewels waiting to be discovered. This book reveals many inspiring and unknown parts of Swamini’s life. Numerous personal accounts of divine healings enhance her quiet yet determined focus to be of service locally and globally. Perhaps most moving is this servitor’s willingness to take on herself, the effects of others’ negative karma. Portrait of Devotion is a doorway that leads to the life of a modern saint. If we pass through this door, there is a good chance that our own life will change for the better.” — Purushottama Hickson, H.Y.T.

    “A.C. Swami Turiyasangitananda is a bhakti yogi who practiced karma yoga, a spiritual guru who, with dedication, followed the footsteps of her Satguru. She was a living example of true mental detachment ...while still physically being in the midst of society. She is spiritually evolved in the truest sense.” — Sai Ram Iyer of Mumbai

    “Many of us are aware of the musical talents of Alice Coltrane, a gifted pianist, harpist and composer. In this beautiful book, the author takes us on a journey of the spiritual transformation of the artist, Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, who became a teacher of life with feminine strength and conviction. The author brings out what a pure relationship is like between a Guru and student, and most important how a spiritual journey may be straight and narrow at any moment, but that moment will pass on to the next moment of joy. Lastly, the story and lessons of Clarity, Compassion, and Courage, which Alice taught day in and day out to her students will call us to embrace our own spiritual journey.”
    — Stephen Rosen, Ph.D

  • Common Prayer Pocket Edition: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals cover image
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    Common Prayer Pocket Edition helps individuals and today's diverse church pray together across traditions and denominations. With an ear to the particulars of various liturgical prayer traditions, and using an advisory team of liturgy experts, the authors have created a tapestry of prayer that celebrates the best of each tradition. This convenient and portable book also includes tools for prayer scattered throughout to aid those unfamiliar with liturgy and deepen the prayer life of those already familiar with liturgical prayer. Common Prayer Pocket Edition adds new prayers for compline (late evening) and for individual use, such as prayers for travel, protection, and various blessings. It includes a table of days and readings for the morning prayers as well as an annotated list of saints and days to remember. Churches and individuals who desire a deeper prayer life--and those familiar with Shane Claiborne and New Monasticism--will enjoy the tools offered in this book as a fresh take on liturgy.

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