Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.

Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry―anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.

Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.

Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

A Friends Fund Publication.

From the creator of the beloved @PoetryIsNotaLuxury Instagram account,a gorgeously wrought poetry anthology that is a gift and a guide for readers through every season of life.

Inspired by writer and philosopher Audre Lorde’s famous claim: “Poetry is not a luxury,” this anthology proves the vitality of poetry as a crucial source of inspiration, comfort, and delight.

In a first section, “Summer,” you’ll find lush landscapes and love poems for weddings and anniversaries, alongside poems on travel, protest, and expressions of sheer joy and exhilaration. “Autumn” ushers in nostalgic poems about home and family and friendship, fall leaves, nesting and gratitude. You may turn to “Winter” should you require a poem for mourning, some lyrics for loneliness, or an ode to comfort. Rounding out a year’s worth of verse is “Spring,” in which you’ll discover celebratory poems, in the form of praise for rain and flowers, new beginnings, and all that the future might hold.

Each poem within has been chosen from centuries of verse from around the world, with an emphasis on living poets. Friends old and new await, with selections from Rita Dove, Victoria Chang, Ross Gay, Naomi Shihab Nye, C.D. Wright, Eileen Myles, Ada Limón,Ross Gay, Ilya Kaminsky, Jos Charles, and more.

From love poems to elegies, from the heights of new love to the furrows of anxiety, from special occasions to a morning pick-me-up, there is something here for longtime poetry lovers and novices, in any season of need.

EVENT DEETS: 

When: December 5 at 630 PM

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

How: RSVP for your time with Glory. Please purchase On Girlhood if you have not to support our programming. 

About The Book

Proudly introducing the Well-Read Black Girl Library Series, On Girlhood is a lovingly curated anthology celebrating short fiction from such luminaries as Rita Dove, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and more.

Featuring stories by: Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, Rita Dove, Camille Acker, Toni Cade Bambara, Amina Gautier, Alexia Arthurs, Dana Johnson, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edwidge Danticat, Shay Youngblood, Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston.

“When you look over your own library, who do you see?” asks Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim in this lovingly curated anthology. Bringing together an array of “unforgettable, and resonant coming-of-age stories” (Nicole Dennis-Benn), Edim continues her life’s work to brighten and enrich American reading lives through the work of both canonical and contemporary Black authors—from Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison to Dana Johnson and Alexia Arthurs. Divided into four themes—Innocence, Belonging, Love, and Self-Discovery—On Girlhood features fierce young protagonists who contend with trials that shape who they are and what they will become. At times heartbreaking and hilarious, the stories within push past flat stereotypes and powerfully convey the beauty of Black girlhood, resulting in an indispensable compendium for every home library.

About The Author

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More than 30 acclaimed writers—including diverse voices such as Nikki Giovanni, David Omotosho Black, Natasha Trethewey, Barry Jenkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, and Angela Flournoy—reflect on their experience and expertise in this unique book on the craft of writing that focuses on the Black creative spirit.

How We Do It is an anthology curated by Black writers for the creation and proliferation of Black thought. While a creator’s ethnicity does not solely define them, it is inherently part of who they are and how they interpret the world.

For centuries, Black creators have utilized oral and written storytelling traditions in crafting their art. But how does one begin the process of constructing a poem or story or character? How do Black writers, when faced with questions of “authenticity,” dive deep into the essence of their lives and work to find the inherent truth? How We Do It addresses these profound questions. Not a traditional “how to” writing handbook, it seeks to guide rather than dictate and to validate the complexity and range of styles—and even how one thinks about craft itself.

An outstanding list of contributors offer their insights on a range of important topics. Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown explores the lives personified in poetry, while Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey explores decolonizing enduring metaphors. National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy illuminates the pain of grief in all forms and how it can be revealed in the act of creation, and iconoclast Nikki Giovanni offers an elegiac declaration on language.

New and previously published essays and interviews provide encouragement, examples, and templates, and offer lessons on everything from poetic form and plotting a story to the lessons inherent in the act of writing, trial & error, and finding inspiration in the works of others, including those of Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, and Edward P. Jones. A handbook and a reference tool, How We Do It is a thoughtful and welcome tool that offers direction to help Black artists establish their own creative practice while celebrating and widening the scope of the Black writer’s role in art, history, and culture.

Contributors include David Omotosho Black, Jericho Brown, Breena Clark, Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, W. Ralph Eubanks, Curdella Forbes, Angela Flournoy, Ernest Gaines, Nikki Giovanni, Marita Golden, Ravi Howard, Terrance Hayes, Mitchell S. Jackson, Barry Jenkins, Charles S. Johnson, Tayari Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Elizabeth Nunez, Carl Phillips, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Rion Amilcar Scott, Evie Shockley, Natasha Trethewey, Frank X Walker, Afaa M. Weaver, Crystal Wilkinson, Jacqueline Woodson, Tiphanie Yanique.

Recently, Black women have taken the world stage in national politics, popular culture, professional sports, and bringing attention to racial injustice in policing and the judicial system. However, rarely are Black women acknowledged and highlighted for their efforts to understand the social problems confronting our generation and those generations that came before us. In the post-civil rights era, research faculty and theoreticians must acknowledge the marginalization of Black women scholars’ voices in contemporary qualitative scholarship and debates.

Black Feminism in Qualitative Inquiry: A Mosaic for Writing our Daughter's Body engages qualitative inquiry to center the issues and concerns of Black women as researcher(s) and the researched while simultaneously questioning the ostensible innocence of qualitative inquiry, including methods of data collection, processes of data analysis, and representations of human experiences and identities. The text centers "daughtering" as the onto-epistemological tool for approaches to Black feminist and critical race data analysis in qualitative inquiry.

Advanced and novice researchers interested in decolonizing methodologies and liberatory tools of analysis will find the text useful for cultural, education, political, and racial critiques that center the intersectional identities and interpretations of Black women and girls and other people of color. Daughtering as a tool of analysis in Black feminist qualitative inquiry is our own cultural and spiritual way of being, doing, and performing decolonizing work.

This fascinating book provides the first assessment of the artists who have shaped the rich history of art in Texas, from its 19th-century origins to the diversity of the present scene. Published to accompany an exhibition of selected works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, this lavishly illustrated volume reveals the complexity of America's most fabled state as seen through the eyes of its leading artists.

The artists highlighted here include figures of national prominence like Robert Wilson; emerging artists such as Helen Altman and Jesse Amado; and artists who have made a significant impact on the evolution of American art, from the Texas-born Robert Rauschenberg to artists who have worked in Texas for extended periods like Rackstraw Downes and Donald Judd. Exploring and exploding the cliches that have defined the Lone Star state and its art, this is an important contribution both to regional history and contemporary art.

The first cookbook from the cult-status Asian grocery store chain is a visual celebration with Korean recipes, ingredient spotlights, cultural deep dives, how-tos, and more.

When the first H Mart opened in 1982, it was just a humble grocery store in Queens, carrying the most basic of Korean ingredients. In the 43 years since then, the tiny shop has grown into America’s largest Asian supermarket chain. And for the nearly 20 million Asian Americans living across the country, H Mart has become more than a simple grocery store. It’s a place of community, a joyous connection to their culture and heritage. Cooking with H Mart is here to bring that joy home. This gorgeous, oversized cookbook and guidebook contains everything a person could ever want to know about H Mart: From its history and profiles to ingredient spotlights and how-tos.

The highlight of the book is the 75 home-cook friendly recipes that make the most of H Mart’s ingredients. There are classic Korean dishes, like Spicy Cucumber Salad (Oi Muchim), Braised Beef Short Ribs (Galbi Jjim), and Stir-Fried Sweet Potato Noodles (Japchae) as well as unique twists using contemporary flavors. Pizza-Stuffed Fish-Shaped Waffles (Pizza Bunggeobbang) rethinks a popular Korean street food by swapping out the traditional red bean paste with pizza toppings. And Cheesy Kimchi Fried Rice (Cheese Buldak Kimchi Bokkeumbap) combines hot sauce, spicy kimchi, and mozzarella to make a truly addictive comfort meal.

Overflowing with brilliantly colored photography and illustrations, charts, and infographics, Cooking with H Mart will help any reader make the most of their next grocery run.

Beyond simplistic binaries of “the dark continent” or “Africa Rising,” Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects — cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong’s focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.

It Tells My Story is a gorgeously illustrated art book showcasing thirty-four quilts from the Yvonne Wells Collection at the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Yvonne Wells is an acclaimed artist from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, whose narrative quilts are immediately recognizable. Using bright colors and bold designs, Wells’s quilts include references to biblical stories, the Civil Rights Movement, and moments from her life. Among the more than ten thousand objects in the International Quilt Museum permanent collection, Wells is the most represented artist.

Essays by quilt historians Teresa Duryea Wong, Carolyn Ducey, Kyra E. Hicks, and Sharbreon Plummer discuss Wells and her place in the art world. It Tells My Story highlights Wells’s most beloved quilt series, The Seven Deadly Sins, which Wells describes in her own words. The vibrancy and vitality of Wells’s creations are featured throughout the book, including the backs of many of Wells’s quilts, which have never been published before, bringing to life the extraordinary work of this renowned quilter.

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South

A slantwise account of queer life in the twentieth century and a testament to the liberatory power of friendship.

A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed ‘marginal’ into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power.

A window into a Dominican family's bodega and the community at its heart

A bodega is much more than a neighborhood grocery store--it's a lifeline to community and culture. In Bodega Stories, Amaris Castillo takes readers inside Orlando Latin Market, a bodega owned and operated by her parents in St. Petersburg, Florida, to reveal a thriving local hub that bridges generations, languages, and traditions.

Meet the regulars: Castillo's glamorous Tía Margarita, who has worked part-time at the bodega for years; longtime cook Alberto, who arrives early to prepare the store's rice, beans, empanadas, and croquetas; Chico, the owner of the barbershop next door; and Esther, who visits after church every Sunday for her crispy chicharrones. Through captivating and charming true stories of visitors who come looking for products from Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, and many other countries, readers get a glimpse into the lives of employees and customers as they navigate matters of immigration, love, history, food, and identity.

Interwoven are snapshots of daily life, like a bulletin board outside the store where local residents post apartments for rent, messages through the bodega's Facebook page asking for hard-to-find items, and photos from the past and present. Including Castillo's own family's story from the Dominican Republic to New York to Florida, Bodega Stories is a portrait of finding home--between the cultures we inherit and the ones we embrace.