Vanessa Taylor is doing everything right: creative, passionate, and determined to make her mark. She’s spent years rebuilding her life on her terms, casting aside the wounds that once held her back. But when her first love, Xavier, unexpectedly reappears, those carefully placed defenses begin to unravel. Years ago, she let him go, burying parts of herself along with him. Now, he’s back—older, wiser, and unwilling to lose her a second time.

Xavier Morris has built his life from the ground up, carving out a thriving career and creating opportunities that once felt like impossible dreams. But something is missing—the woman who understood him in ways no one else could, even when he didn’t yet understand himself. Coming face-to-face with Vanessa again is like feeling sunlight after a long winter. Their chemistry is undeniable, but so is the pain of the past they’ve never fully faced.

Together, they’ll confront buried heartbreak, long-hidden secrets, and a love that refuses to fade. Vanessa’s journey toward self-acceptance and healing collides with Xavier’s drive to build a future that includes her. But can they trust each other—and themselves—enough to make it work this time?

For readers who crave an authentic, slow-burning, soul-stirring romance, this is a story of resilience, family bonds, and second chances. Discover the journey of two people whose love endures time and trials, pulling them together in a way neither can resist.

CONTENT WARNING:
Just a heads-up before you dive into this story—this book is a slow burn, emotional rollercoaster. There are some parts that touch on sensitive topics, like miscarriage, grief, and family struggles. Plus, there are moments that explore anxiety and panic attacks, mixed in with several moments of laughter and lightness. You'll also find a fair share of adult language and some steamy, explicit scenes. Take care of yourself, and feel free to step away if it gets too heavy.

A Taste of Sin is the stunningly emotional and dangerously sexy conclusion to the Passion and Politics duet.

Months after suffering a devastating heartbreak, Selene Taylor finds herself navigating the complexities of her new role as First Lady while longing for the two men her husband is determined not to let her have—Secret Service agents Callan Drake and Lance Beckham.

With their hearts on the line and threats pressing in from all sides, the forbidden trio is faced with the challenge of wading through the webs of lies and shadows of deceit to find their way back to each other. For good.

Christopher Rossmore has one dream: to run Rossmore Wineries, the vineyard that has been in his family for generations. Despite preparing for the role since birth, Christopher finds himself competing with his estranged father's gold digging fiancee for the job.

In order to become CEO, he has to convince celebrity couple Michaela Hamilton and Hunter Lawrence to hold their star studded nuptials at the vineyard.

He can run a business with his eyes closed, but public relations is not his jam.

He's gonna need some help.

Isobel Brooke Taylor has one dream: to run Taylor Made Hair Care, the family run hair care brand currently helmed by her father. Despite traveling all over the world to solidify Taylor Made's status as an international brand, the board is worried that her reputation as a party girl & socialite would make her unsuitable to take over.

In order to get the top job she has to convince the board that she can balance business & pleasure.

Walking into a crowded party and walking out with everyone eating out of the palm of her hand? Easy. Doing the same thing in the boardroom? Not so much.

She's gonna need some help.

When Izzie and Chris discover that Michaela and Hunter are hosting a couples only retreat, the perfect plan emerges. These childhood best friends will pretend to be lovers, while Izzy helps Chris woo the future Lawrences and Chris helps Izzy woo the board.

But, can Christopher and Isobel get through the retreat without wooing each other?

From bestselling YA authors comes thirteen dazzling contemporary romances inspired by the songs of Taylor Swift!

If you could live inside one Taylor Swift song for a day, which would you pick? In this shimmering anthology, thirteen best-selling and acclaimed authors do just that, reimagining some of Taylor’s most iconic songs as love stories.

Whether you’re in an era of fairy lights and folktales or diss tracks and dance floors, here’s a playlist that features all the hits: The soaring high note of first love. The minor key of heartbreak. And the steady rhythm of true friendship and self-discovery.

As clever and unforgettable as the songs that inspired them, these stories are sure to play on repeat in your head and your heart.

Stories by:
Elise Bryant
Jennifer Dugan
J. Elle
Jessica Goodman
Sloan Harlow
Crystal Maldonado
Krystal Marquis
Katharine McGee
Julie Murphy
Lynn Painter
Laura Sebastian
Sara Shepard
Jesse Q. Sutanto

At the center of this dazzling novel is Angela, a twenty-year-old beauty who leaves the stifling conformity of Oklahoma to search for fame during the rise of blaxploitation cinema in Los Angeles. But for her mother, Mildred, a strait-laced survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race riots, Angela's acting career is unforgivable, and the distance between them grows into a silence that lasts for years. It is only when Angela's daughter, Tamara, a filmmaker, sets out to close the rift between them that the women are forced to confront all that has been left unspoken in their lives.

Bold and beautifully written, Third Girl from the Left deftly explores the bonds of family and the inextricable pull of the movies.

*ships in 7 - 10 business days*

Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.

Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood’s relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor’s inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. “Concentrate,” she writes. “We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make.”

A New York Times Notable Book, Overground Railroad is a compelling and illuminating exploration of the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for Black motorists used for decades when traveling through segregated America.

“Essential” (Library Journal; starred review) I“Recalls Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns” ( Los Angeles Times) I “Eye-opening, deeply moving.” (Bookpage; starred review)

It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and Overground Railroad celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations and systemic racism in America.

Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the “Black travel guide to America.” At that time, it was both dangerous and difficult for African Americans to travel, because Black travelers couldn’t eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for Black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem.

Candacy Taylor writes in her introduction, “The Green Book was published during a time when car travel symbolized freedom in America, but since racial segregation was in full force throughout the country, the open road wasn’t open to all. When Black motorists picked up a copy of the Green Book, they were greeted by the words ‘Just What You Have Been Looking For!! NOW WE CAN TRAVEL WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT.’”

Chapters include:

* Driving While Black
* The Business of the Green Book
* Vacation
* Music Venues
* The Roots of Route 66
* Women and the Green Book
* and much more

Includes color and black-and-white period illustrations

Celebrate the release of Watermelon & Red Bird Birds: A Cookbook for Juneteeth & Black Celebrations with James Beard Award nominated food writer and chef Nicole A. Taylor!

Event DEETS: 

When: Thursday, June 23 @ 7:00 PM CST

Where: Assembly HTX (2015 Berry Street, HTX 77004)

How: Space is limited. Tickets With Book includes all the necessary materials for cocktail class. Ticket Without Book is for the author talk and materials/supplies for cocktails. 

About the Book

On June 19, 1865, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order Number 3, informing the people of Texas that all enslaved people were now free. A year later, in 1866, Black Texans congregated with music, dance, and BBQs—Juneteenth celebrations.

All-day cook-outs with artful salads, bounteous dessert spreads, and raised glasses of “red drink” are essential to Juneteenth gatherings. In Watermelon and Red Birds, Nicole puts jubilation on the main stage. As a master storyteller and cook, she bridges the traditional African-American table and 21st-century flavors in stories and recipes. Nicole synthesizes all the places we’ve been, all the people we have come from, all the people we have become, and all the culinary ideas we have embraced.

Watermelon and Red Birds contains over 75 recipes, including drinks like Afro Egg Cream and Marigold Gin Sour, dishes like Beef Ribs with Fermented Harissa Sauce, Peach Jam and Molasses Glazed Chicken Thighs, Southern-ish Potato Salad and Cantaloupe and Feta Salad, and desserts like Roasted Nectarine Sundae, and Radish and Ginger Pound Cake. Taylor also provides a resource to guide readers to BIPOC-owned hot sauces, jams, spice, and waffle mixes companies and lists fun gadgets to make your Juneteenth special. These recipes and essays will inspire parties to salute one of the most important American holidays, and moments to savor joy all year round

About the Author

Nicole A. Taylor (@foodculturist) is a James Beard Award-nominated food writer, master home cook, and producer.  She has written for the New York Times, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine. Nicole is the author of The Up South Cookbook and The Last O.G. Cookbook. She is the executive producer of If We So Choose, a short documentary about the desegregation of an iconic southern fast food joint. Nicole is the co-founder of The Maroon, a marketplace and retreat house focused on radical rest for Black creatives. She lives in New York City and Athens, Georgia, with her husband and son.

About the Moderator

Chef Vicky V (@thequeenofyum) is a United States-based, Houston native Chef Consultant/FoodStylist/Influencer/Media Producer/ & Black Restaurant Liaison. Chef Vicky V is the powerhouse for food media and championing people to expand their palates while living life beyond the stereotypes! Chef Vicky V garnered professional training in Philadelphia at JNA Institute of Culinary Art. After moving back to Houston she has successfully navigated as a food media personality. She has recently centered in on the Food & Travel/ and Unique brand forward recipe development.

Chef Vicky V has rebranded herself as the Queen of Yum in 2020 with a powerful engine of followers she calls the “yumcrumb” behind her! She has
worked with many Regional and National brands to create delicious, colorful, beautifully aesthetic food media with engagement reaching in the multiple of millions.

An Audacious Book Club Pick

The author of the award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a new poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim, to subject, critic, and master of her story

Resting Bitch Face is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.

From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop-culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris.

Ultimately, while watching lies at the crux of this collection’s poetic concerns, the goal of the speaker is to query her own self, rendering these poems as invitations for readers to question their own.

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.