For Black women who've grown weary of shrinking back.

The Pink Robe Chronicles began in a moment of heartbreak. In August 2016, Rev. Dr. Melva L. Sampson wrapped herself in a tattered pink robe, pressed "Go live" on Facebook, and preached from her living room--grieving the police killing of Korryn Gaines and the silencing of her own voice in the pulpit. That livestream became a sanctuary. Week after week, she showed up in her robe, offering meditations on justice, healing, and spiritual insurgency. What started as a digital hush harbor grew into a movement.

Now, in this powerful new collection of womanist wisdom, Dr. Sampson weaves together sermons, essays, letters, and reflections that center the lived experiences of Black women navigating identity, trauma, joy, and liberation. With fierce honesty and poetic depth, she chronicles her journey from silence to sovereignty, bringing ancestral wisdom, theological insight, and radical love into a sacred space for the weary and the rising.

Each chapter closes with prompts, meditations, and affirmations that invite us into reflection, healing, and embodied truth-telling. The Pink Robe Chronicles offers a space to rest, rage, and reimagine. It is a love letter to Black women's brilliance, a call to collective healing, and a reminder that our stories are sacred--and our voices, unchained.

After decades out of print, Passion—one of June Jordan’s most important collections—has returned to readers. Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including “Poem About My Rights,” “Poem About Police Violence,” “Free Flight,” and an essay by the poet, “For the Sake of the People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This new edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.

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From the renowned author of Invisible Man,a classic, “elegant” (The New York Times) collection of essays that captures the breadth and complexity of his insights into racial identity, jazz and folklore, and citizenship across six decades. Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this definitive volume includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead. With newly discovered essays and speeches, The Collected Essays reveals a more vulnerable, intimate side of Ellison than what we've previously seen. “Raph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

Dominique Morisseau’s most radical play yet follows two Black women living more than a century apart as they struggle to define freedom for themselves.

Confederates tells the story of two women in what at first appear to be radically different circumstances. Sara is an enslaved rebel ferrying information from the plantation to Union soldiers. Sandra is a political science professor fighting the patriarchy at a predominantly white university. As the play progresses, the line between the past and present blurs, raising questions about how far we have come since 1865—and how far we still have to go.

In Morisseau’s words, "I don’t believe in the inhumanity of the enslaved." This play delves into serious themes with a satirical tone, juxtaposing humor and sexuality alongside pain and struggle. Confederates is an ambitious work by one of America’s most exciting playwrights.

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.

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An artist’s odyssey from Jim Crow–era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery—a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson.

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs.

During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert’s breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia’s Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert’s Black community and the people, including his wife, Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother’s love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.

Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and paintings that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society

Join us for our monthly book club meeting. Our March book club read is Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie.

Please support the space and opportunities we create by buying your book from Kindred Stories. 

Our meeting will be on Thursday, March 23 at 7:00 PM in the Kindred Stories Reading Garden. Be sure to RSVP and show up with the book read (or mostly read).

About the Book

One of The Guardian’s Top 10 Debuts of the Year
One of Entertainment Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of the Summer

Sayon Hughes longs to escape the volatile Bris­tol neighborhood known as Ends, the tight-knit but sometimes lawless world in which he was raised, and forge a better life with Shona, the girl he’s loved since grade school. With few paths out, he is drawn into dealing drugs along­side his cousin, the unpredictable but fiercely loyal Cuba. Sayon is on the cusp of making a clean break when an altercation with a rival dealer turns deadly and an expected witness threatens blackmail, upending his plans.

Sayon’s loyalties are torn. If Shona learns the secret of his crime, he will lose her forever. But if he doesn’t escape Ends now, he may never get another chance. Is it possible to break free of the bookies’ tickets, burnt spoons, and crook­ed solutions, and still keep the love of his life?

Rippling with authenticity and power, Mo­ses McKenzie’s dazzling debut brings to life a vi­brant and teeming world we have read too little about. In its sheer lyrical power, An Olive Grove in Ends recalls the work of James Baldwin and marks the arrival of an exciting and formidable new voice. 

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The bookclub meeting will take place on July 27 at TBA in the Kindred Stories' Reading Garden. Be sure to show up with the book read (or partially read). You are always welcome to just come and take up space. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

The long-awaited reissue of Alice Coltrane’s original spiritual teachings and reflections, which provide powerful insight into her transcendent music, cherished by millions across the globe 

ALICE COLTRANE (1937–2007) was a composer, master of various musical instruments, improviser, spiritual leader, and wife of John Coltrane. Throughout her adult life, she worked within and combined a broad range of musical genres, including gospel, R&B, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. She recorded more than twenty full-length albums for Impulse and Warner Bros. Her music speaks to her experiences as a child playing for church congregations in Detroit; the transcendent and mind-bending avant-garde improvisations she performed with her husband John Coltrane; and her religious pilgrimages to India. 

When Monument Eternal was originally published in 1977, Alice Coltrane was living in Southern California and had recently become a swami, building and nurturing an alternative spiritual community. In these pages, she says that the book is “based upon the soul’s realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.” Monument Eternal offers deep insight into Coltrane’s tremendous musical output, and shines a light on her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church organist and bebopper, to sage thought leader Swami Turiyasangitananda. It also reflects the extraordinary fluidity of American religious customs in the mid and late twentieth century. 

Akashic’s long-awaited reissue of Monument Eternal includes a new foreword by Ashley Kahn.