Celebrate the release of Good Spirits with Tiffanie Barriere! This special evening will feature an author conversation with Tiffanie and Chef Dominic Lee, owner of Augustine’s, followed by a cocktail tasting featuring recipes from the book. Join us for an engaging evening of conversation, cocktails, and good spirits!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, December 10 @ 7PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St., HTX 77004)

How: 

• RSVP ONLY
  Reserve your seat and participate in the tasting.

  RSVP WITH BOOK
  Reserve your seat and purchase a copy of Good Spirits, supporting both the author and our store programming. Your book will be available for pickup at the event. Includes the tasting.

  RSVP (I ALREADY HAVE THE BOOK)
  Reserve your seat and let us know you plan to bring a copy of Good Spirits that you previously purchased from another bookseller. Includes the tasting.

Please Note: Generally books purchased from other retailers are not permitted in the bookstore and are not eligible for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must either purchase a copy from Kindred Stories or select the RSVP: I Already Have the Book ticket option, which allows you to bring a copy purchased elsewhere. If you already purchased your book from Kindred Stories, you may select the RSVP Only ticket option and bring your Kindred Stories copy to the event.

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your book. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event. If your book is not retrieved it will be returned to the publisher and will not be available for pick up in the future.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The must-have companion for classic cocktails, mocktails, and creative drinks, plus historical insights, from a celebrated industry icon.

Good Spirits is a culture-rich cocktail exploration that seamlessly blends practiced technique with deep historical knowledge. For master bartender and cocktail educator Tiffanie Barriere, the bar has always been a place where history, creativity, and community combine. From gold-standard martinis and expert Manhattans to drinks inspired by mood, the cocktail curious will learn not only how to skillfully mix and pour with joy, but also about the fascinating and often untold history behind our favorite drinks and spirits.

In addition to the backstories and recipes for 125 cocktails, enthusiasts will find illuminating essays about choosing and using spirits and the legacies (both bitter and sweet) behind them; important historical figures who invented our favorite drinks, liqueurs, and bar tools; and truths that track the impact of trends and cocktail movements. Zero-proof variations abound thanks to the ingenious concept of cocktail “stock”, while dozens of bold-flavored syrups, shrubs, and infusions make it just as easy and exciting to take a drink in a no-alcohol direction as a boozy one. Insights on tools, garnishing, ice types, and the difference between shaking, rolling, and aerating set you up to hone your mixology and make drinks with confidence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tiffanie Barriere is a bartender’s bartender and award-winning mixologist, educator, and hospitality leader. The former beverage director at One Flew South, the “Best Airport Bar in the World,” she has been honored as a Food & Wine Game Changer and a Tales of the Cocktail Visionary Award recipient. She has contributed cocktail recipes to several cocktail books and cookbooks, including Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice and Modern Classic Cocktails. Her work has also been featured in Imbibe, Forbes, Essence, and Southern Living. She is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Rooted in the unique tapestry of Creole culture, Chef Dominick Lee’s culinary journey pays heartfelt homage to his New Orleans heritage. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Lee’s passion for cooking led him to The Art Institute of Houston, where he received the inaugural “Underbelly Scholarship” from James Beard award-winning chef Chris Shepherd. His journey to his Bachelors in Culinary Management included roles as sous chef at Bay Oaks Country Club, Executive Sous Chef under James Beard semifinalist Chef Kiran Verma at Kiran’s and stages at some of the most highly acclaimed restaurants in the country, including Alinea (2 Michelin Stars), Next (1 Michelin Star), and Blue Hill at Stone Barns (2 Michelin Stars). At 29, Lee became one of the youngest executive chefs in Houston, taking the helm at Poitín Bar & Kitchen where he earned accolades such as Texas Monthly’s 2019 Best New Restaurants and a number of “Rising Star Chef” distinctions.

In 2021, Lee relocated to Europe to study Creole food derivatives and served as head chef at Villa Lena in Tuscany. Two years later, he returned back to The States, opening Alligator Pear in New York City, which showcased a New American menu inspired by New Orleans. Now, Lee has returned to Houston to open Augustine’s, a progressive Creole restaurant exploring the many dimensions of his Creole heritage — debuting Summer 2026.

In Teaching Critical Thinking, renowned cultural critic and progressive educator bell hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today.

In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, hooks explores the confounding and sometimes controversial topics that teachers and students have urged her to address since the publication of the previous best-selling volumes in her Teaching series, Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community. The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning.

Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart.

In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how profoundly she can.

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives―to see that feminism is for everybody.

Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans. Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships and marriage in Black life, the prose and poetry of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, the liberation movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, or hip hop and gangsta rap culture, hooks lets us know what love’s got to do with it.

Combining the passionate politics of W.E.B. DuBois with fresh, contemporary insights, hooks brilliantly offers new visions that will heal our nation’s wounds from a culture of lovelessness. Her writings on love and its impact on race, class, family, history, and popular culture raise all the relevant issues. This is work that helps us heal. Salvation shows us how to create beloved American communities.

Ten years ago, bell hooks astonished readers with Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope - a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, any time - not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives.

In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change.

Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."

Icon of women's movement and author of over twenty books, including a narrative series on love, bell hooks reminds us of the good and bad moments we spend in love through her inspiring poetry.

When Angels Speak of Love is a book of 50 love poems by the icon of the feminist movement and most famous among public intellectuals. In beautiful, profoundly poetic terms, hooks challenges our views and experiences with love--tracing the link between seduction and surrender, the intensity of desire, and the anguish of death. Whether towards family, friends, or oneself, hooks's creative genius makes love both magical and beautiful. Her poems are written from the heart and learned by the reader's heart.

For bell hooks, the best cultural criticism sees no need to separate politics from the pleasure of reading. Yearning collects together some of hooks's classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the '80s. Addressing topics like pedagogy, postmodernism, and politics, hooks examines a variety of cultural artifacts, from Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing and Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. The result is a poignant collection of essays which, like all of hooks's work, is above all else concerned with transforming oppressive structures of domination.

In Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, award-winning author and renowned academic “bell hooks reveals the heart of her writing life and the process through which she has come to be known as a ‘visionary feminist’” (Essence).

Born and raised in the rural South, bell hooks learned early the power of the written word and the importance of speaking her mind. Her passion for words is the heartbeat of this collection of essays.

Remembered Rapture celebrates literacy, the joys of reading and writing, and the lasting power of the book. With grace and insight, these essays reveal bell hooks’s wide-ranging intellectual scope, untangling the complex personae of women writers, especially those whose work goes against the grain.

“For anyone who writes, or seeks to understand the writing process, or wants to know more about the erudite and passionate mind of bell hooks, this is the book to read.”―The Philadelphia Inquirer

In childhood, bell hooks was taught that "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion. In this collection of personal and theoretical essays, hooks reflects on her signature issues of racism and feminism, politics and pedagogy. Among her discoveries is that moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, making new life and new growth possible.