80 results for “dorothy west”

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  • IRL AUTHOR TALK: Spilling the Tea with Brenda Jackson - May 15 @ 7PM
    from $5.00

    Celebrate Brenda Jackson's 150th book, Spilling the Tea! 

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Tuesday, May 15 @ 7PM

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

    How: RSVP WITH BOOK

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    Ninety-something Mama Laverne is determined to find all of her great-grandchildren their perfect match before going home to glory. So far, her success rate is 100 percent—and she intends to keep it that way.

    Ninety-something-year-old Felicia Laverne Madaris, known in the family as Mama Laverne, is determined to find all of her great-grandchildren the perfect match before she goes home to glory. So far, her success rate is 100 percent, and she intends to keep it that way.

    After sustaining injuries in Iraq, US Army Ranger Chancellor (Chance) Madaris was told he’d never walk again. Chance credits his great-grandmother, Mama Laverne, with giving him the will and fortitude to heal and prove the doctors wrong. He has a healthy respect for her meddling ways and knows he’ll eventually end up next on her matchmaker’s list.

    When Zoey Pritchard was eight, she survived a car accident that left both her parents dead. She was sent to live with her great-aunt who refused to speak about her parents. Zoey has no memory from before the crash, but she’s been having the same dream over and over…

    Guided by nothing but a hunch and images from her dream, Zoey travels to Houston. Searching for answers, Zoey uncovers a scandal involving her parents and the wealthy and powerful Madaris family. Her trail leads her straight to Chance’s door. The dislike and intense attraction are instant and simultaneous. Was it chance or Mama Laverne’s plan to throw this pair together?

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    BRENDA JACKSON is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than one hundred contemporary multicultural romance novels, including the Madaris Family series, the Westmorelands series, and The Playas series. She was the first African-American author to have a book published under the Harlequin/Silhouette Desire line and the first African-American romance author to hit both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists in the series romance genre. Many of her books have been adapted into movies. Brenda lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and divides her time between family, writing and traveling. brendajackson.net.

  • Kindred Stories Vinyl Sticker
    $3.00
  • Love Black Women Lapel Pin - Red/Orange
    $12.00
    • Hard enamel with gold plating • 1.25 inches wide • Pin comes with 1 pin post and 1 rubber pin back
  • IN PERSON AUTHOR TALK: We are a Haunting with Tyriek White & Kiese Laymon-June 1 @7PM CST
    from $0.00
    Come swoon over We are a Haunting with us! 
    EVENT DEETS
    WHEN: June 1 at 7PM CST
    WHERE: Kindred Stories Reading Garden (2304 Stuart Street, HTX 77004)
    HOW: RSVP to reserve your free ticket or RSVP with book to support our store and programming. 
    ABOUT THE BOOK
    A poignant debut for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Jamel Brinkley, We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts: a story of hope and transformation. 

    In 1980’s Brooklyn, Key is enchanted with her world, glowing with her dreams. A charming and tender doula serving the Black women of her East New York neighborhood, she lives, like her mother, among the departed and learns to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, who is on the verge of losing the public housing apartment they once shared. Colly, Key’s grieving son, soon learns that he too has inherited this sacred gift and begins to slip into the liminal space between the living and the dead on his journey to self-realization.

    In the present, an expulsion from school forces Colly across town where, feeling increasingly detached and disenchanted with the condition of his community, he begins to realize that he must, ultimately, be accountable to the place he is from. After college, having forged an understanding of friendship, kinship, community, and how to foster love in places where it seems impossible, Colly returns to East New York to work toward addressing structural neglect and the crumbling blocks of New York City public housing he was born to; discovering a collective path forward from the wreckages of the past. A supernatural family saga, a searing social critique, and a lyrical and potent account of displaced lives, We Are a Haunting unravels the threads connecting the past, present, and future, and depicts the palpable, breathing essence of the neglected corridors of a pulsing city with pathos and poise.
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
    Tyriek Rashawn White is a writer, musician, and educator from Brooklyn, where he served at-risk and marginalized youth, artists, and scholars in the classroom. He is currently the media director of Lampblack Lit, a literary foundation which seeks to provide mutual aid and various resources to Black writers across the diaspora. He has received fellowships from Callaloo Writing Workshop, New York State Writers Institute, and Key West Writers’ Workshop, among other honors. He holds a degree in Creative Writing and Africana Studies from Pitzer College, and most recently earned an MFA from the University of Mississippi. He is the author of the forthcoming novel, WE ARE A HAUNTING (Astra House, 2023).
    ABOUT THE MODERATOR

    Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He is also the  author of Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and  Heavy: An American Memoir.  Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

  • merry meet- cute: a virtual panel of Black holiday Romance authors - November 24 @ 3:30 PM CST
    from $3.00

    It's raining Black holiday romances and women's fiction this year and we're here to celebrate it all!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Sunday, November 24 @ 3:30 PM CST

    Where: Virtual via Zoom. We'll send you the Zoom link!

    How: RSVP here to let us know you're coming! Also, check out the cool book bundles to support the authors. 

    The Grinch (includes Only for the Holidays by Abiola Bello, A Novel Christmas by Charity Shane and Christmas in Spite of You by K.C. Mills)

    The Hallmark (I'll Be Gone for Christmas by Georgia Boone, The Christmas Catch by Toni Shiloh, Only for the Holidays by Abiola Bello) 

    Home Alone (Christmas in Spite of You by K.C. Mills,  I'll Be Gone for Christmas by Georgia Boone, A Novel Christmas by Charity Shane) 

    ABOUT THE AUTHORS 

    Abiola Bello is a British-Nigerian author from London, England. She is the bestselling, award-winning author of the children’s series Emily Knight I Am and the YA novel Love in Winter Wonderland, as well as a contributor to The Very Merry Murder Club anthology. Abiola has won London’s BIG Read 2019, was a finalist for the People’s Book Prize Best Children’s Book and was nominated for the Yoto Carnegie Award.

    Charity Shane holds a bachelor’s degree and a Juris Doctor degree. Author. Higher Education Leader. Legal Expert. Writing stories that create feelings through her words is her true passion. Her soul sings AA romance and urban romance fiction. To date, she has published twelve books, one of which became a #1 Bestseller in Urban Fiction on Amazon. Charity Shane’ is dedicated to giving readers robust and diverse stories centered around love.

    K.C. Mills penned her first novel in July 2015. One of her many talents is the ability to move between multiple genres and fully execute stories which are whole, realistic and heart-warming that leave readers wanting more. Her soul tends to feel at home with contemporary adult romance and urban fiction novels. To date, she has over one hundred titles, thirty-seven of which were published independently. Mills’ goal as an author is to craft Romance with an Edge that displays love in all shades of brown, with beautifully flawed humans that deserve to find their happily ever after.

    Toni Shiloh is a wife, a mom, and an award-winning Christian contemporary romance author. Her novel In Search of a Prince won the first ever Christy Amplify Award. It has also been praised by Oprah Daily, POPSUGAR, Library Journal, and Booklist and is a Parable bestseller. Her books have won the Christy Award and Selah Award and have been finalists for the Carol Award and the HOLT Medallion. As a member of American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW), Toni loves connecting with readers and authors alike via social media. Learn more at ToniShiloh.com

    Georgia K. Boone is a writer, a poet, and the daughter of storytellers. Sometimes, she writes songs she may one day share. Once, in a Brooklyn community center, she read James Baldwin’s quote “You can’t tell the children there’s no hope,” and she carries those words from the city to the desert and beyond. She lives on the West Coast with her family

    ABOUT THE MODERATOR

    Theresa Arline, is a Birmingham, AL native, graduate of Texas Southern University and the owner of Public Displays of Reading, a book accesories company based in Houston, Texas. Her lifelong passion for reading has evolved into a mission to promote books by Black authors across genres. 

  • June 2023 Adult Bookclub: Belly of the Beast by Da'Shaun L. Harrison
    from $0.00

    Our meeting will be on Thursday, June 22, 2023, at 7:00 PM CST at KINDRED STORIES. Be sure to RSVP and show up with the book read (or mostly read).  If you haven't read the book at all, that's ok too.

    Please support the space and opportunities we create by purchasing your book from our store. 

    About the Book

    Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing.

    To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.
     
    Da’Shaun Harrison--a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer--offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated.
     
    Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.

  • JANUARY 2024: Adult Book Club - January 25 @ 7PM
    from $0.00

    The bookclub meeting will take place on January 25, 2024 at 7 PM in The Reading Room (inside The Post). Be sure to show up with the book read (or partially read) but you are always welcome to just come and take up space. 

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.

    What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace –– feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit.

    In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us.

    Rest Is Resistance is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey’s lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art, Rest Is Resistance is a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.

  • MAY 2025: Fiction Book Club - May 22 @ 7PM
    Sold out

    We're meeting to discuss The Wedding by Dorothy West!

    BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

    When: Thursday, May 22 @ 7PM CST

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

    How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend and RSVP WITH BOOK to purchase your book and support Fiction Book Club!

    ABOUT THE WEDDING  

    In her final novel, “a beautiful and devastating examination of family, society and race” (The New York Times), Dorothy West offers an intimate glimpse into the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's Black bourgeoisie on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s.

    Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.

    With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

  • IN PERSON EVENT: MEET & GREET with Glory Edim- December 5 at 6:30PM
    Sold out
    Join us as we celebrate the paperback release of On Girlhood with Glory Edim, founder of the Well Read Black Girl.

    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

    Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a podcast and digital literacy platform that celebrates the uniqueness of Black literature and sisterhood. She edited the Well-Read Black Girl anthology, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and named a best book of the year by Library Journal. Her latest book On Girlhood is a collection of groundbreaking short stories that explore the thin yet imperative line between Black girlhood and womanhood. The winner of the Innovator's Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Edim worked as a cultural practitioner for over ten years and serves on the board of Baldwin for the Arts. She resides in Washington D.C. with her son, Zikomo. 

  • The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family cover image
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    From Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and a writer who “has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades” (Bryan Stevenson), comes a spirited and riveting memoir of growing up in an interracial family in 1960s Chicago and a daughter’s journey to understand her parents’ marriage—and her own identity.

    Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the “colorline.” Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn’t just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages—a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life.

    As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy’s father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s—studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality.

    Decades later, while sorting through her father’s papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father’s research didn’t begin with her parents’ love story—it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father’s intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own.

    Though grounded in her parents’ research, it’s Roberts’ captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents’ interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today’s most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.

  • Torn Apart

    by Dorothy Roberts

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    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change 

    Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment.

    The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, Torn Apart argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities. 

  • IRL AUTHOR TALK: Cord Swell with brittny ray crowell - January 7 @ 7PM
    Sold out

    Celebrate the release of CORD SWELL with brittny ray crowell!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Wednesday, January 7 @ 7PM

    Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

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

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    A pilgrimage of poems, stories, voices, and mixed-media collage through the lives of three generations of Black women.

    How can we memorialize our dead? How can that memorialization rend the veil between the dead and the living? In her debut volume, brittny ray crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the generations of her family from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. She preserves her relatives’ stories in writing and in works of collage, a style of archive that layers the past and the present literally and poetically.

    This unique approach transforms Cord Swell into an altar, an artistically enshrined space where crowell communes with the past and looks to the future. The title poem, in which crowell speaks to an aunt who passed away, poignantly asks, “if there’s any such thing / as paradise . . . / better than the warmth / of your neck . . . / how close am i / to that context of space?” Her question acts as a provisional thesis statement for this collection, a poetic attempt to reveal, redress, and interpret those who came before her, especially in the absence of physical traces. Each poem imagines ways to access family members who have died and calls out to ancestors crowell never met.

    In the process, crowell demonstrates capacious syntactical range, nimbly leaping from haibun to erasure poems, interviews to sonnets. She also invents forms she calls “grooves,” which are structured as album tracklists. These techniques marry form with meaning, echoing the voices of lost loved ones in indelible verse. Rhapsodic, inventive, and ambitious, Cord Swell establishes crowell as one of the most creative and dynamic new voices in poetry.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    brittny ray crowell is an assistant professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, where she teaches courses in poetry and composition. She is a recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

    ABOUT THE MODERATOR

    Aris Kian (she/her) is a Houston enthusiast and student of abolition. Her poems are published with Button Poetry, West Branch, Obsidian Lit, and elsewhere. As an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of Houston. Her team Smoke Slam coached by Ebony Stewart ranked #1 at the 2025 Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam and #1 at the 2024 Southern Fried Poetry Slam. She previously served as the 2023-2025 Houston Poet Laureate and was chosen as a 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.

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