A visionary new collection by former poet laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Tracy K. Smith

The forest in Tracy K. Smith’s brilliant new work is and is not a metaphor. While these poems strive to hear and to heed the voices of the earth and its nations of trees, they also test a discomfiting view of humanity, not as divided and opposing factions but as a vast cacophonous family connected by a single deep root.

The Forest grapples with violence, cynicism, and injustice by tapping into the ecstatic for much-needed insight, humility, and conviction. Enlivened by slow time and spiritual desire, Smith’s poems are political and devotional conduits that bear witness to meditative visions and channeled conversations with ancestors and ascended guides. Several poems honor motherhood and the particular care bound up in mothering Black sons. Others come to terms with grief and a failed marriage now so distant as to be another life. Hovering always near, the divine feminine is a figure called forth to refute the God of War.

The Forest is a magnificent act of foresight beyond the granular realities of partisan depravity, polarization, and indifference. Smith reaches an exhilarating new height, in contact with the mythic and the rapturous.

In a piercing blend of biography, criticism, and memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Salamishah Tillet explores Nina Simone’s life and the impact of her legacy.

In Nina Simone and the World She Made, Salamishah Tillet traces Nina Simone’s transformation from child prodigy to musical icon and fearless civil rights activist. When racism thwarted her dreams of becoming a classical pianist, Simone reinvented herself and created a sound wholly her own—one that would catapult her into stardom and the heart of the Black Power movement.

Decades later, Simone’s music inspired the hip-hop generation and Tillet’s own profound political awakening. From buying her first Nina Simone album to becoming a creative and activist, Tillet’s private encounters with Simone’s work grew into a broader exploration of her legacy. Exploring Simone’s unique impact on the American cultural landscape through the women who shaped her and those whom she shaped, Tillet reveals how art can be a powerful driver of social activism, and the struggles and sacrifices it involves.

With honest, lyrical prose, Tillet’s intimate portrait brings us close to Simone, while showing us how the singer’s voice captured the pain and promise of America and resonates in the fight for equality today. Nina Simone and the World She Made urges us to listen to Simone’s music—not just as a reflection of the past, but as a guide for the future.

In her first book for young readers, National Book Award winner Imani Perry chronicles the history of schools and education in Black America.

After emancipation, freed people of all ages wanted to go to school. From the story of John McCline, who learned to read as a boy serving in the Union Army, through the teachers who built one-room schoolhouses across the rural South during Reconstruction to the student-led movement to desegregate schools during the Civil Rights movement, Imani Perry’s intimate and sweeping social history narrates this powerful desire for education and literacy―and how African Americans built and maintained an education system even while segregated and unequal public education failed them. These schools taught Black children to believe in themselves and their future despite Jim Crow and the institutionally racist society they lived in.

Informed by a rich trove of letters, diaries, and other archival materials, Hope in a Classroom is a necessary, expansive new narrative of the Black American experience for young readers, delivered in a propulsive and soaring voice.

illustrations throughout

For the first time in print! A definitive compilation of Nikki Giovanni’s best and most beloved poems from her extraordinary 60-year career.

Nikki Giovanni’s poems are some of the most quoted, most memorable, and most talked about gems in American literature, with a huge pop culture following that continues even after her death in 2024. But there has never been a single “best of” volume of her work—until now.

The Essential Poems compiles Nikki’s most beloved and thought-provoking work, drawn from her extraordinary 60+ year career. Included here are classics like “Nikki-Rosa,” “Ego Trippin’,” “Housecleaning,” “Cotton Candy for a Rainy Day,” “Bicycles,” and “The Sterling Silver Mirror.” Edited by Dr. Virginia Fowler, Nikki’s widow, it also includes an Introduction and an Afterword by literary superstars Kwame Alexander and Renée Watson.

It is a book to be savored, and shared.

We're meeting to discuss Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, April 28 @ 7PM CST

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

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Mystery/Thriller Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

ABOUT ARSENIC AND ADOBO

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. 

From the final decades of US slavery to the present, a powerful and illuminating history of a profound inequity: the special burden of infant care and loss experienced by Black women.

In the United States, Black infants are far less likely than white infants to survive their first year of life. Underlying this predicament is a history of profound loss and persistent striving, which has durably shaped Black life in America. Following generations of mothers, caregivers, laborers, and activists from the final decades of slavery to the present, Perilous Passages chronicles the intimate practices and collective strategies Black communities created and relied upon to sustain early life threatened by disease, inadequate medical care, and racialized harm.

Perilous Passages examines nineteenth-century domestic care practices that carried families through the violence of slavery and war, and traces Black eugenic ideas, the efforts of various grassroots movements, and myths and realities surrounding the 1980s panic over “crack babies.” Health professionals, legal officials, and scientific experts exerted pressure, sometimes directly―as in antimidwifery campaigns―and sometimes more subtly, through life insurance practices that devalued Black life. Wangui Muigai shows that at every turn, authorities recast infant deaths as the fault of Black women, with ongoing impact on birthing experiences and outcomes. Still, Black women and their communities have always done more than bear loss. They have produced vital knowledge about its causes, trained in specialized care, developed networks of cradle-to-grave support, and organized to reform society in ways that safeguard children.

Centering Black women’s experiences, Perilous Passages insists on visceral confrontation with the deadliness of American racism while also offering a powerful account of what makes life possible.

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a novel about the collisions of youth—with want, with art, with rage—as experienced by a young Chippewa writer in politically fraught 1970s America.

“Where do we find a definition? Where do we find what a poet is?”

Fargo, 1971. Erdrich’s narrator spends her days sneaking pocketsful of lasagna home from waitressing, missing the author friends who have floated out of town again, and wondering half-seriously if the poetry of local third graders is outdoing her own. In search of more life, more inspiration, and—always—enough food to get through the next day, she embarks on a series of jobs, affairs, and travels that illuminate the wild eccentricities of the American national character as much as they do the injustices—and resistances—boiling around her in North Dakota.

I’m Hungry explores shocking violence, unearthly beauty, and voracious appetites of all kinds, from sexual hunger to the need for a life transfigured by poetry. It answers the question of “what a poet is” with an indelible portrait of a young woman in a fractured community who finds her voice even as she encounters lovers, hustlers, and specters whose own hungers threaten to pull her under.

A bold, gorgeously textured, and unforgettable moral fable, this compelling novel will be revelatory to her legions of fans.

Award-winning author Kai Ashante Wilson returns with a bold new vision of fantasy. The Fall of Elvenesse transforms the genre of Tolkien in the image of N. K. Jemisin, Marlon James, and Simon Jimenez.

Elves have ruined the world.

From their high mountain, the cruel knights of Elvenesse range out to conquer. They pillage, they enslave, they wreak genocide. Always the Elves have taken, never considered when the bill for their crimes will come due.

That time has come. The fury of the world has awoken. The victims will have their vengeance.

A divine scourge of fire sweeps across the land toward Elvenesse, and the last free people of the Nations flee before it. As the mountains char, rivers boil, and savannas burn, the Free Nations rely on the muscle and magic of their strong and runt freaks. But as their one remaining Saint assumes his power, he receives a prophecy: the Nations' only path to survival runs through Elvenesse. Only by navigating the Elven labyrinth can he win his people's lives.

Enter St. Paradise, a city pulsing with blood magic, where clan secrets and shifting allegiances rule the land. For the first time, bestselling novelist Akwaeke Emezi brings their powerful talents to epic fantasy!

Ten years ago, Eclipse Orinabe and her aunt, Silver, were the sole survivors of a massacre that nearly wiped out their clan.

Then the Orinabe unleash their revenge: the annihilation of the clans who betrayed them, and the release of rapture, a drug so potent that the clan—once peaceful pharmaceutical makers—soon have St. Paradise in a chokehold.

Disturbed by the Orinabe’s bloody rise, the surviving clan leaders nonetheless make nice with Silver, known as the Butcher, and accept Eclipse—a weapon disguised as a glamorous clan princess—into society.

With the foundations of St. Paradise trembling, one spark will set the city aflame. And embers are everywhere: Wolf, Heir to the Goldshot clan, is on the run from his own people, armed with holy golden bullets. He claims sanctuary with Clan Heron, spies so secretive that no one knows their true Heir.

Noah, Heir to the psychic Solarin clan, is pushed into a consuming relationship with Eclipse by his clan leaders. But neither Heir is what the other thinks—and the secret Noah is keeping is powerful enough to blink out St. Paradise’s entire existence in an instant.

An ancient magic ties these clans together and a brutal reckoning will come as the Heirs collide and claim their fraught inheritance.

Emotionally rich, explosively thrilling, and finely wrought as all of Emezi’s work, their new standalone novel is perfect for fans of the author or Fonda Lee, R.F. Kuang, and V.E. Schwab.

The next book in the New Haven series, interconnected standalones featuring second chances, fiery passion, and Black heroines who get their happily ever afters.

Rae

Loving someone with demons is hard but leaving them is harder.

That's a lesson I learned roughly a decade ago when I left the love of my life behind. Choosing the child we made but weren't ready for over any hope for what could be. Trading in potential for reality, my dreams for motherhood and the warmth of his embrace for a cold, lonely world.

Despite how tragic it all sounds, everything turned out okay. I made peace with my decisions, soothed the ache in my heart with harsh truths that have remained firmly in tact until...well, until now.

Now, I'm back in New Haven and nothing is the way it should be. The man I left behind is not the one I keep running into around town. He's steady, dependable, stable, ready to be a father to our daughter and desperate to do more than co-parent with me.

Hunter

couldn't stop wanting Rachel Prince if I tried. Not that I ever have. Tried, that is. Why would I when she's the only good thing I've ever craved, the only addiction I've had that didn't try to destroy me?

When she left me, I wasn't mad. I didn't want her to go, but I think by the end we both knew she couldn't stay. There was too much darkness around us, and it was all emanating from me.

My addiction. My pain. My grief overshadowing hers.

I wasn't the man she needed or the partner she deserved. She did the right thing, getting out, taking our kid with her. But knowing that doesn't make it hurt any less.

It does, however, make me determined.

To keep my decade long sobriety streak going.

To make up for every day I missed of my daughter's life.

To win back the love of my life and never let her go again.