*Ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

Award-winning author Renée Watson continues her charming Ramona-esque series starring spirited Ryan Hart and her loving family.

Ryan Hart loves her family and friends. She’s looking forward to summer vacation, spending time with loved ones, and her first trip to sleepaway camp! But when an unexpected camper shows up, Ryan finds it’s hard to share your best friend and harder to be a friend to someone who isn’t a good friend to you.
She's also waiting for her new sister to be born—and hoping the baby doesn’t ruin everything. The Hart family is experiencing a lot of changes, and Ryan needs to grow her patience in many ways, find ways to share the love, meet new challenges, and grow into the leader her mom and dad named her to be. This summer and the start of fifth grade just might give Ryan the chance to show how she grows and glows!

*Ships/ready for pick up in 5-8 business days*

When Nala Robertson attends an open mic night for her cousin Imani’s birthday, she finds herself falling in instant love with Tye Brown, an activist who is spending the summer putting on events for the community. Nala would rather watch movies and try out new flavors at the local creamery. In order to impress Tye, Nala tells a few tiny lies to have more in common with him. When they spend time together, some of the lies get harder to keep up. But as Nala falls deeper into keeping up her lies and into love, she’ll learn all the ways love is hard, and how self-love is revolutionary.

We're meeting to discuss Skin & Bones by Renee Watson!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Wednesday, April 23 @ 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 SKIN & BONES

From the acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a soulful and lyrical novel exploring sisterhood, motherhood, faith, love, and ultimately what gets passed down from one generation to the next
 
At 40, Lena Baker is at a steady and stable moment in life—between wine nights with her two best friends and her wedding just weeks away, she’s happy in love and in friendship until a confession on her wedding day shifts her world.

Unmoored and grieving a major loss, Lena finds herself trying to teach her daughter self-love while struggling to do so herself. Lena questions everything she’s learned about dating, friendship, and motherhood, and through it all, she works tirelessly to bring the oft-forgotten Black history of Oregon to the masses, sidestepping her well-meaning co-workers that don’t understand that their good intentions are often offensive and hurtful.

Through Watson’s poetic voice, skin & bones is a stirring exploration of who society makes space for and is ultimately a story of heartbreak and healing.

*ships in 7-10 business days

A tour-de-force collection of stories about the Black experience, by award-winning, bestselling, and emerging African American YA authors.

Black is... two sisters navigating their relationship at summer camp in Portland, Oregon as written by Renée Watson.

Black is… Jason Reynolds writing about three guys walking back from the community pool talking about nothing and everything.

Black is… Nic Stone’s bougie debutante dating a boy her momma would never approve of.

Black is …two girls kissing in Justina Ireland’s story set in Maryland.

Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more—because there are countless ways to be Black enough.

Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, this is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it’s like to be young and Black in America.

Contributors:

Justina Ireland

Varian Johnson

Rita Williams-Garcia

Dhonielle Clayton

Kekla Magoon

Leah Henderson

Tochi Onyebuchi

Jason Reynolds

Nic Stone

Liara Tamani

Renée Watson

Tracey Baptiste

Coe Booth

Brandy Colbert

Jay Coles

Ibi Zoboi

Lamar Giles

Spring is in the air, and love is on the page. Join D.W. Brooks, Alexandra Lechelle, and Zee Renee at Kindred Stories for a celebration of local romance authors.

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, May 23 @ 6PM

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

How: RSVP WITH BOOK to support the authors and our store programming. There are four options available: you can choose to support an individual author or select the Romance In Spring Bundle, which includes one book from all participating authors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

D. W. Brooks

D. W. Brooks  is an author who has independently published three romantic suspense books and two contemporary romance novels. In addition to writing books, D. W. is also a retired ophthalmologist and a kidney transplant recipient of over eight years. She is originally from Alabama but now lives in Texas with her husband and daughter.

Alexandrea LeChelle

Alexandrea LeChelle is a contemporary romance author whose stories explore love, grief, healing, and the complicated beauty of human connection.

Her novels unfold between Houston and Louisiana and center Black characters navigating family legacies, emotional vulnerability, and the quiet courage it takes to love deeply and unapologetically.

Through rich, emotional storytelling and cinematic detail, Alexandrea writes the kind of love stories she rarely saw growing up and entering adulthood. Stories where Black characters are allowed to be flawed, passionate, and deeply human.

What began as a way to process emotions and channel creativity through her own healing journey, slowly evolved into something much bigger: an urge to create and share stories about love, healing, and the complicated paths of life that bring people together.

Her stories often explore themes such as emotional healing, family dynamics, grief and growth, healthy Black love, the courage to begin again. Every story is planted in the belief that love, in all its forms, has the power to change us for the better.

When she’s not reading, Alexandrea can be found working her way through her own TBR, journaling or planning new creative projects, adding recipes to her personal cookbook, and listening to playlists that eventually inspire new stories.

At the heart of everything she creates is a simple hope: That readers will find pieces of themselves in her stories.

Zee Renee

Writing is where Zee thrives, finding peace and purpose. Her journey began at thirteen with a black-and-white composition book, later blossoming on Wattpad, where she captivated over two million readers. In December 2023, she released her debut novel, All In, and was nominated for the 2023 Black Girl Who Writes Best New Author award. By November 2024, Zee became a National Best-Selling Author with the release of When He’s Not There, her third book.

Crafting urban fiction and romance, Zee transforms raw emotions into powerful stories. Her characters are deeply personal, each carrying a piece of her spirit. She is grateful for the opportunity to share her God-given talent and hopes readers will feel the same passion in her words as she does in writing them.

Let's celebrate a few of the new-ish Black women mystery writers! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Monday, August 11, 2025 @ 6:30 PM CT

Where: Virtual! Sign up and we'll send you the link to the Zoom. 

How: RSVP ONLY to get the link to the Zoom! RSVP WITH BUNDLE to get a copy of each of the authors' book and support the bookstore!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Zoe B. Wallbrook is a recently tenured professor whose academic research has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times and The New Yorker. She was selected for mentorship by LA Times bestseller Elizabeth Little, and History Lessons, her first novel, was a runner-up for the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award. Zoe’s hobbies include beginning all emails with, “My sincerest apologies for my slow reply,” pretending to understand how astrological signs work, and crying at the end of every Call the Midwife episode. She and her husband live with their stalker, a black lab/pittie mix named Sophie.

SANDRA JACKSON-OPOKU is the author of Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him and the award-winning novel The River Where Blood is Born. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works have been published and produced in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, storySouth, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others.

Elise Bryant is the NAACP Image Award-nominated author of Happily Ever Afters, One True Loves, Reggie and Delilah’s Year of Falling, and It’s Elementary. For many years, Elise had the joy of working as a special education teacher, and now she spends her days reading, writing, and eating dessert. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Long Beach, California. You can visit her online at www.elisebryant.com.

Celebrate the final installment of Attica Locke's Highway 59 Series, Guide Me Home! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Wednesday, September 11, 2024 @ 7 PM

Where: Holy Family HTX (3719 Navigation Blvd, HTX, 77004) 

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support Attica Locke and the bookstore! 

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Attica Locke is a NY Times best-selling author of six novels, including Guide Me Home.  She is also a winner of an Edgar Award and the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and she has been short listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and nominated for an LA Times Book Prize and an NAACP Image award for her work as a novelist. Locke is also a screenwriter and TV producer, with credits that include Empire, When They See Us and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She co-created and executive produced an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home for Netflix. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

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.

Kindred Stories, Solid State Books,  Cafe Con Libros, and Shelves Bookstore presents Good Morning, Love with Ashley M. Coleman & Pauleanne Reid. 

Event Deets

When: June 22 @ 6:30PM CST

Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

How:  Register on this page or head over to register on Crowdcast directly using this link.  If you register using our website (with or without purchasing the book) and not Crowdcast, you will register a Crowdcast watch link at least 24 hours before the start of the event.

About the Book

Carlisa “Carli” Henton is a musician and songwriter hoping to follow in her father’s musical footsteps. But, biding her time until she makes it big in the music industry, she works as a junior account manager at a big-name media company to cover her New York City rent. Carli meticulously balances her work with her musical endeavors as a songwriter—until a chance meeting with rising star Tau Anderson sends her calculated world into a frenzy. Their worlds collide and quickly blur the strict lines Carli has drawn between her business and her personal life, throwing Carli’s reputation—and her burgeoning songwriting career—into question.

About the Author

Ashley M. Coleman is a freelance writer and music executive from Philadelphia. Working in the music industry for over ten years, she has also written for Essence, The Cut, Apartment Therapy, and GRAMMY.com among others. In 2017, she launched a writing community for BIPOC writers entitled Permission to Write. 

About the Moderator 

Pauleanna Reid is a celebrity ghostwriter who helps high-profile leaders and doers turn their personal stories into powerful brand assets. She founded The WritersBlok, a full-service ghostwriting agency composed of a team of content ninjas responsible for some of the most talked-about pop culture moments, books and noteworthy speeches. Pauleanna is Senior Contributor at Forbes and Business Insider where she reports on female leaders who are shaping the future. Pauleanna penned her debut novel, Everything I Couldn’t Tell My Mother, a loose adaptation of her life story. If she isn’t holding a pen or fostering next-generation leaders, Pauleanna is re-imagining a new world and crafting an exciting one of her own. 

Registration is closed via our website, but please register directly via Crowdcast

ORDER South to America here for an exclusive signed copy!

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In SOUTH TO AMERICA: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, one of our most important thinkers and critics, acclaimed author Imani Perry tackles her most ambitious project yet, moving across the color line to grapple with the mix of intimacy and racial violence in Southern and American history, showing that what it means to be American is inextricably linked with the South.  

Imani Perry will be in conversation with Dr. Melanye Price of Prairie View University

Event Details

When: Tuesday, February 1 @ 6:30 PM CST

Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

How:  Register here or on Crowdcast.  Although the event is free, we encourage you to support our store and future programming by purchasing the book here.

About the Author: 

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where she also teaches in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Law and Public Affairs and Jazz Studies. She has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D in the history of American civilization from Harvard University. Perry is the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the Bograd-Weld Biography Prize of 2019 from the Pen America Foundation. She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, which was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Nonfiction. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside of Philadelphia with her two sons.

About the Moderator:

Dr. Melanye Price is Endowed Professor of Political Science at Prairie View A&M University and principle investigator for their African American Studies Initiative, which is funded by grants and gifts from the Mellon Foundation. Her research/teaching interests include black politics, public opinion, political rhetoric, and social movements. Her most recent book, The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) examines the multiple and strategic ways that President Obama uses race to deflect negative racial attitudes and engage with a large cross-section of voters. Her first book, Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009) examined contemporary support for Black Nationalism. Her new project is called “Mountaintop Removal: Martin Luther King, Trump and the Racial Mountain,” which uses MLK’s “Mountaintop Speech” as a lens for understanding the rise of Trump and the 2016 election.

Join us as we celebrate author, Adiba Nelson & the release of Ain't That A Mother!

Event Deets:

When: Wednesday, May 4 at 7:00 pm CST

Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden--2304 Stuart Street, Houston, TX 77004

How:  Limited in-person tickets are available.  You have the option to grab a ticket for free or purchase the book and ticket.  Only books purchased at the event will be eligible to be signed by the author.

We hope to see you there!

About the Book

Witty and bold, Afro-Latina Adiba grew up in survival mode. Her sometimes complicated relationship with her strong-willed, vibrant, religious mother marked her views of mothering and love. When a chance encounter with a tall-ish, brown-skinned brotha at Ruby Tuesday's right before closing time collided with a Jill Scott song and the right time of the month, Adiba found herself unexpectedly pregnant. She also found herself unexpectedly falling into the same relationship patterns of the matriarchs before her-the ones she swore she'd never end up in.

Mom to a new baby with high medical needs and a slew of hardships that just didn't seem to quit, she set out on a reckoning that was just as generational as it was personal. Along the way, Adiba never loses her heart or her humor. This is a true love story, but the kind about a woman loving herself enough to change the course of her life for herself, her child, and the women after her as well as before. From pasties to postpartum depression, Ain't That a Mother is not your average motherhood memoir-and Adiba is not your average mother.

The in-between moments and the self-revelations are where this bold and brilliant story of love, family secrets, and lots of "what the…?" really shines. Just like parenting, the story is messy, but the reward is incredibly satisfying.

About the Author

Adiba Nelson writes about inclusion and her life as a Black mother, woman, and daughter. She wrote her 2013 children’s book, Meet ClaraBelle Blue, after searching fruitlessly for a children’s book that adequately and appropriately represented her Afro-Latinx daughter with special needs. The subject of the Emmy Award– winning documentary The Full Nelson, Adiba is a highly acclaimed speaker and in 2017 delivered a TEDx talk to a sold out house on what to do when life throws you a curveball. As the curveballs keep coming, Nelson continues to write.

Learn about the art of coming home to your body with Lyvonne Briggs!

EVENT DEETS

When: April 5 @ 7PM CST

Where: 3719 Navigation Blvd, HTX 77003 (Holy Family HTX)

How: RSVP ONLY to grab your free ticket or support our programming, author, and store by RSVP WITH BOOK. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lyvonne Briggs, MDiv, ThM, an Emmy Award winner, is a body- and sex-positive womanist preacher, speaker, coach, and creator. Briggs is the host of the Sensual Faith podcast and the founder of beautiful scars, a healing- centered storytelling
agency focused on fostering pleasure and resiliency; visionary of The Proverbial Experience; and now curator of Sensual Faith Sunday, a series of virtual spiritual gatherings to nourish your soul. She has been featured in Essence, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post, and Sojourners named her one of “11 Women Shaping the Church.” Briggs, a New York City native and proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, is currently based in New Orleans, Louisiana.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Wale (@theehotgirlbooks)is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor working with folks in New York and Texas. She has a double masters degree in mental health counseling from Teachers College Columbia University. After practicing in New York for a few years, Wale moved back to her hometown Houston and started her own therapy practice in 2020. Wale currently works with individuals and couples on a weekly basis.