Come celebrate the new essay collection, Dark Days: Fugitive Essays with National Book Award winner, Roger Reeves! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Friday, August 4 at 7 PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden

How:  RSVP ONLY to save your seat or RSVP with ticket to support the author or programming.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A crucial book that calls for community, solidarity, and joy, even in—especially in—these dark days

In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down.

Together, these groundbreaking essays build a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground. “The peace we fight and search for,” Reeves writes, “begins and ends with being still.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROGER REEVES is the author of the poetry collections King Me and Best Barbarian. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2015 Whiting Award, and Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University. His essays and poems have appeared in Poetry, the New Yorker, Granta, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.

Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the “double consciousness” of W. E. B. Du Bois to the “double vision” of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.

In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.

Winner, 2025 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize, Association for Philosophy and Literature

Finalist, 2025 PEN Open Book Award, PEN America

An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life.

In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown’s famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial “hollow earth theory” from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison.

Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.

The beloved novel about a New York City girlhood that heralded a renaissance in Black women’s literature, with a new foreword by Nicole Dennis-Benn, the bestselling author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun

One of The New York Times Magazine’s 25 Most Significant New York City Novels from the Last 100 Years

A Penguin Classic

Selina Boyce comes of age in 1940s New York as the daughter of two immigrants from Barbados: a free-spirited father she adores and who dreams of returning to his Caribbean island home, and a disciplined, hardworking mother she admires and who is determined to purchase their Brooklyn brownstone. When her father comes into an unexpected inheritance, Selina is torn between his nostalgia for the past and her mother’s ambition for the future, all while negotiating racism, sexuality, Depression-era poverty, and the competing values of African Americans and her West Indian immigrant community.

First published in 1959, Brown Girl, Brownstones opened a window into the rich inner life of Black women and today ranks with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as one of the great New York City novels. With her autobiographical debut, Paule Marshall paved the way for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Maya Angelou—and took her place in the American literary canon.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

What if the writing life isn’t about daily word counts―but about daily attention to your whole self?

You don’t need to write every day to be a writer. You don’t need perfect conditions, endless hours, or a life free from doubt. What you need is permission to bring your whole, imperfect self to the page―and practices that nourish your soul as you write.

All of life is the writing life.

Drawing on her experience as a spiritual director working primarily with writers, Charlotte Donlon offers something rare: a book that honors both the craft of writing and the care of the soul. Through contemplative practices, personal stories, and wisdom from writers like Toni Morrison, Margaret Walker, and Kaveh Akbar, she invites you to discover how rest, doubt, grief, and joy all become sacred ground for creative flourishing.

Structured around five essential movements―“Begin,” “Belong,” “Become,” “Behold,” “Bestow”―this book offers practical rituals and gentle companionship for the real conditions of your life. Whether you’re navigating resistance, recovering from burnout, or simply longing for a more sustainable practice, you’ll find permission to write from exactly where you are.

Writers of all backgrounds are welcome here. People of deep faith and profound doubt. Those who write every day and those who write in stolen moments. Published authors and private journalers. This is a sanctuary, not a system―a space where your creative identity isn’t measured by output but nourished by attention.

Spiritual Direction for Writers doesn’t promise to make you more productive. It promises something better: to help you become more fully yourself, on and off the page. Because when writing helps make you a kinder, wiser, and more generous human being―when it opens you to what matters most―you’ve already succeeded.

“Charlotte’s book makes space, supports readers, writers, and listeners, and truly cares about the people who encounter its pages. It is a place to land and rest, a place to be curious, to experiment, to pray, to breathe, to feel, and to embrace the truth of your identity as a writer.”
―Ashley M. Jones, poet laureate emerita of Alabama

Literature has the power to help build a shelter in language for a way of being that holds integrity and love as its root. In the tradition of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and many other Black writers and theorists, poet and professor Khadijah Queen observes questions of life and literature, human feeling and behavior, and explores language-based solutions to common cultural conflicts that are often rooted in harmful assumptions.

Instead of operating from a base of unquestioned thought and systemic tradition, Radical Poetics presents more inclusive and accurate ways of contemplating literary work. Building on ideas and theoretical practices from Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Queen reads for where love is present as well as for where it is absent—tracing systems of thought and aesthetic choices to track how characters are portrayed in terms of race, gender, class, and disability. She analyzes short stories, novels, nonfiction narratives, poetry, and a play from authors such as Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, Dionne Brand, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Natasha Trethewey, and Muriel Rukeyser. Queen’s essays offer shifts in thinking about language—beyond calling out the ways language punishes vulnerability, entrenches harm, and suppresses true intercultural communication. Her intuitive approach aims to correct inaccuracies that have served as a foundation for the discriminatory thinking that undergirds American institutions and culture, particularly the continued glorification of violence. Radical Poetics makes a case for the imperative and practical value of understanding poetics beyond artistic and academic spaces and into everyday life.

*This book is not currently on our shelves and will ship in 5-10 business days.  Please see FAQs for more information.

African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision explores the rich past and bright future of the nine Black Greek-Letter organizations that make up the National Pan-Hellenic Council. In the long tradition of African American benevolent and secret societies, intercollegiate African American fraternities and sororities have strong traditions of fostering brotherhood and sisterhood among their members, exerting considerable influence in the African American community, and being on the forefront of civic action, community service, and philanthropy. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Arthur Ashe, Carol Moseley Braun, Bill Cosby, Sarah Vaughan, George Washington Carver, Hattie McDaniel , and Bobby Rush are among the many trailblazing members of these organizations. The rolls of African American fraternities and sororities serve as a veritable who's who among African American leadership in the United States and abroad. African American Fraternities and Sororities places the history of these organizations in context, linking them to other movements and organizations that predated them and tying their history to one of the most important eras of United States history―the Civil Rights struggle. African American Fraternities and Sororities explores various cultural aspects of these organizations such as auxilliary groups, branding, calls, stepping, and the unique role of African American sororities. It also explores such contemporary issues as sexual aggression and alcohol use, college adjustment, and pledging, and provides a critique of Spike Lee's film School Daze, the only major motion picture to portray African American fraternities and sororities as a central theme. The year 2006 will mark the centennial anniversary of the intercollegiate African American fraternity and sorority movement. Yet, to date, little scholarly attention has been paid to these organizations and the men and women who founded and perpetuated them. African American Fraternities and Sororities reveals the vital social and political functions of these organizations and places them within the history of not only the African American community but the nation as a whole.

Featuring a new original introduction by Opal Palmer Adisa

Avey Johnson--a Black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls--has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel--and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed. Originally published in 1983, Praisesong for the Widow was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and is presented here in a beautiful new hardcover edition as the second title in McSweeney's Of the Diaspora series.

"Astonishingly moving."
-Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

About Of the Diaspora
McSweeney's Of the Diaspora is a series of previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic, the first novel in the series, was originally published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as an editor at Random House. This Of the Diaspora edition features a new introduction written by Brown for the series. Tragic Magic will be followed by Paule Marshall's novel of a Harlem widow claiming new life. Praisesong for the Widow was originally published in 1983 and was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in literature at the College of Southern Nevada. Published in collectible hardcover editions with original cover art by Sunra Thompson, the first three works hail from Black American voices defined by what Amiri Baraka described as strong feeling "getting into new blues, from the old ones." Of the Diaspora-North America will be followed by series from the diasporic communities of Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

A beautiful, rich, and groundbreaking book exploring Black foodways within America and around the world, curated by food activist and author of Vegetable Kingdom Bryant Terry.

In this stunning and deeply heartfelt tribute to Black culinary ingenuity, Bryant Terry captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food. With contributions from more than 100 Black cultural luminaires from around the globe, the book moves through chapters exploring parts of the Black experience, from Homeland to Migration, Spirituality to Black Future, offering delicious recipes, moving essays, and arresting artwork.

As much a joyful celebration of Black culture as a cookbook, Black Food explores the interweaving of food, experience, and community through original poetry and essays, including “Jollofing with Toni Morrison” by Sarah Ladipo Manyika, “Queer Intelligence” by Zoe Adjonyoh, “The Spiritual Ecology of Black Food” by Leah Penniman, and “Foodsteps in Motion” by Michael W. Twitty. The recipes are similarly expansive and generous, including sentimental favorites and fresh takes such as Crispy Cassava Skillet Cakes from Yewande Komolafe, Meatballs with Egusi and Squash from Edouardo Jordan, Jerk Chicken Ramen from Suzanne Barr, Avocado and Mango Salad with Spicy Pickled Carrot and Rof Dressing from Pierre Thiam, and Sweet Potato Pie from Jenné Claiborne. Visually stunning artwork from such notables as Black Panther Party creative director Emory Douglas and artist Sarina Mantle are woven throughout, and the book includes a signature musical playlist curated by Bryant.

With arresting artwork and innovative design, Black Food is a visual and spiritual feast that will satisfy any soul.

James Baldwin’s final novel is “the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers” (The New York Times Book Review).

Arthur Montana, celebrated gospel singer, has been found collapsed in a London pub at the age of thirty-nine. His brother, Hall, is left to write the story of his life, his talent, and his great love. Retracing the past three decades of their history, Hall writes with tender passion about the central characters in Arthur’s life: Sister Julia, a “fire-baptized” child evangelist called to the ministry when she was nine, whose life seems considerably less “redeemed” out of the pulpit; and Julia’s brother Jimmy, Arthur’s most gifted accompanist, the catalyst of his success as a singer, and his devoted lover.

An unforgettable epic drama spanning the distance from the Apollo in Harlem to the Olympia in Paris, Just Above My Head is a magnificent tale of personal courage, commitment, and profound love filled with all the lyricism, violence, and compassion that comprise the human condition.