84 results for “by james baldwin”

Not finding what you're looking for? Check out our shop on bookshop.org to order and still support us ♥

  • salvation

    by bell hooks

    Sold out
    “A manual for fixing our culture…In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process.”—Black Issues Book Review

    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.

  • With Love from Harlem: A Novel of Hazel Scott cover image
    Sold out

    From The Queen of Sugar Hill author ReShonda Tate—a new novel inspired by beloved Harlem jazz performer Hazel Scott and the equal parts exhilarating and tumultuous relationship that changed the course of her life.

    Harlem, 1943. At just twenty-three, Hazel Scott is a woman on fire. A jazz prodigy, a glamorous film star, and a fierce advocate for civil rights, she’s breaking barriers and refusing to play by the rules. Then Adam Clayton Powell Jr. walks into her life. Harlem’s most electrifying preacher-turned-politician, Adam is as bold and unyielding as Hazel—charismatic, powerful…and married.

    This kicks off a decades-long relationship that propels them into the center of a political and cultural revolution. As Hazel’s star rises, Adam takes the national stage in Congress and the couple becomes the toast of the country. But when their affair turns into a marriage, behind the glamorous façade is a battlefield of ego, ambition, and sacrifice. Forced to choose between her music and her family, Hazel must decide what she’s willing to lose—and what she refuses to give up.

    Set against the pulsing backdrop of twentieth-century Harlem and featuring icons like Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin, With Love from Harlem is a sweeping, emotionally charged romantic drama, rich with historical detail. ReShonda Tate delivers a powerful portrait of love, art, and the price of being unforgettable.

  • Looking For Lorraine

    by Imani Perry

    Sold out
    A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

    Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” and Imani Perry’s multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.

    After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation’s first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry’s extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.

    A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction

    A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalist
  • Corregidora

    by Gayl Jones

    Sold out

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*


    The new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery.

    A literary classic that remains vital to our understanding of the past, Corregidora is Gayl Jones’s powerful debut novel, examining womanhood, sexuality, and the psychological residue of slavery. Jones masterfully tells the story of Ursa, a Kentucky blues singer, who, in the wake of a tragic loss, confronts her maternal history and the legacy of Corregidora, the Brazilian slave master who fathered both her mother and grandmother. Consumed and haunted by her hatred of the man who irrevocably shaped her life and the lives of her family, Ursa Corregidora must come to terms with a past that is never too distant from the present.

    Selected, edited, and first edited by Toni Morrison, it is “the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women,” (James Baldwin) and “a tale as American as Mount Rushmore and as murky as the Florida swamps.” (Maya Angelou).

  • The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

    by Toni Morrison

    Sold out
    NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR).

    These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (    The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved,Paradise) and that of others.

    An essential collection from an essential writer,     The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.
  • Loving Black Boys: A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering cover image
    Sold out

    Loving Black Boys is not just a love letter to Tamura Lomax’s own sons, but to all Black boys, men, fathers, and brothers. With understanding and urgency, Lomax writes honestly about Black endangerment and what it means to endure living in what James Baldwin called the “burning house” of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal America. Seeing the full humanity of Black boys and men, and the liberation of all Black people, Lomax writes, requires a Black feminist lens. A companion piece to Freeing Black Girls, this book connects the everyday and extraordinary moments of Black mothering: phenomena as varied as “the talk” about police brutality, physical and emotional violence, Christian nationalism, miseducation, emotional health, sports, and more, which produce not only shared vulnerabilities but also tensions among Black folks. To her sons and to all Black men, Lomax insists that Black feminism, which emphasizes mutuality, protection, ethical autonomy, and healing, is vital to forging a safer future for individual and collective survival.

  • Blue in Green

    by Wesley Brown

    Sold out

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    The latest work from the veteran novelist called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin and “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis

    Written by playwright and novelist Wesley Brown, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, mere weeks after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of the New York City Police Department outside of the Birdland jazz club. In the aftermath, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and his wife, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently cajoled into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis’ temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse—reckons with her upbringing in Christian Science and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his sports car. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker and the stilted world of the Black middle class he’s left behind.

  • Follow Your Dreams, Little One

    by Vashti Harrison

    Sold out

    This beautifully illustrated board book highlights true stories of black men in history. The exceptional men featured include artist Aaron Douglas, civil rights leader John Lewis, dancer Alvin Ailey, lawman Bass Reeves, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and writer James Baldwin.

  • March 2023 Adult Book Club- Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie
    Sold out

    Join us for our monthly book club meeting. Our March book club read is Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie.

    Please support the space and opportunities we create by buying your book from Kindred Stories. 

    Our meeting will be on Thursday, March 23 at 7:00 PM in the Kindred Stories Reading Garden. Be sure to RSVP and show up with the book read (or mostly read).

    About the Book

    One of The Guardian’s Top 10 Debuts of the Year
    One of Entertainment Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of the Summer

    Sayon Hughes longs to escape the volatile Bris­tol neighborhood known as Ends, the tight-knit but sometimes lawless world in which he was raised, and forge a better life with Shona, the girl he’s loved since grade school. With few paths out, he is drawn into dealing drugs along­side his cousin, the unpredictable but fiercely loyal Cuba. Sayon is on the cusp of making a clean break when an altercation with a rival dealer turns deadly and an expected witness threatens blackmail, upending his plans.

    Sayon’s loyalties are torn. If Shona learns the secret of his crime, he will lose her forever. But if he doesn’t escape Ends now, he may never get another chance. Is it possible to break free of the bookies’ tickets, burnt spoons, and crook­ed solutions, and still keep the love of his life?

    Rippling with authenticity and power, Mo­ses McKenzie’s dazzling debut brings to life a vi­brant and teeming world we have read too little about. In its sheer lyrical power, An Olive Grove in Ends recalls the work of James Baldwin and marks the arrival of an exciting and formidable new voice. 

    Only books purchased from 

  • February 2023 Adult Book Club: Salvation by bell hooks
    Sold out
    Join us for our monthly book club meeting/discussion! 

    MEETING DEETS

    When: February 23, 2022 at 7:00 PM CST

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

    How: RSVP to reserve your spot if you already own the book or RSVP with book to support our store and programming.  


    ABOUT THE BOOK
    “A manual for fixing our culture…In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process.”—Black Issues Book Review

    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.


  • MARCH 2026: NO NAME BOOK CLUB - March 29 @ 1 PM CST
    Sold out
    No Name is a Black-owned worker cooperative connecting community members both inside and outside carceral facilities with radical books. Each month, No Name uplifts two books written by Black, indigenous, and other people of color. No Name believes building community through political education is crucial for our liberation and should be accessible to everyone—which is why all programming is free. 

    MEETING DEETS

    When: Sunday, March 29 @ 1 PM

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

    How: RSVP to let us know you're coming! Support the No Name Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

    ABOUT I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

    Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

    Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

    Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.

    Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.

    “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin

  • IN PERSON AUTHOR TALK: The House of Eve with Sadeqa Johnson-April 23 @5PM CST
    Sold out
    Come meet Sadeqa Johnson, author of Yellow Wife and The House of Eve! 

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Sunday, April 23, 2023 at 5PM CST

    Where: Hogan Brown Gallery (2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004)

    How: RSVP ONLY for TICKET or RSVP WITH BOOK to get your copy of THE HOUSE OF EVE!

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    “A triumph of historical fiction” (The Washington Post) set in 1950s Philadelphia and Washington, DC, that explores what it means to be a woman and a mother, and how much one is willing to sacrifice to achieve her greatest goal.

    1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.

    Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC’s elite wealthy Black families, and his par­ents don’t let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William’s family and grant her the life she’s been searching for. But having a baby—and fitting in—is easier said than done.

    With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Sadeqa Johnson is the award-winning author of four novels, including Yellow Wife. Her accolades include the National Book Club Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the USA Best Book Award for Best Fiction. She is a Kimbilio Fellow, former board member of the James River Writers, and a Tall Poppy Writer. Originally from Philadelphia, she currently lives near Richmond, Virginia, with her husband and three children. To learn more, visit SadeqaJohnson.net.


Stay Informed. We're building a community committed to celebrating Black authors + artisans. Subscribe to keep up with all things Kindred Stories.