From the daughter of the legendary Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, a heartfelt cookbook celebrating four generations of Black restaurateurs and the soulful recipes that nourished a community. 

For nearly fifty years, Mama Dip’s Kitchen wasn’t just one of Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s most beloved restaurants―it was an institution. In 1976, with just $64 and a lifetime of kitchen wisdom, Mildred “Mama Dip” Council opened the doors to a gathering place that fed the soul as much as the stomach. Her youngest daughter, Anita Spring Council, honed her skills as a chef within its walls, learning the secrets of the Southern kitchen at her mother’s side. Now, the inheritor of this incredible legacy steps forward to share her family’s story.

In her tenderhearted debut cookbook, Southern Roots, Spring offers more than 100 dishes grounded in the oral recipe-sharing tradition. It’s a collection filled with treasured family secrets and vignettes from her experience coming of age as a Black girl in the Jim Crow South, all brought to life with a thoughtful, modern approach to the classics.

The recipes invite you to create a vibrant Southern table, from mouthwatering starters like PIMENTO CHEESE BISCUITS to showstopping main courses like FRIED GREEN TOMATO PARMESAN and SMOTHERED FRIED CHICKEN WITH ANDOUILLE SAUSAGE. You’ll find these updated classics alongside sweets like the decadent GOAT CHEESE POUND CAKE that will wow even the most demanding guests.

Beyond the recipes and stunning, colorful photography, Southern Roots is a powerful tribute to a large, loving, and hardworking entrepreneurial family who left an indelible mark on Southern culinary history. Warm, accessible, and bursting with flavor, this rich cookbook introduces a powerful new voice in Southern food and inspires home cooks everywhere to celebrate the enduring joy of a shared meal.

75 photographs

Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis and the world's #1 bestselling author James Patterson’s Judge Stone "delivers first-class courtroom drama, small-town excitement, and strong characters all wrapped in a moral dilemma. Tense, readable, and relevant.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

All rise… for Judge Stone.
 
The most respected citizen in Union Springs, Alabama (population 3,314), is Judge Mary Stone. She holds two responsibilities sacred: running her family farm and presiding over her courtroom. It's there she draws the most controversial case in the history of the South.   
 
Criminally, it’s open-and-shut. 
 
Ethically, there is no middle ground. Essentially, it’s a choice between life and death.
 
No judge can satisfy everyone. It would be dangerous to try. But Judge Stone is willing to fight to bring justice to the people and place she loves.

Celebrate the release of The Period and Puberty Parenting Revolution with Dr. Charis Chambers!

EVENT DEETS

When: Friday, September 18 @ 7PM CST

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, HTX 77004)

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat.
• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your seat and purchase a copy The Period and Puberty Parenting Revolution, supporting both the author and our store programming. The book will be available for pickup at the event.

Please Note: Books purchased from other retailers are not permitted in the bookstore and are not eligible for the signing or photo line. To participate in the signing and photo opportunity, you must purchase a copy from Kindred Stories. If you already purchased your book from Kindred Stories, you may select the RSVP Only ticket option and bring your Kindred Stories copy to the event.

If you purchase a ticket and are unable to attend the event, your ticket is non-refundable. If your ticket includes a book, an email will be sent to all attendees before and after the event with instructions on how to receive your book. Books must be claimed within 14 days following the event. If your book is not retrieved it will be returned to the publisher and will not be available for pick up in the future.

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Charis Chambers is a board-certified OB/GYN and fellowship-trained Pediatric & Adolescent Gynecologist. She is the founder of The Period Doctor, an award winning and internationally recognized social media platform dedicated to reproductive health education and equity. She is also the Chief Medical Officer at the #1 women founded and women led menstrual tracking app, Clue. She currently practices part-time in Greenville, SC but will soon be opening her private practice in Atlanta, GA.

Dr. Chambers is a proud Spelman College alumna where she served on the Miss Spelman Court as 1st Attendant and was initiated into Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Mu Pi Chapter in the Spring of 2008. She graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2010 with a degree in Biology. She is a 2024 Distinguished Young Alumni Award recipient from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she earned her medical degree. She completed OB/GYN residency at Greenville Memorial Hospital and fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine.

Beyond clinical care and digital education, Dr. Chambers serves on the governing board of Movement Charter Schools Atlanta and the Medical Review Committee for PERIOD. She is the author of the upcoming book “The Period & Puberty Parenting Revolution,” a compassionate and medically accurate guide that transforms how we parent kids through puberty. She is also a wife and new mom who is passionate about raising the next generation with a foundation in health equity and reproductive justice.

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of “extraordinary grit” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.

Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, she was denied freedom. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.

“A crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling” (USA TODAY), historian and National Book Award finalist Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father and most powerful man in the United States at the time.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package. 

Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.

Benjamin "Chappie" Puttbutt, a black juior professor at the overwhelmingly white Jack London College, lusts after tenure and its glorious perks (including a house in the Oakland Hills). He spends most of his time trying to divine the ideological climate of the school and obligingly adapting his beliefs to it. When Puttbutt's mysterious Japanese tutor, who promises to teach him Japanese by spring, suddenly becomes the school's new president and appoints Puttbutt as academic dean, the fun really begins—for Puttbutt sets out to stir things up and settle old scores.

Turning every contemporary political and social movement on its head—from feminism to nationalism to jingoism—this boistrois and irreverent novel manages to be by turns hilarious and totally serious.

"One of the funniest satires of university politics I've ever read. Ishmael Reed is funnier than Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal." —Leslie Marmon Silko

"Reed is, as always, an American original; a wiseguy whose wisdom is the real thing," —The Boston Sunday Globe

A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe).

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives.

Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness.

At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”

As a tree grows, so too does a strong and loving Black family over generations in this gorgeous and lyrical picture book spanning centuries of persistence and hope.

Roots take hold and settle in,
creeping far and free.
They stake their claim in barren ground—
a dream of what will be.
Here, they hope together.

A newly freed Black couple plant a pecan tree. The tree grows alongside each new generation of their family, weathering various seasons of change from the Jim Crow era to the Civil Rights period and into present day. Through difficult winters and the promise of spring, the tree continues to rise, mirroring the strength, resilience, and celebration of the family throughout time.

An Oprah Daily Spring 2023 Reading List Pick

From an exciting new literary voice: a memoir that explores grief, Blackness, and recovery after the death of a dear friend.

After an unexpected phone call on an early morning in 2018, writer and model Eirinie Carson learned of her best friend Larissa’s death. In the wake of her shock, Eirinie attempts to make sense of the events leading up to Larissa’s death and uncovers startling secrets about her life in the process. 

THE DEAD ARE GODS is Eirinie’s striking, intimate, and profoundly moving depiction of life after a sudden loss. Amid navigating moments of intense grief, Eirinie is overwhelmed by her love for Larissa. She finds power in pulling moments of joy from the depths of her emotion. Eirinie’s portrayal of what love feels like after death bursts from the page alongside a timely, honest, and personal exploration of Black love and Black life.

Perhaps, Eirinie proposes, “The only way out is through.”

Let's celebrate author, Karen Good Marable and illustrator, Tonya Engel on their new book, Yaya and The Sea!

ABOUT THE BOOK

A family goes on a trip from the city to the sea in search of renewal in this “lively and lovely…beautiful” (Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming) picture book that’s an ode to sisterhood, nature, and being present.

On the first day of spring, when the city is quiet and still, little Yaya takes the A train down to New York City’s southern shores with her mama and aunties to greet Mama Ocean and celebrate the arrival of a new season through a ritual of letting go of the past and embracing the new.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Karen Good Marable is a writer raised in Prairie View, Texas. Her essays, music journalism, and stories have appeared in several books and publications including The New Yorker, Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner,Seventeen, and Essence. After a lifetime of living in Brooklyn, she and her family now reside in Atlanta.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

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.

In The Elsewhere Is Black, Marisa Solomon examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns of Virginia’s Tidewater, Solomon contends that waste infrastructures concentrate environmental risk in an elsewhere that is routinely Black. Solomon emphasizes that ecological violence is a form of racialized heteropatriarchal environmental control that upholds whiteness as a propertied way of life and criminalizes Black survival. As she points to acute sites of toxicity, Solomon theorizes the relationship between the devaluation of land and Black and more-than-human life to reveal how the risks of poisoning, police violence, dispossession, and poverty hold Black life captive. Locating Black survival as a site from which alternative eco-political imaginations spring, she foregrounds how people live and dream amidst waste’s daily accumulation. Solomon opens new ecological horizons to ask: What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?