“A gorgeous, captivating gem of a memoir…Josephine Baker’s as enthralling on the page as she was on the stage.” —Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author of Eden Undone and Sin in the Second City

Published in the US for the first time, Fearless and Free is the memoir of the fabulous, rule-breaking, one-of-a-kind Josephine Baker, the iconic dancer, singer, spy, and Civil Rights activist.
 
After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, dazzling audiences across the Roaring Twenties. In her famous banana skirt, she enraptured royalty and countless fans—Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso among them. She strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah wearing a diamond collar. With her signature flapper bob and enthralling dance moves, she was one of the most recognizable women in the world.
 
When World War II broke out, Josephine became a decorated spy for the French Résistance. Her celebrity worked as her cover, as she hid spies in her entourage and secret messages in her costumes as she traveled. She later joined the Civil Rights movement in the US, boycotting segregated concert venues, and speaking at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr. 
 
First published in France in 1949, her memoir will now finally be published in English. At last we can hear Josephine in her own voice: charming, passionate, and brave. Her words are thrilling and intimate, like she’s talking with her friends over after-show drinks in her dressing room. Through her own telling, we come to know a woman who danced to the top of the world and left her unforgettable mark on it.

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At the March On Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was 57 years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech at the march, she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. From those few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the 27 seconds in “Gimme Shelter” where Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in black and white culture, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.

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New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • An award-winning author charts the poignant global journeys of African Americans as she explores her own transatlantic family odyssey in Beyond the Shores, a powerful history of living abroad while Black.
 
“By exploring the life of Black expats, creatives, and activists, Beyond the Shores enhances the stories of migration to reveal how race is lived in the United States and abroad.”—Marcia Chatelain, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of South Side Girls

Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Together, the interwoven stories highlight African Americans’ complicated relationship to the United States and the world at large.
 
Beyond the Shores is not just about where African Americans stayed or where they ate when they traveled but also about why they left in the first place and how they were treated once they reached their destinations. Drawing on years of research, Dr. Tamara J. Walker chronicles their experiences in atmospheric detail, taking readers from well-known capital cities to more unusual destinations like Yangiyul, Uzbekistan, and Kabondo, Kenya. She follows Florence Mills, the would-be Josephine Baker of her day, in Paris, and Richard Wright, the author turned actor and filmmaker, in Buenos Aires. Throughout Beyond the Shores, she relays tender stories of adventurous travelers, including a group of gifted Black crop scientists in the 1930s, a housewife searching for purpose in the 1950s, a Peace Corps volunteer discovering his identity in the 1970s, and her own grandfather, who, after losing his eye fighting in World War II and returning to a country that showed no signs of honoring his sacrifice, set out with his wife and children on a circuitous journey that sent them back and forth across the Atlantic. Tying these tales together is Walker’s personal account of her family’s, and her own, experiences abroad—in France, Brazil, Argentina, Austria, and beyond.
 
By sharing the accounts of those who escaped the racism of the United States to try their hands at life abroad, Beyond the Shores shines a light on the meaning of home and the search for a better life.

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.

Use discount code: SALE to receive 30% off. 
 
In a beautiful picture book brimming with P for Pride, writer and poet Seema Yasmin and illustrator Lucy Kirk celebrate all the joys and challenges of queer history in the United States through lively, rhyming verse and bright, colorful illustrations.

This is a book of people, of ideas, of accomplishments and events. It’s a book about Allies and Ancestors, about Belonging and Being accepted, about Hope, Knowledge, and Love. About historic moments like Stonewall, and how it changed the world. And all about Trailblazers, like Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Harvey Milk, Barbara Jordan, George Takei, Elliot Page, and Sally Ride.

And ultimately, it’s a book to help kids learn a different kind of ABCs—not just words like apple, ball or cat, but rather the essence of what it means to be diverse, to be equitable, to be inclusive. That no one counts unless we all count, and how we must open our eyes and ears, minds and hearts, to hear everyone’s story and understand and celebrate their experience.

PROSE Award- Music and Performing Arts Category Winner

A framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance in the digital era

In an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert Williams’s 1916 silent film short “A Natural Born Gambler” or the performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research Black performance.

While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access, it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to the background sounds of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital.

Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture in the digital world.

The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present day

Gender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggle

In this latest book in Beacon’s award-winning ReVisioning History series, Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost unearth the often overlooked history of the Black queer community in the United States.

Arguing that both gender and sexual expression have been an intimate and intricate part of Black freedom struggle, Snorton and Bost present historical contributions of Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming Americans from slavery to the present day to highlight how the fight against racial injustice has always been linked to that of sexual and gender justice.

Interweaving stories of queer and trans figures such as:

* Private William Cathay/Cathay Williams, born female but enlisted in the Army as a man in the mid-1860s
* Josephine Baker, internationally known dancer and entertainer of the early 20th century who was also openly bisexual
* Bayard Rustin, prominent Civil Rights activist whose well known homosexuality was viewed as a potential threat to the movement
* Amanda Milan, a black trans woman whose murder in 2000 unified the trans people of color community,

this book includes a deep dive into the marginalization, unjust criminalization, and government legislation of Black queer and trans existence. It also shows how Black Americans have played an integral role in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, countering narratives that have predominantly focused on white Americans.

Through storytelling and other narratives, Snorton and Bost show how the Black queer community has always existed, regardless of the attempts to stamp it out, and how those in it continue to fight for their rightful place in the world.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the little-known story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington.

"Chatelain lets us see the complexities of these women’s lives, feel their pain, and marvel at their ability to cut through the thicket of racism and sexism."—Carol Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage

"Chatelain brilliantly reframes one of the most enduring images in American memory through the women erased from its frame."—Alexis Coe, New York Times bestselling author of You Never Forget Your First

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day's headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”

In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.

How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.

This "thoroughly engaging" third novel by the author of Beetlecreek ("[a] quiet masterpiece" —Kirkus Reviews) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment.

In the midst of the tumultuous 1970s, Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity once rivaled Josephine Baker’s. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona’s strange world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with Hortense, a beautiful young assistant at New Black Woman. From revolutionary downtown poetry readings to a hospital bed on the Continent and back, becoming entangled in the lives of both women might turn Edwards’s bourgeois life upside down for good.

Food photographer and baking extraordinaire Monique Polanco presents the most tempting, beautiful and easy-to-make holiday desserts, from fruit-filled cakes to night-before-Christmas nibbles.

Irresistible Recipes Filled with The Heart & Soul of the South

Discover an exciting collection of delightful desserts inspired by Southern baking traditions. Monique McLeod-Polanco’s recipes are brimming with soulful flair and rich flavors while prioritizing simplicity for the home cook. Drawing inspiration from her family’s celebrations and holiday meals, these 60 scrumptious recipes will conjure all the nostalgic flavors from your youth yet dazzle the modern palate.

Fall in love with Monique’s fresh approach to the classics, including an outstanding Orange, Bourbon & Pecan Pie and a drool-worthy Coconut Cake with Lime Curd that will impress your family and friends. Recapture the magic of your grandmother’s kitchen in summertime with One-Layer Strawberry Basil Shortcake, or elevate tradi- tional holiday bakes with Browned Butter Sweet Potato Pie that will be the star of your Thanksgiving table.

So, grab your whisk and take a trip down South, where the secret ingredient is always love—and a bit of sugar! These showstopping desserts invite you to turn the simple, joyful act of baking into a cause for celebration.

Join us for a montly children's storytime at Kindred Stories. Each Story time will celebrate a special book and be read by a wondertful community mementer. IT also includes a story time. 

Featured Book: Daisy Helps With The Dress 

Featured Reader: Antonia Adams 

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, September 26 @ 11 AM CST 

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

How: 

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your spot and let us know you are coming.

ABOUT DAISY HELPS WITH THE DRESS 

When Daisy tries to help with her cousin’s wedding, her misguided assists almost ruin the big day, until she finds a way to pull the dress—and her family—together in this charming picture book by award-winning author Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich.

Daisy loves helping her family and she knows the best kind of helpers never wait to be asked. That’s why she doesn’t ask before adding finishing touches to her family’s special reused, re-tried, remixed things, like a leftover broccoli topping for Auntie Fontie’s cakes or a good bath for Nana DJ’s “back-in-the-day, rusty, dusty” vintage albums—much to their chagrin.

But what Daisy wants most is to help give her cousin Simone’s recycled wedding dress a little razzle dazzle. She knows just what the vintage dress needs: a little glitter here, a few stickers there to give the dress some flair.

But Daisy’s cousin Simone and the rest of the family are not so happy with her decorations. Can Daisy make things right and help find Simone a new re-lived, re-loved wedding dress?

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In exuberant verse and stirring pictures, Patricia Hruby Powell and Christian Robinson create an extraordinary portrait for young people of the passionate performer and civil rights advocate Josephine Baker, the woman who worked her way from the slums of St. Louis to the grandest stages in the world. Meticulously researched by both author and artist, Josephine's powerful story of struggle and triumph is an inspiration and a spectacle, just like the legend herself.