“Words carry the dead like henchmen,” in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black bodies and psyches against impossible odds, Burton writes, “I spent so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings.”

Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.
 
I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed 

themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”

Celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the release of Grace Engine with Joshua Burton!

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, March 21st, @ 6PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2310 Elgin St, Unit #2, Houston, TX 77004).

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store programming. Please note that all tickets are non refundable. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Words carry the dead like henchmen,” in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black bodies and psyches against impossible odds, Burton writes, “I spent so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings.”

Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and he received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is out with Ethel Press, and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is out with the University of Wisconsin Press. He is a Tin House Scholar, a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient, and a Writers' League of Texas Book Awards Discovery Prize Winner.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Chan Tea is a trans nonbinary Khmai person and multidisciplinary poet and artist whose work has been featured in publications including Glass Mountain, Sybil, Infrarrealista Review, Holy of Holies, and Location/Houston. Alongside the poems, Chan’s head is filled with pool sequences and chess calculations.

The legendary actor behind Roots, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Reading Rainbow shares never-before-told stories from a life that has shaped generations—told at last on his own terms.

This is my attempt to pull back the curtain. Not just on the roles I’ve played, but on the life I’ve lived. The fears. The fight. The survival. And yes, the joy. All of it.

Tracing the different eras of his life—from Kunta Kinte to Geordi La Forge to Reading Rainbow and far beyond the camera—celebrated actor LeVar Burton fearlessly opens up about growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, being raised by a remarkable mother, and discovering his calling as a storyteller. He explores how acting has served as both a source of transformation and an escape from the most difficult parts of his past, while also confronting the challenges of being a parent, husband, and householder.

As Burton honors the loved ones whose strength and resilience shaped him in this inspiring memoir, he also asks what we owe to our ancestors and to each other, reflecting on the deep necessity he’s always felt advocating for liberation and equity. Generous, deeply moving, and illustrated with personal family photos, Take My Word For It is a courageous self-portrait of an iconic artist.

Join us for a poetry reading with Olatunde & friends, Ayokunle Falomo and Joshua Burton!

EVENT DEETS

When: Saturday, March 2 @ 6PM

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

How: RSVP Only to reserve seats or RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your copy of the book and our programming. No refunds.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The irony of transformation often is that we mistake it to have occurred long before it does. Tender Headed takes its time in asserting the realization that growth remains ever ahead of you. Examining the themes of Black identity, accountability, and narration, we encounter a series of revealing snapshots into the role language plays in chiseling possibility and its rigid command of depiction. Olatunde Osinaike's startling debut sorts through the many-minded masks behind Black masculinity. At its center lies an inquiry about the puzzling nature of relationships, how ceaseless wonder can be in its challenge of a truth. In the name of music and self-identity, the speaker weaves their way through fault and how it amends Black life in America.

This is demonstrated best in how the demanding, yet vulnerable tone for the collection is set in "Men Like Me," its restless opening poem. Here, we find the speaker reciting a chronicle of generational neglect from men that became him also. Earnest and sharp, there is a beauty in seeing a poet not shy away from both the melancholy and resolve of rescripting their path while cherishing their steps and missteps along the way. This collection is a panel aching of fathers, sons, uncles, grandfathers, all of whom would do well to join in and confront shared privileges that are typically curtailed or altogether avoided in conversation. Tender Headed entrusts the heart to be a compass, insisting on a journey unto itself and a melodic detour toward tenderness precise with its own footing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Celebrate the release of God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer with Joseph Earl Thomas!

EVENT DEETS

When: Tuesday, June 25 @ 7:30 PM

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

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat and RSVP WITH BOOK to support the author and our store. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility.

Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.  

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist, and a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Grist, and Indiana Review. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is currently out with Ethel and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is out with the University of Wisconsin Press.