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  • Positive Obsession : The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler

    Susana M. Morris

    from $18.99

    *Paperback Release Date - 7/21/2026*

    A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work. 

    As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. 

    In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories. 

    Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

  • Phases: A Memoir

    Brandy

    $32.50

    The iconic, multiplatinum, Grammy Award®–winning performer Brandy brings us a raw, intimate portrait of her life, charting her growth to stardom from Mississippi churches to Hollywood spotlights

    From the moment she first sang at church in McComb, Mississippi, Brandy knew her voice was special. At fourteen she landed her first record deal. At fifteen her album went platinum. At sixteen she was starring in the hit sitcom Moesha and became the first Black actress to play Cinderella on screen alongside fairy godmother, Whitney Houston.

    Yet as the accolades piled up, so too did the pressure the maintain a flawless image. To onlookers, she had crafted the blueprint for the teenage “it” girl. But behind closed doors “The Vocal Bible” as she was known, was struggling.

    Now, for the first time, Brandy reveals the real story behind her life in the spotlight, the stratospheric highs and the unimaginable lows, the groundbreaking moments and the relatable journey she had to take to discover her authentic self—as a woman, a mother, an artist—as Brandy.

    Brandy's debut memoir is a fearless and remarkable story of hope, resilience and the strength it takes to make peace with the past.

  • Big Girl Blitz (Curve, 3) cover image
    $19.99

    "Nothing is hotter and more fun than Danielle Allen’s writing."-- Ali Hazelwood

    Because life’s too short, and mean girls ain’t sh…
    Jazmyn Payne fled her hometown―and the fatphobes who made her life hell– the minute she graduated high school. Growing up, her haven was her Aunt Addison, and when her health takes a drastic turn, she insists that Jazz should spice up her life. Emphasis on spice.

    But dating is the last thing Jazz had on her mind.

    Until Lamar Anderson sits next to her at the local sports bar. He is sexy, fun, and refreshingly drama free. With him she's able to pretend that everything is alright. But as real life intrudes, Jazz has to decide if she can leave the past where it belongs… for a love that she deserves.

  • Mayhem and the Mortal cover image

    Shanora Williams

    $32.99

    Don't miss out on the stunning DELUXE LIMITED EDITION while supplies last. This breathtaking collectible is only available on a limited first print run in the U.S. and Canada, a must-have for any book lover.

    Dungeons & Dragons meets The Wizard of Oz in this darkly hilarious romantasy adventure in which a young woman who will do anything to rescue her sister from an evil sorcerer's curse hires a ruthless assassin. They embark on a quest with a band of misfits, one of whom harbors a devastating secret that could ruin her fairy-tale ending.

  • We Don't Talk About Carol: A Novel cover image

    Kristen L. Berry

    from $20.00

    *Paperback Release Date -02/02/27*

    A dedicated journalist unearths a generations-old family secret—and a connection to a string of missing girls that hits way too close to home—in this gripping debut novel.

    In the wake of her grandmother's passing, Sydney Singleton finds a hidden photograph of a little girl who looks more like Sydney than her own sister or mother. She soon discovers the mystery girl in the photograph is her aunt, Carol, who was one of six North Carolina Black girls to go missing in the 1960s. For the last several decades, not a soul has talked about Carol or what really happened to her. But now, with her grandmother gone and Sydney looking to start a family of her own, she is determined to unravel the truth behind her long-lost aunt’s disappearance, and the sinister silence that surrounds her.

    Unfortunately, this is familiar territory for Sydney: Years earlier, while she worked the crime beat as a journalist, her obsession with the case of another missing girl led to a psychotic break. And now, in the suffocating grip of fertility treatments and a marriage that's beginning to crumble, Sydney’s relentless pursuit for answers might just lead her down the same path of self-destruction. As she delves deeper into Carol's fate, her own troubled past reemerges, clawing its way to the surface with a vengeance. The web of secrets and lies entangling her family leaves Sydney questioning everything—her fixation on the missing girls, her future as a mom, and her trust in those she knows and loves.

    Delving into family, community, secrets, and motherhood, We Don’t Talk About Carol is a gripping and deeply emotional story about overcoming the rot at the roots of our family trees—and what we’ll do for those we love.

  • Kin: A Novel cover image
    $32.00

    A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

    Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

    A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

  • On Witness and Respair: Essays cover image
    $29.00

    The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.

    Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.

    From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”

    True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.

  • Cleopatra: A Novel cover image
    $30.00

    Cleopatra tells her own story in this evocative and sensuous historical epic from the bestselling and award-winning author of Faebound and The Final Strife.

    This stunning edition includes designed endpapers and a custom case stamp.

    YOU KNOW MY NAME, BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW ME.

    Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love's thrall.

    Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves.

    Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children.

    How wilfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, and divinely blessed to rule.

    Death will silence me no longer.

    This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.

  • Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life cover image
    $30.00

    INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Emma is an inspiring force, a modern day business mogul and visionary…[This book] should be your guide if you are starting a business, thinking about starting a business, already in a business, want to make a better business for yourself and want to be a better person in that business, I highly recommend Start With Yourself…It’s a good reminder that a well-lived life starts with you.” —Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Podcast

    “Emma Grede is a modern executive for the influencer age…Start With Yourself makes the case for putting yourself first in work, life, and child-rearing. It’s Lean In for the post-girlboss era.” —The Wall Street Journal

    As seen on Good Morning America, TODAY, Morning Joe, ABC News Live, and Meet the Press.

    Start With Yourself is a game-changing, no-BS guide for anyone seeking meaningful success on their own terms. It’s an essential framework that will give you the tools and mindset to unlock your full potential in life and business—straight from a woman who defied all the odds to become a serial entrepreneur, a cofounder of culture-defining global businesses, a nonprofit champion, and the host of the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast. All while raising a family of four children.

    Based on the factors of her early life—she’s the child of a working-class single mother and grew up in a rough neighborhood in East London and dropped out of high school—you’d never guess that Emma Grede would go on to become one of America’s richest self-made women.

    This makes Grede unique, but she’s convinced you can do it, too: Start With Yourself is a blueprint to her mindset and how she thinks about business and life, structured in easy takeaways, so you can immediately apply her philosophy to what you’re trying to build and create.

    Among her most blazing insights, Grede identifies what she calls “Old Thoughts”: stale thinking, outdated ideas; set-in-stone rules ingrained into the culture about work-life balance, the crassness of money, and the unseemliness of ambition—that aren’t actually rules at all. They’re biases, Grede insists, system errors, and we must strike them from our minds so that we can gain a greater sense of control, even mastery, over our day-to-day and long-range goals.

    Ultimately, this is a book for everyone tired of feeling like a bystander or passenger in their own life. Grede offers tangible and applicable-right-now solutions to create a mindset, an overall system of thought to manage emotions, clarify ideas, and illuminate the right next step—while always staying positive.

    It’s about gathering yourself after failure. It’s about being accountable but also forgiving yourself. It’s about not expecting shortcuts while never being bashful about grabbing them when they appear. It’s about pushing hard for wins and never apologizing for your dreams.

    Above all, Grede offers a new vision for work and life that encourages readers everywhere to take responsibility for their own thinking in order to achieve personal and professional success at the highest levels.

  • AUTHOR TALK: Black Freedom with Blair LM Kelley - June 18 @ 7PM
    from $5.00

    Celebrate the release of Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days with Blair LM Kelley!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Thursday, June 18 @ 7PM

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

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

    *Please note outside copies of the book will not be allowed in the bookstore and you will not be eligible for the signing/photo line. You must buy a book from Kindred Stories.

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    The first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative from an award-winning historian.  
     
    For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is also the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kelley is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (2010) which was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize and Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), which received the 2024 Brooklyn Library Book Award, the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History. Her latest book, Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days, will be published June 2, 2026.

    ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

    Melanye Price is the inaugural Director of The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Price is an Endowed Professor of Political Science and served as the Principal Investigator for the African American Studies Initiative and the HBCU Student Voting Rights Lab. She has secured grants for the Simmons Center and her own research from various foundations including Mellon, Ford, LUMINA, and others. Price is the author of two books: The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race (NYU, 2016) and Dreaming Blackness:  Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (NYU, 2009). She is currently working on her third book project on the five decade history of voting rights activism at Prairie View.  She also served as a Special Assistant to Ruth J. Simmons in her last year as President of Prairie View.

    Dr. Price completed her B.A. magna cum laude in geography at Prairie View A&M University and her MA and PhD in political science at The Ohio State University. Dr. Price was recently named the 2024 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Price has been a Black History Month lecturer for the US Embassy in Germany where she lectured at universities and community organizations across the country. Professor Price was one of the contributors to Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Obama: Through the Fire, which aired on BET. She has been a regular contributor for The New York Times Opinion section and also done political commentary for various local and national outlets.  Dr. Price has also served as a consultant and commenter for the audio tour of two major exhibits at the Museum Fine Arts Houston—Philip Guston Now and Kehinde Wiley’s Archaeology of Silence. 
    In her free time, Melanye is an avid watcher of television, supporter of all things Black and Houston, and intrepid gardener! 

  • Testimony Therapy: Decolonizing Mental Health for Black Therapists and Clients cover image
    $28.99

    Centering Black culture and community for liberating, anti-racist therapeutic practice.

    This innovative book lays out the journey of family therapist Makungu Akinyela in developing testimony therapy―a healing practice rooted in Black cultural traditions of testifying and storytelling. This book argues that traditional Eurocentric approaches to therapy often perpetuate colonial oppression in the lives of Black clients, and that decolonizing mental health requires centering African American cultural knowledge, history, and community.

    Drawing from thinkers from the Black radical critical tradition like Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Akinyela frames testimony therapy as a narrative practice grounded in Ubuntu (the African communal self) and the oral traditions of African diasporic peoples. Testimony Therapy maps out theory, practices, and supervision approaches that help therapists support clients in resisting internalized racism, reclaiming self-definition, and nurturing liberated Black identities. Ultimately, this work is a call for Black therapists and clients to engage therapy as cultural resistance―a pathway to repair our souls and build collective freedom beyond Eurocentric limitations.

  • Good Woman: A Reckoning cover image
    $28.99

    A raw and lyrical exploration of the confining expectations of womanhood and, if we dare, what lies beyond those limitations--from a writer Roxane Gay calls "vibrant and thoughtful."

    Gorgeous, badass, and practically waiting to pounce, Good Woman: A Reckoning is acclaimed essayist Savala Nolan's follow-up to her "standout collection" (New York Times Book Review) Don't Let It Get You Down.

    A lifetime of playing by the rules of female social conditioning is not what it's cracked up to be for Nolan. The years of making herself smaller (literally and metaphorically); the sexual advances that led to more than she wanted; the bad marriage she fought like hell to keep; all the ways others questioned her identity or choices and she let it slide to keep the peace; her silence when requested; her body when desired--none of it worked. None of it protected her the way it was advertised to.

    Nolan noticed the same was true for the women around her and the women in history she read about. Across time and location, they were raised to be agreeable and "good." Hyper-visible as sexual objects but invisible as full people. Living in a physical world created by men for men. Taking on the ultimate role of birth-giver and caretaker, yet seeing it remain an unsung act, even as it's a God-like endeavor. Only in midlife did Nolan begin to realize she was capable of living outside these cages of conditioning so slyly insidious that they're nearly invisible.

    Good Woman elegantly probes the knotty conditions themselves, the costs of adhering to them, and what happens when one refuses to comply. The twelve stunning and unforgettable essays blend memoir, reportage, and history to create a collection that is alternately bold, brash, and explosive ... and ravishingly tender, sensual, and joyous. Nolan takes aim at big and old ideas, and she does not miss. Hers is a testimony to witness and to savor.

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