A TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might—together—come to a new view of our shared past

“A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith’s father’s family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero’s record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life.

Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?

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Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.

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The first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. Smith

A Penguin Classic

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous. The poets featured in Volume 1 are George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Anne Spencer, and Angelina Weld Grimké.

The debut collection from a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient whose “astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable” (Tracy K. Smith)
  
The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

Celebrate the release of This Is How You Love Her with Traci Saulsberry!

EVENT DEETS

When: Sunday, September 27 @ 6 PM CST

Where: 2310 Elgin St, Houston, TX 77004

How:

• RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat.
• RSVP WITH BOOK to reserve your seat and purchase a copy This Is How You Love Her, 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

A fiercely candid, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking blend of memoir and self-help on vulnerability, identity, and reclaiming your life

What if you didn't need Bali to find yourself? For 14 years, Traci Saulsberry led communications at NBC, becoming one of the youngest Black executives at the company. She had everything a modern woman is told to want—the house, her son, the high-powered job.

But when her carefully constructed life collapsed, Saulsberry was confronted with a question she'd been avoiding for years: Who was she, really?

Here I was, caught on my heels, with no backup lover to pick up the slack. Naturally, because I am a product of an adolescence spent binging rom-coms filled with sweeping tales, I wanted to run away and leave it all behind. I romanticized that there must be a flight to the farthest island on the edge of the world where I could just start over again. My archnemesis, reality, quickly snapped me out of that daydream. I wasn't going anywhere. I felt trapped.

This Is How You Love Her is a vulnerable narrative guide to uncovering your identity in life's small moments, right where you are. With wit and insight, heart and cinematic prose, Saulsberry weaves together pages from her journal, conversational guides, poetry, and reflection prompts in this memoir-meets-guide that gives readers permission to get to know themselves at their own pace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Traci Saulsberry is a senior communications executive, leadership coach, and writer. At twenty-seven, she became one of the youngest Black executives at NBC, where she spent fourteen years shaping narratives at the highest levels of entertainment. She later built and led the communications team at Peacock, managing a team of more than thirty people during the platform’s launch and growth.

She is currently a host and narrator for Calm, the world’s leading meditation and sleep app, where she guides original series including Workplace Wellbeing, Professional Growth, and Processing World Events, designed to help audiences navigate life with clarity and care.

As a leadership coach, keynote speaker, and learning facilitator, Saulsberry works with early-career professionals, executives, and business owners, with a focus on helping individuals find and own their voice—particularly while navigating spaces where they are underrepresented. She also serves as an adjunct professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, where she teaches entertainment publicity.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Dee Brown is a former television reporter and producer, media personality, and founder of Happy + Home Collective, a boutique media agency specializing in home and garden PR, social marketing campaigns, production, and storytelling. Her background in television and brand communications has given her a passion for telling the stories behind beautiful spaces, the people who create them, and the transformations that make a house feel like home. Dee’s work and expertise have been featured by leading media outlets and platforms, including HGTV, NBC, Oprah Daily, and FOX SOUL, among others.

Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New Yorker

Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “Night Shift”), allowing poets from different eras to talk back to one another in the same space, intertwined with chronological groupings from the decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression,” Young notes), the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political ’60s and ’70s, the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater depth and breadth. Inevitably, we see the high points when poems spoke directly into, about, or against the crises of their times—the war poetry of W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro; the remarkable outpouring of verse after 9/11 (who can forget Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”?); and more recently, stunning poems in response to the cataclysmic events of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.

The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.

One World is proud to present THE 1619 PROJECT: A New Origin Story, a book that dramatically builds on the vision of the original magazine project with major expansions of the original essays, seven new essays by historians, and dozens of new poems and pieces of fiction. The book includes a significant elaboration of the project’s Pulitzer Prize-winning lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones and a new introduction that together offer a stirring rebuttal to critics. Hannah-Jones has also written a third essay that makes the case for reparative solutions to the legacy of injustice the project documents.

Edited by Hannah-Jones, along with New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, features editor Ilena Silverman, and New York Times executive producer Caitlin Roper, the book offers work from some of the country’s most outstanding journalists, thinkers, historians and scholars, including: Michelle Alexander, Leslie Alexander, Carol Anderson, Jamelle Bouie, Anthea Butler, Matthew Desmond, Martha Jones, Ibram Kendi, Kevin Kruse, Trymaine Lee, Tiya Miles, Wesley Morris, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Dorothy Roberts, Jeneen Interlandi, Bryan Stevenson, and Linda Villarosa.

Woven throughout the book are works of fiction and poetry that bring to life four hundred years of history with imaginative writing by Joshua Bennett, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Rita Dove, Camille Dungy, Cornelius Eady, Eve L. Ewing, Nikky Finney, Vievee Francis, Yaa Gyasi, Forrest Hamer, Terrance Hayes, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Barry Jenkins, Tyehimba Jess, Robert Jones, Jr., A. Van Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kiese Laymon, Jasmine Mans, Terry McMillan, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Gregory Pardlo, Darryl Pinckney, Claudia Rankine, Jason Reynolds, Evie Shockley, Tim Siebles, Clint Smith, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward and Sonia Sanchez.

The book also includes archival portrait photography of Black Americans paired with each essay, curated by Kimberly Annece Henderson.

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The expansion of Marvel and DC Comics’ characters such as Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Black Lightning in film and on television has created a proliferation of poetry in this genre—receiving wide literary and popular attention.

This groundbreaking collection highlights work from poets who have written verse within this growing tradition, including Terrance Hayes, Lucille Clifton, Gil Scott-Heron, A. Van Jordan, Glenis Redmond, Tracy K. Smith, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Joshua Bennett, Douglas Kearney, Tara Betts, Frank X Walker, Tyree Daye, and others. In addition, the anthology will also feature the work of artists such as John Jennings and Najee Dorsey, showcasing their interpretations of superheroes, Black comic characters, Afrofuturistic images from the African diaspora.

The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay.

As Heard on NPR's This American Life

“Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate

The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.

In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything other subject, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world--his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.

The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

‘I may pay rent to a friend for my place in Greensboro, but the South’s my landlord; and I’m trapped in its stomach trying to get to its brain. Here, I see butterflies with Confederate flag-grown wings and minstrel vestiges of Daddy Rice collecting dough. I can’t move because I’m stuck in Aunt Jemima’s syrup.’ Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body is the highly anticipated first book by artist, filmmaker, and writer RaMell Ross. Bringing together Ross’s large-format photographs, sculptures, conceptual works, and selected films, together with illuminating texts by Ross and a host of writers, this ambitious publication presents a chronicle of the American South that is both mysterious and quotidian, a historical document and a radical imagining of the future. The book opens with a series of illuminating colour photographs from Hale County, Alabama, Ross’s adoptive home and the setting of his Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). It then moves through a series of photographic and mixed-media works and writings that examine, deconstruct, and rewrite visual representations of the South. Amidst these works, at the book’s heart, is Ross’s film Return to Origin, a remarkable conceptual work in which Ross freight ships himself in a 4x8-foot box – a nod to Henry Brown who shipped himself to freedom in 1849. With Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, Ross creates a new visual narrative of the South, freed from its iconic meanings to reveal the earth, dirt, soil, and land beneath. With texts by RaMell Ross, Tracy K. Smith, Richard McCabe, and Scott Matthews

Celebrate the release of Good Spirits with Tiffanie Barriere! This special evening will feature an author conversation with Tiffanie and Chef Dominic Lee, owner of Augustine’s, followed by a cocktail tasting featuring recipes from the book. Join us for an engaging evening of conversation, cocktails, and good spirits!

EVENT DEETS

When: Thursday, December 10 @ 7PM

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

How: 

• RSVP ONLY
  Reserve your seat and participate in the tasting.

  RSVP WITH BOOK
  Reserve your seat and purchase a copy of Good Spirits, supporting both the author and our store programming. Your book will be available for pickup at the event. Includes the tasting.

  RSVP (I ALREADY HAVE THE BOOK)
  Reserve your seat and let us know you plan to bring a copy of Good Spirits that you previously purchased from another bookseller. Includes the tasting.

Please Note: Generally 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 either purchase a copy from Kindred Stories or select the RSVP: I Already Have the Book ticket option, which allows you to bring a copy purchased elsewhere. 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

The must-have companion for classic cocktails, mocktails, and creative drinks, plus historical insights, from a celebrated industry icon.

Good Spirits is a culture-rich cocktail exploration that seamlessly blends practiced technique with deep historical knowledge. For master bartender and cocktail educator Tiffanie Barriere, the bar has always been a place where history, creativity, and community combine. From gold-standard martinis and expert Manhattans to drinks inspired by mood, the cocktail curious will learn not only how to skillfully mix and pour with joy, but also about the fascinating and often untold history behind our favorite drinks and spirits.

In addition to the backstories and recipes for 125 cocktails, enthusiasts will find illuminating essays about choosing and using spirits and the legacies (both bitter and sweet) behind them; important historical figures who invented our favorite drinks, liqueurs, and bar tools; and truths that track the impact of trends and cocktail movements. Zero-proof variations abound thanks to the ingenious concept of cocktail “stock”, while dozens of bold-flavored syrups, shrubs, and infusions make it just as easy and exciting to take a drink in a no-alcohol direction as a boozy one. Insights on tools, garnishing, ice types, and the difference between shaking, rolling, and aerating set you up to hone your mixology and make drinks with confidence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tiffanie Barriere is a bartender’s bartender and award-winning mixologist, educator, and hospitality leader. The former beverage director at One Flew South, the “Best Airport Bar in the World,” she has been honored as a Food & Wine Game Changer and a Tales of the Cocktail Visionary Award recipient. She has contributed cocktail recipes to several cocktail books and cookbooks, including Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice and Modern Classic Cocktails. Her work has also been featured in Imbibe, Forbes, Essence, and Southern Living. She is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Rooted in the unique tapestry of Creole culture, Chef Dominick Lee’s culinary journey pays heartfelt homage to his New Orleans heritage. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Lee’s passion for cooking led him to The Art Institute of Houston, where he received the inaugural “Underbelly Scholarship” from James Beard award-winning chef Chris Shepherd. His journey to his Bachelors in Culinary Management included roles as sous chef at Bay Oaks Country Club, Executive Sous Chef under James Beard semifinalist Chef Kiran Verma at Kiran’s and stages at some of the most highly acclaimed restaurants in the country, including Alinea (2 Michelin Stars), Next (1 Michelin Star), and Blue Hill at Stone Barns (2 Michelin Stars). At 29, Lee became one of the youngest executive chefs in Houston, taking the helm at Poitín Bar & Kitchen where he earned accolades such as Texas Monthly’s 2019 Best New Restaurants and a number of “Rising Star Chef” distinctions.

In 2021, Lee relocated to Europe to study Creole food derivatives and served as head chef at Villa Lena in Tuscany. Two years later, he returned back to The States, opening Alligator Pear in New York City, which showcased a New American menu inspired by New Orleans. Now, Lee has returned to Houston to open Augustine’s, a progressive Creole restaurant exploring the many dimensions of his Creole heritage — debuting Summer 2026.

Gail Simmons will be in conversation with Chris Shepherd on November 17th at the Hobby Center as part of her official book tour.  Get tickets HERE!

From author, culinary expert, and Top Chef judge Gail Simmons comes a fun, informative, and trailblazing guide to a rarely-explored side of hospitality: how to be a great guest.

Countless influential voices have written books about hosting, offering tips for what to cook, how to set the perfect table, mix the best drinks and create the most welcoming vibes. But hospitality, by definition, involves at least two people; where is the advice for guests?

Culinary expert and perennial Top Chef judge Gail Simmons is something of a professional on the subject. As a tastemaker and lifestyle authority, she is invited to countless social events running the gamut from world-class fine dining and international affairs to neighborhood potlucks. Through it all, she knows that for any gathering to be a success, guests must rise to the occasion and actively embrace their role.

In Guesting, Gail unpacks the reciprocal nature of this relationship and explores the sometimes-tricky choreography that governs its dance. She also shares her essential tenets of guesting, and proven strategies for navigating any social situation (yes, even assigned seating). From dinner parties to weddings, religious observances to restaurants, Guesting guides readers through all types of “get-togethers” with confidence and grace. It also connects the vital role guesting plays in our wellbeing and the integrity of our collective culture, at a moment when technology and the temptation for short-term comfort have diminished our inherent need to create―and maintain―human relationships.

And since any good guest knows that bringing something to the table is always the right move, Gail shares ideas and recipes for thoughtful store-bought contributions, homemade food gifts, and favorite dishes to share with a crowd. Whether you’re visiting an old friend, going out for dinner, or attending a milestone celebration, Gail has the answers and inspiration to help you become the consummate guest.