*Paperback Release Date - 6/23/2026*

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

“My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem,” W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood these words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother, the descendant of slaves and tenant farmers—Ailey carries the weight of this Problem on her shoulders.

The daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, Ailey is raised in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. Growing up, she struggles with this duality, a battle for belonging that shapes her identity. On one side are her exacting parents and her imperious, light-skinned grandmother Nana Claire, to whom skin color is paramount. On the other, Ailey feels the pull of the “deep country” of her mother’s land-tending family, whose forebears endured the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.

But how can Ailey live up to everyone’s expectations when half of her family rejects the truth of a fraught racial history, while the rest can’t ever seem to break away from it?

A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France during World War II but later against France in Algeria’s war for independence. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, inspired leaders of diverse liberation movements: Steve Biko in South Africa, Che Guevara in Latin America, the Black Panthers in the States. Wideman’s novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary African American novelist,Thomas, who undertakes writing a life of Fanon. The result is an electrifying mix of perspectives, traveling from Manhattan to Paris to Algeria to Pittsburgh. Part whodunit, part screenplay, part love story, Fanon introduces the French film director Jean-Luc Godard to the ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood and chases the meaning of Fanon’s legacy through our violent, post-9/11 world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought to rectify.

From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.

One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.

In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

We're meeting to discuss The Missed Connection!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Wednesday, July 8 @ 7PM CST

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

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Romance Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

*This book is currently on PRE-ORDER and has an on sale date for June 9th. You can purchase now for your book to be picked up or shipped on June 9th. 

ABOUT THE MISSED CONNECTION

New York Times bestselling author Tia Williams returns with an intensely romantic, deliciously sexy tale about a woman searching for her handsome seatmate on a European flight--and the unexpected places her hunt for love leads her.

Sasha Cruz knows types. As a booked-and-busy casting agent, she's always casting -- at happy hour, the post office, the grocery store, everywhere. She's all about finding the perfect person to slot into the perfect role. What she doesn't do, however, are relationships. Too much energy, not enough time. Men find her intimidating, and she likes it that way.

But when Sasha's seated next to a mysterious, broodingly handsome Italian man on the way to a work trip in Paris, sparks fly - but they miss the chance to exchange contact information. Now, convinced that she's lost out on her soulmate, Sasha is on a manhunt to find Seat F.

Sasha enlists her work friend for help in the search, but when she accidentally emails the entire global company, colleagues around the world begin looking for Seat F, too - with some finding love along the way. Meanwhile, Sasha takes matters into her own hands, hiring a smoldering detective who complicates matters in unforeseen ways

We're meeting to discuss Judge Stone by Viola Davis!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, July 28 @ 7PM CST

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

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Mystery/Thriller Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

ABOUT JUDGE STONE

We're meeting to discuss Blood Slaves by Markus Redmond!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Tuesday, July 21 @ 7PM CST

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

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Horror Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

ABOUT BLOOD SLAVES

For readers of Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, this ingenious reimagining of the vampire origin story set during the early days of American slavery blends alternate history with supernatural horror, as the last surviving member of an ancient African vampire tribe meets a slave desperate for freedom, and together, they lead an army of enslaved people in a cinematically blood-soaked battle for freedom and revenge.

What if nobody ever freed the slaves…because they freed themselves – 150 years before the Civil War?

In the Province of Carolina, 1710, freedom seems unattainable for Willie, for his beloved Gertie, and for their unborn child. They live, suffer, and toil under their brutal master, James “Big Jim” Barrow, whose grand plantation was built by the blood, sweat, and tears of the enslaved. To flee this hell on earth is be hunted and killed. Until one strange night Willie is offered a dark hope by Rafazi, an enigmatic slave with an irresistible and blood-chilling path to liberation.

Hailing from the Kingdom of Ghana, Rafazi is the lone survivor of the Ramanga, an African vampire tribe rendered nearly extinct by plague. Rafazi has roamed the world for centuries with an undying desire to replenish the power that once defined his heritage. In Willie, Rafazi has found his first biddable subject to be turned and to help in a hungry revolt. And Willie desires nothing more than to free his people from malicious bondage. Whatever it takes.

One by one, as an army of blood slaves thirsting for revenge is gathered, the headstrong Gertie fears that no good can come from the vampiric legacy that courses through Rafazi’s veins. Willie knows that only evil can fight evil. And when the woman he loves stands between the reemergence of the Ramanga and the justified slaughter of the oppressors, Willie must make an irreversible decision. Only one thing is certain: on the Barrow plantation, and beyond, blood will spill.

Part historical drama, part supernatural horror, and part alternate history, Blood Slaves is an ingenuous and defiant new creation myth of the vampire, one rooted in both justice and the sometimes-violent means necessary to achieve it.

We're meeting to discuss Kin by Tayari Jones!

BOOK CLUB MEETING DEETS

When: Thursday, July 30 @ 7PM CST

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

How: RSVP ONLY to let us know you plan to attend! Support the Fiction Book Club by purchasing a copy of the book from Kindred Stories here!

ABOUT KIN

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 

Come celebrate the paperback release of The Long Songs of W.E.B DuBois with author, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers & Jacqueline Allen Tremble. 

Event Deets

When: May 10 at 7PM CST

Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

How: Register on this page or head over to register on Crowdcast directly using this link.  If you register using our website (with or without purchasing the book) and not Crowdcast, you will register a Crowdcast watch link at least 24 hours before the start of the event.

About the Book

“My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem,” W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood these words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother, the descendant of slaves and tenant farmers—Ailey carries the weight of this Problem on her shoulders.

The daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, Ailey is raised in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. Growing up, she struggles with this duality, a battle for belonging that shapes her identity. On one side are her exacting parents and her imperious, light-skinned grandmother Nana Claire, to whom skin color is paramount. On the other, Ailey feels the pull of the “deep country” of her mother’s land-tending family, whose forebears endured the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.

But how can Ailey live up to everyone’s expectations when half of her family rejects the truth of a fraught racial history, while the rest can’t ever seem to break away from it?

About the Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 NBA-nominated collection The Age of Phillis. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma.

About the Moderator

 JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is  a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow and a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications including The Griot, The Offing, The Louisville Review,  and Blue Lake Review.  American Happiness (2016), her first collection, published by NewSouth Books, won the Balcones Poetry Prize.   Trimble's next collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books in fall of 2022.