Pull up in your best to celebrate Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion with Pulitzer winning author, Michell S. Jackson and one of our favorite artist/community members, Tay Butler. 

EVENT DEETS

When: Wednesday, September 13, 2023 at 7PM

Where: The Reading Room HTX (401 Franklin Street, 77201)

How: RSVP to grab your free ticket or RSVP book to reserve your seat and your copy of the book while supporting our programming. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Use discount code: SALE to receive 30% off. 

Michael Jackson’s closest sister pulls back the curtain to reveal the inner workings of the Jackson family, Michael’s tortured soul, and her own love for her brother in this intimate portrait of a beloved, yet troubled, pop legend.

In this shocking New York Times bestselling memoir, La Toya Jackson pays heartfelt tribute to her legendary brother Michael’s tortured soul and offers unprecedented insight into the troubled entertainer’s tragic destruction.

La Toya Jackson was always closer to Michael than anyone knew. Now, she sheds light on the intimate moments she shared with the beloved pop legend and unveils the disturbing behind-the-scenes dealings that she believes foretold his death. Like Michael, La Toya experienced an upbringing that made her vulnerable to exploitation, and her own journey led to hell and back at the hands of her former manager and husband. Here, in vivid and candid detail, she reveals the most painful episodes of her deeply personal story and explores how anyone—regardless of fame, fortune, or status—can be trapped in a cycle of abuse. La Toya ultimately found the courage to break free, rebuild her life and career, and reconcile with her close-knit family. Her unforgettable story will touch the hearts of millions of fans and inspire anyone who feels as if there’s nowhere to go that it is possible to truly start over...

An all-new stand-alone novel featuring Brenda Jackson’s fan-favorite Madaris family.

Ninetysomething Mama Laverne is determined to find all of her great-grandchildren their perfect match before going home to glory. So far, her success rate is 100 percent—and she intends to keep it that way.

After sustaining injuries in Iraq, US army ranger Chancellor (Chance) Madaris was told he’d never walk again. Chance credits his great-grandmother Mama Laverne with giving him the will and fortitude to heal and prove the doctors wrong. He has a healthy respect for her meddling ways and knows he’ll eventually end up next on her matchmaking list.

When Zoey Pritchard was eight, she survived a car accident that left both her parents dead. She was sent to live with her great-aunt, who refused to speak about her parents. Zoey has no memory from before the crash, but she’s been having the same dream over and over…

Guided by nothing but a hunch and images from her dream, Zoey travels to Houston. Searching for answers, Zoey uncovers a scandal involving her parents and the wealthy and powerful Madaris family. Her trail leads her straight to Chance’s door. The dislike and intense attraction are instant and simultaneous. Was it chance or Mama Laverne’s plan to throw this pair together?

Step into the vibrant streets of the 1970s Bronx and witness the exact moment a global movement began. Birth of a Culture gives you a front-row seat to the origins of hip-hop, told through the firsthand experiences of Grandmaster Flash—one of the founding pioneers who helped build the culture from the ground up.

When you read this book, you feel the pulse of the neighborhood parks, hear the scratch of the vinyl, and experience the raw energy of a community turning its daily struggles into a revolutionary art form. This is not just a collection of dates and facts. It is a deeply personal narrative written by Grandmaster Flash and coauthor Robert “Scoop” Jackson that brings you into the rooms and onto the streets where music changed forever.

What you will discover inside:

* An Authentic Pioneer Perspective: Read a personal narrative from the mind of Grandmaster Flash, complete with untold stories of the earliest park jams and legendary club nights.
* The Blueprint of a Movement: Understand exactly how DJing, MCing, break dancers, and graffiti artists merged to form the core pillars of a massive cultural shift.
* Untold History Revealed: Uncover the real stories behind the evolution of hip-hop and culture.
* Timeless Cultural Relevance: Explore how the innovation born in the Bronx directly influences the music, art, and social movements you interact with every day.

This book cuts through the myths to deliver an authentic, chronological history—bringing you alongside Grandmaster Flash as he invents the groundbreaking Quik Mix Theory and helps transform a landscape of social unrest into a global movement. With turntables and microphones, the young innovator sparked a cultural explosion that quickly swept the world.

More than a timeline of musical milestones, this Birth of a Culture explores the profound power of community, resilience, and unapologetic creativity. The challenges and triumphs detailed within these pages mirror the social issues we still face, proving that music remains our most vital tool for connection and change.

Whether you are a lifelong hip-hop fan, a dedicated music historian, or simply someone who loves powerful stories of cultural triumph, this book belongs on your shelf. Once you’ve read Birth of a Culture, you can say you know the undeniable heartbeat of hip-hop's true origins.

The definitive insiders' look at the Jacksons' lives and careers, celebrating 50 years of one of history's most remarkable acts of all time.

The official volume dedicated to the Royal Family of Pop, The Jacksons: Legacy offers unparalleled access to the legend that is the Jacksons. Four specially commissioned chapters deftly weave twelve days of exclusive interviews with the brothers and contributions from key players throughout their careers.

The story takes root at 2300 Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana, tracing the boys' journey from early childhood to their transformative tenure at Motown as the Jackson 5. This account maneuvers through their radical move to Epic as The Jacksons, the blossoming of their solo careers, the dizzying successes of the Victory tour, and their legacy as it stands today.

Through unprecedented access to the family archives and the personal collections of Jackie, Marlon, and Tito Jackson, the book offers an exhaustive array of never-before-seen imagery, rarities, and personal artifacts. Readers are invited to explore intensely personal family snapshots, shots of the first guitars the brothers ever held, and photographer Harrison Funk’s exclusive coverage of their professional lives. The collection also captures the singular energy of Michael Jackson on tour during the releases of Off the Wall (1979) and the 1982 phenomenon, Thriller―the bestselling album of all time. More than anything, it underscores the unprecedented cultural reach of the family through vintage magazine spreads and eclectic memorabilia, including official merchandise and even original Jacksons-branded cereal boxes complete with their 7" record premiums.

Originally published to commemorate their 50th anniversary, The Jacksons: Legacy remains the definitive behind-the-scenes record of one of the greatest acts of all time.

1,000 color illustrations

In this inspiring, intimate memoir, the first Black woman to ever be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court chronicles her extraordinary life story.
 
With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji BrownJackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family’s ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America’s highest court within the span of one generation.
 
Named “Ketanji Onyika,” meaning “Lovely One,” based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams: from hearing stories of her grandparents and parents breaking barriers in the segregated South, to honing her voice in high school as an oratory champion and student body president, to graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, where she performed in musical theater and improv and participated in pivotal student organizations.
 
Here, Justice Jackson pulls back the curtain, marrying the public record of her life with what is less known. She reveals what it takes to advance in the legal profession when most people in power don’t look like you, and to reconcile a demanding career with the joys and sacrifices of marriage and motherhood.
 
Through trials and triumphs, Justice Jackson’s journey will resonate with dreamers everywhere, especially those who nourish outsized ambitions and refuse to be turned aside. This moving, open-hearted tale will spread hope for a more just world, for generations to come.

*Ships in 7-10 business days*

More than 30 acclaimed writers—including diverse voices such as Nikki Giovanni, David Omotosho Black, Natasha Trethewey, Barry Jenkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, and Angela Flournoy—reflect on their experience and expertise in this unique book on the craft of writing that focuses on the Black creative spirit.

How We Do It is an anthology curated by Black writers for the creation and proliferation of Black thought. While a creator’s ethnicity does not solely define them, it is inherently part of who they are and how they interpret the world.

For centuries, Black creators have utilized oral and written storytelling traditions in crafting their art. But how does one begin the process of constructing a poem or story or character? How do Black writers, when faced with questions of “authenticity,” dive deep into the essence of their lives and work to find the inherent truth? How We Do It addresses these profound questions. Not a traditional “how to” writing handbook, it seeks to guide rather than dictate and to validate the complexity and range of styles—and even how one thinks about craft itself.

An outstanding list of contributors offer their insights on a range of important topics. Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown explores the lives personified in poetry, while Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey explores decolonizing enduring metaphors. National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy illuminates the pain of grief in all forms and how it can be revealed in the act of creation, and iconoclast Nikki Giovanni offers an elegiac declaration on language.

New and previously published essays and interviews provide encouragement, examples, and templates, and offer lessons on everything from poetic form and plotting a story to the lessons inherent in the act of writing, trial & error, and finding inspiration in the works of others, including those of Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, and Edward P. Jones. A handbook and a reference tool, How We Do It is a thoughtful and welcome tool that offers direction to help Black artists establish their own creative practice while celebrating and widening the scope of the Black writer’s role in art, history, and culture.

Contributors include David Omotosho Black, Jericho Brown, Breena Clark, Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, W. Ralph Eubanks, Curdella Forbes, Angela Flournoy, Ernest Gaines, Nikki Giovanni, Marita Golden, Ravi Howard, Terrance Hayes, Mitchell S. Jackson, Barry Jenkins, Charles S. Johnson, Tayari Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Elizabeth Nunez, Carl Phillips, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Rion Amilcar Scott, Evie Shockley, Natasha Trethewey, Frank X Walker, Afaa M. Weaver, Crystal Wilkinson, Jacqueline Woodson, Tiphanie Yanique.

"The power of George Jackson's personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the younger generation, black and white, will read Soledad Brother."  —Howard Zinn, author, A People's History of the United States

A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life.
Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.

The autobiography of a Black woman who defied nineteenth-century conventions to become a preacher, popular speaker, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist. 

Sojourner Truth was an incredible, remarkable, epoch-defying woman who escaped from slavery and successfully sued for her son’s freedom, in addition to her career as a wildly successful orator and activist—a woman alive to the hypocrisies of her age, and unafraid to talk about them.

Her autobiography, which she dictated, is an outstanding historical document. Truth’s tale sheds a light on realities of slavery that are still rarely discussed: that she was a slave in upstate New York, not on a Southern plantation; that Dutch was her first language; that the circumstances of her slavery isolated her from a broader Black community; that her experience of religion was a racially integrated one, and became the means of her independence. Ultimately, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the story of a great American that reveals aspects of slavery and free Black life that are too often overlooked.

Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory.

Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young

Comi Johnson entered college with a high-school diploma, an associate's

degree and a broken heart. Betrayed by her high-school sweetheart and best friend she swore

off love, dating, and athletes. Then she met a basketball star and 1st round draft pick Dray

Townsend, and the attraction was instant. A chance pairing in class created a friendship that

made each other question everything they thought they knew about love.

Then one night changed the course of their friendship forever. After years of not speaking to one

another they run into each other in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Dray's latest conquest is

determined to come between him and Comi. After battling social media lies and rumors and the

paparazzi Dray and Comi finally find their footing and form a lasting relationship.

As Comi and Dray navigate the complexities of friendship, feelings, and life they discover that

love is as complicated as the game itself- full of victories, heartbreaks, and choices that will

shape who they become.

Incidental Contact is not just a sports romance; it's a journey of self-discovery, resilience and

courage. Comi and Dray's story captures the tension between hope and vulnerability, ambition

and sacrifice and speaks to the hopeless romantics that believe that love conquers all.