Contemporary

Watkins's powerful collection of eleven stories centers on the reckonings of men and women in one Black Texan community.

In the Jim Crow South, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., who can see ghosts, is sent to The Reformatory where boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, while his sister Gloria rallies everyone in Florida to get him out before it's too late.

Nena's ranching family has long been threatened by Anglo settlers from the north pushing into northern Mexico's lands.  But when Nena finds herself in the thick of battle at the dawn of the Mexican-American War, she finds the enemy has a weapon far more frightening than cannons and guns. 

This debut family saga follows five generations of Canadian Indigenous women through a varied viewpoints, including the land that the women live on, as the women journey through their lives and into the Afterlife.

Nineteen-year-old Renee 'Cash' Blackbear has survived the bleak reality of the foster care system but continues to struggle against the discrimination that her Ojibwe background elicits in 1970s Fargo, North Dakota.  When an Ojibwe man is found murdered, and Cash starts to dream of the dead man's life, she teams up with her one friend and guardian, Sheriff Wheaton, to discover the killer.  First in a series.

This collection of original crime stories highlights twenty leading authors of colors, including luminaries such as Tracy Clark, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Gigi Pandian, Jennifer Chow and more.  

Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood is recalled through the voice of Joseph 'Ziggy' Johnson in an imaginative collection of miniatures that capture the legendary denizens that made mid twentieth century Detroit a cultural, economic and political center of African American life.  

Up and coming LA lawyer Olivia Monroe feels too busy to date, but a chance meeting with a handsome stranger changes her mind.  When she learns too late that he's Max Powell, California's hotshot junior senator, she's surprised to find that he's not the white privileged politician she thought he was.  But when they go public with their relationship, Olivia has to cope with the intense scrutiny of her past, her status as a trophy girlfriend, and frank discussions with Max about race.  Olivia and Max know they have something special, but can they survive the spotlight?

On South Dakota's Rosebud Lakota reservation, Virgil Wounded Horse uses his fists to give local families with the sort of vigilante justice that federal courts can't or won't offer.  But when drug dealers encroach onto the reservation and hit too close too home, Virgil discovers a sense of justice might come at a terrible price.  

In Alyssa Cole's unflinching thriller, members of a historically Black Brooklyn neighborhood begin disappearing from their highly desirable brownstone homes, only to be replaced by wealthy White residents.  Longtime Black resident Sydney teams with her new White neighbor Theo, who has secrets of his own, to discover that the horrifying truth behind the disappearances is an all too familiar story of systemic and economic racism.