Sistah Scifi | Bookstore

🎧 A young African writer disappears. The house she disappeared into gets a podcast deal.

HOUSE OF MARGINS by @tlotlotsamaase is out now from @erewhonbooks, and the audiobook is live on Libro.fm.

Anaya Sebeya wins a spot at an exclusive writing residency inside a colonial mansion on the slopes of Devil's Peak. Five emerging writers, one grand prize, one building that has been listening for a very long time. Anaya never comes home. Her sister Ranewa gets a sensationalized true crime series instead of answers, and every episode drags her closer to a version of events far worse than the one she was sold.

🌑 Tsamaase takes the haunted house and turns it on what actually does the haunting. The mansion is only the obvious ghost. Underneath it sits a true crime industry that turns missing Black women into a listening habit, and a publishing culture that keeps treating young African writers like they need supervising.

Womb City readers already know the register. This one is gothic, and it is patient.

🎧 Listen through our Libro.fm partnership at libro.fm/audiobooks/9798899741609?bookshop=sistahscifi or borrow free via Libby.app

📚 Print copies at sistahscifi.com/products/house-of-margins

📚 Ten years ago, a group of children's book creators looked at what publishing kept leaving out and built their own thing anyway.

The Social Justice Children's Book Fair started as a one time gathering after the 2016 election. It is now an annual event pulling 500+ people and 50+ creators and organizations, with its own book award and year round programming alongside [@BayAreaBookFest].

Last year, working with @theconsciouskid and the Juvenile Justice Literacy Project, they moved 4,000 books into Bay Area schools, the San Quentin literacy project, and tribal libraries.

Siblings, we know exactly what that takes. Independent book spaces do not get handed to anybody. You build them and your people keep them standing.

✊🏾 Year ten is bigger: more creators, more families, and a mentorship program for the next generation of storytellers.

🍷🩸 Tonight we pull up with @markusredmond.

Blood Rising is book two of The Blood Saga, and it opens after the Barrow plantation has already fallen. Kwadzo Okoro leads the Ramanga Tribe now. The Crimson Plantation is free ground, held by formerly enslaved Africans and the Native people who stood with them.

But freedom taken by force has to be held by force. The Crabtrees are organizing the region to strike back. Penelope Knudsen walks in daylight on Ramangan blood. And the sharpest threat is coming from inside the house: Rafazi, whose blood started the rebellion and who has no intention of taking orders from what he made.

Bring a question for the room. Here's ours: when liberation is won through violence, who gets to decide when it stops?

🗓 Wednesday, August 5 ⏰ 5PM PST / 8PM EST 📍 Online

Blood Rising arrives August 25 from Dafina and preorder is open. Blood Slaves is on the shelf now if you want to walk in caught up.

🌌 Seattle, LANGSTON is opening the portal again.

The second annual Seattle Black Nerd Festival takes over the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute August 28 to 30. This year's theme is Black Nerd Magic, the kind that lives in our curiosity and our worldbuilding, in every future we refuse to be written out of.

Three days of panels, workshops, gaming, cosplay, live music, and a marketplace stocked by Black creators. The Brown Sugar Fantasy Jam lands on Saturday.

Black nerds have always been here. Building the worlds, showing up in full costume, holding the door open for whoever comes next. LANGSTON has anchored Seattle's Black arts community for over 50 years, and handing that building over to a weekend of unapologetic nerding out is the whole point.

🗓 Friday August 28 to Sunday August 30

📍 Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, 104 17th Ave S, Seattle

🎟 Free with RSVP at seattle-black-nerd-festival-2026.eventbrite.com

Hosted by @206langston. The schedule drops soon, so follow @seattleblacknerdfest to catch it.

🗓 August, Siblings. Here is where we are gathering.

🍷 Wine Down Wednesday, Wed Aug 5, 5PM PST / 8PM EST @markusredmond joins us for BLOOD RISING, book two of The Blood Saga. Vampires on a plantation, and the steady argument underneath it that the real monsters were never the ones who needed blood to live. The book arrives August 25 from Dafina, so this is an early seat at the table.

🍷 Wine Down Wednesday, Wed Aug 12, 5PM PST / 8PM EST @gwendolynparadice discusses THE DIVINING SEASON with cohost @fromthemixedupdesk. Larissa, Texas. Native girls going missing. An eleven year old who can hear her ancestors and cannot make sense of the living. Published by Aunt Lute Books, and it does not look away from what it is about.

📚 D.E.A.R. Drop Everything and Read, Sat Aug 15, 4 to 7PM Chapter 510, 546 9th St, Oakland Presented by @divineradianceoakland alongside the @oaklitcoalition, @oaklibrary, @chapter510, and us. Bring a book. Bring your people. Read in a room full of readers.

🌍 Afrofuturism Trip to Ghana, Aug 17 to 25 Nine days in Accra. Ten spots only.

📖 Graphic Novel Club, Sun Aug 30, 4PM PST SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN by @geneluenyang, art by Gurihiru. A 1940s radio serial rebuilt into a story about who gets counted as American and who decides.

🌌 Patternist community read continues: CLAY'S ARK Octavia E. Butler, book three. Four weeks, four sections, running on Goodreads with quotes and giveaways along the way.

✨ Black Futures Book Club x Langston, Mon Aug 31, 6 to 7:30PM 104 17th Ave S, Seattle AS THE EARTH DREAMS, edited by Terese Mason Pierre. Ten Black Canadian writers on growth, futurity and joy. House of Anansi Press.

Eight gatherings in one month. Some online, some in a room, one on another continent. All of them the same work.

👉🏾 Register now at sistahscifi.com/pages/events

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧

RING SHOUT by @pdjeliclark takes the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and gives it teeth, claws, and a hunger fed by hatred.

In 1920s Georgia, Maryse Boudreaux and a crew of resistance fighters hunt the monsters hiding beneath those white robes. With a blade forged from ancestral power, Maryse must face what violence leaves behind and decide what it will take to keep that violence from swallowing the world.

This is Black historical horror where folklore becomes a weapon and survival demands more than simply staying alive.

@im.angelabassett said what she said. 🎬

"You do not need to prove you belong somewhere. The moment you stop asking and start declaring it, the room reorganizes itself around you."

Black women have never needed permission to build worlds. On the page or off it. Full conviction. Full weight. No shrinking.

🍷 Tonight, pull up with your Sistah Scifi Siblings.

Join us for Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesday as @greg_burnham7 discusses The Search for Sadiqah, published by Rosarium Publishing.

Come through for a conversation on ancestral memory, history, and the search for home.

🗓 Tonight, Wednesday, July 29⏰ 5 PM PST / 8 PM EST📍 Live online at sistahscifi.com

✨ Black history, still being written.

Award-winning author @tananarivedue, author of The Reformatory, stands at the Obama Presidential Center wearing the Sistah Scifi Black Authors List Shirt, carrying a lineage of Black speculative storytelling into the frame.

The Center preserves the story of the first Black presidency while looking toward the communities and generations still shaping this country. And there is something fitting about seeing one of our essential speculative writers standing here, wearing the names of Black authors who have spent decades imagining what could come next.

📚 What’s your Sunday ritual?

Our founder, @isisasare, loves spending Sundays at home, immersed in a good book surrounded by plants🪴Most of these are from @ramsessartgarden.

This Sunday’s selection is DELICIOUS MONSTERS by @lisellesambury because the main character, Daisy, is plant mom goals. Of course, the ghosts and the mysterious mansion might make her quiet escape slightly more complicated.

If you love audiobooks too, eligible Spotify Premium plans include monthly audiobook listening hours at no additional cost. And when you decide you need the physical copy, Spotify now links directly to Bookshop.org for book purchases. Make sure Sistah Scifi, or another indie bookstore you love, is selected as your preferred bookstore. 📖

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧

This week’s audiobook pick is WHEN THE RECKONING COMES by @latanya_mcqueen.

When Mira returns home for a wedding held on a former plantation, celebration gives way to something far more sinister. The land remembers what happened there. So do the dead.

This Southern Gothic horror confronts the violence hidden beneath manufactured nostalgia and the cost of turning Black suffering into spectacle. Kara Young’s narration pulls every buried secret, fractured friendship, and gathering shadow painfully close.

What happens when escape changes the body, but freedom still demands a fight?

This month, the Black Futures Book Club is reading SORROWLAND by @rivers.solomon, a fierce work of speculative fiction about transformation, survival, inherited violence, and the systems that refuse to release their hold.

Join Sistah Scifi and LANGSTON for a virtual conversation about the ways Solomon turns the monstrous into a language of resistance, and what it means to build a future beyond the world that harmed you.

📅 Monday, July 27 ⏰ 6:00 PM 📍 Virtual

🍷 Tonight, we're pulling up with @clarenceahaynes for Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesday.

THE BROKEN HEARTS AGENCY drops us into a Washington, DC already reeling from a ghost invasion. Linda Villanueva runs a mystical detective agency for people carrying real heartbreak, and she can feel every bit of it. Her newest case starts small, a distraught client, a bad breakup. It ends somewhere much darker, with DC residents losing their memories and wandering the streets while something feeds on what's left of their desire.

Spicy, seductive, a little unhinged in the best way. This is urban fantasy that asks what we give up to feel safe, and what it costs to get it back. What would you sacrifice to protect the people you love?

⏰ Tonight, 5PM PST / 8PM EST 📍 Virtual 👉🏾 Register at sistahscifi.com/pages/events

Your sister. The world. You only get to save one. 🌌

The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass by @leslyepenelope is coming for the readers who know love can be both the thing that saves us and the thing that breaks us open.

Zahara Douglass has an impossible choice ahead. Save her sister, or doom the world.

A story of sacrifice, survival, and what it costs to choose your people when the stakes are everything.

✨ @dangerouswomeninc calls The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays a SFF mystery romance. And then asks the question nobody else is asking: why does everyone want to know if the mystery was hard to write, but nobody asks about the romance?

This is bigger than one book. This is about the border guards and keep-out signs around genre. The ones that say science fiction lives over here. Romance lives over there. Mystery gets a seat at the literary table. Romance gets a side eye.

Andrea has been crossing those boundaries since childhood. A Black girl growing up in 1950s Pittsburgh, headed for physics and mathematics, told to enter any realm that intrigued her. A weeping willow tree at age six. A playwright by college. A novelist by way of Octavia Butler and Clarion West. A career built on ignoring every sign that said stay in your lane.

The result is a novel that sits in the intersection of three genres and refuses to pick one. The way the best stories always do.

📖 Read the full article at https://crimereads.com/andrea-hairston-on-crossing-genres-science-fiction-and-taking-romance-seriously/

📚 Flyers went up across West Oakland this week.We spent the day getting the word out for tomorrow's A is for Afrofuturism Family Storytime.

The blue house at De Fremery Park. The halls at KIPP Bridge. The West Oakland Public Library where we'll gather.

Afrofuturism in the communities it's for.

Tomorrow @isisasare and children's author @angeladalton_author sit down with the little ones for an afternoon of books, wonder, and Black futures. In partnership with the Oakland Literacy Coalition as part of Oakland is a Reading Town, made possible through an Oakland Literacy Coalition microgrant.

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧

An Unkindness of Ghosts by @rivers.solomon is set on the HSS Matilda, a generation ship organized like the antebellum South. Aster works the lowdeck slums, gets called ogre and freak by people who've never once tried to understand her, and starts digging into what really happened to her mother. What she finds threatens to blow the whole ship's order apart.