Sistah Scifi | Bookstore

🎧 Three sisters in DC. All of them conjurers. None of them convinced the world has earned their magic.

Chocolate Chip City by @besteadwell follows Jasmine, a heartbroken baker whose pastries nobody in the neighborhood can afford anymore. Ella, a bodyworker whose hands keep rich white clients loose. And Layla, the youngest, fighting for affordable housing in a district being priced out block by block.

Then their mother tells them about her vision. Princes, true love, revolution. The sisters roll their eyes. The prophecy starts unfolding anyway.

Practical Magic meets Black Cake, set in a Chocolate City that developers keep trying to rewrite. Black love, Black queer joy, and inherited power that nobody knows quite what to do with yet.

The question the book keeps asking: what do you owe a place that is being sold out from under you?

👉🏾 Listen through our Libro.fm partnership: libro.fm/audiobooks/9798318524929?bookshop=sistahscifi Or borrow free through Libby.app

🌌 Book Riot went looking for YA fantasy where the worldbuilding actually holds up. Akata Witch and Iron Cast both made the cut.

Akata Witch by @nnediokorafor drops you into a Nigeria running on its own rules. Sunny is albino, American born, and only just learning she belongs to the Leopard People. Giant red grasshoppers. Masquerades. A script that shifts meaning depending on who reads it. None of that magic was invented for the page. It comes out of West African cosmology people actually live inside.

Iron Cast by @thedestinysoria puts you in Boston, 1919, weeks before Prohibition. Hemopaths pull illusions out of poetry and music, and the city has made that a crime. They perform anyway, in an underground club, one raid away from an asylum built to hold them.

Worldbuilding usually gets talked about like set dressing. These two build from something real. One from a cosmology that was never fiction to begin with. One from a stretch of Boston history the postcards leave out.

👉🏾 Read the full list from Book Riot here: https://bookriot.com/ya-fantasy-with-exceptional-worldbuilding/

📚 Both are on the shelf at www.sistahscifi.com, or request them from your favorite library.

🎂 Happy birthday, @cadwellturnbull.

Born August 12 in Maryland, raised in St. Thomas. The Virgin Islands sit at the center of this work, never at the edge of it. The Lesson dropped an alien occupation onto home ground and asked what it costs to be a good neighbor when someone else holds all the power. That debut took the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Award.

Then came the Convergence Saga. Book one belonged to the people. Book two to the monsters. Book three, A Ruin, Great and Free, belongs to the gods.

Monsters stepped out of hiding to be seen. The world answered by hunting them. Inside a settlement called Moon, survivors try to build something that holds while gods above them move pieces on a board nobody agreed to play.

Who gets to be safe, and who decides. That is the question this whole series keeps circling.

Signed copies of the finale are on the site.

🎂 Happy birthday to @besteadwell.

Chocolate Chip City is the debut novel, and it follows three Black sisters in Washington DC who are conjurers, though none of them are convinced the world has earned their magic.

Jasmine bakes pastries nobody in the city wants to buy. Ella does bodywork for rich white clients. Layla organizes for affordable housing in a district getting priced out from under everybody in it. Then their mother tells them about a vision. Princes, true love, revolution.

What holds us is where the magic lives. Not in some far off realm. In the kitchen, in the family, in Black queer love, in the fight over who gets to stay in their own city. 🤎

Happy birthday, Be. Enjoy every bit of it.

📚 Two pub days landed on the same Tuesday.

🌌 Season of the Serpent by @suyidavies closes out The Nameless Republic. Bassa has fallen. The islands are under water. What is left of Oon has to pick a side before a third great war picks for them. Three books of West African inspired epic fantasy have been building toward this, and the ending does not soften anything.

🌌 The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass by @leslyepenelope opens in December 1999 with Y2K closing in. Zahara is the only person alive who remembers her twin sister. Not their mother. Not the police. Nobody. She finds proof Annica was real and starts pulling the thread anyway.

An empire deciding what comes after it, and a woman refusing to let her sister be erased from the record. Both of these are about who gets remembered and who does the remembering.

Published by @orbitbooks_us and @redhookbooks_us.

📚 Grab your copies at www.sistahscifi.com or request them from your favorite #library.

📚 Five books to put money on before they land.

Preorder numbers decide print runs and shelf space. That math is the whole reason we push these.

🦖 THE BIG BAD BOOK OF KAIJU (Sept 22) 25 original stories about monsters big enough to flatten a city. Tananarive Due, Tobi Ogundiran, Maurice Broaddus, Linda D. Addison, and Jamal Hodge are all in the lineup.

🔥 FORGED IN FIYAH (Sept 29) Eighteen stories marking ten years of FIYAH Magazine, edited by DaVaun Sanders. Genre veterans sitting next to writers most readers have not met yet.

🦉 CHILDREN OF OWL (Oct 6) Darcie Little Badger returns with three Lipan Apache cousins, a ghost after justice, and a monster headed for their trailer park. Comics pages run through the whole book.

🕯 LOVE, WITCHES, AND WAHALA (Nov 17) Christine Cowan's debut. A Nigerian witch, an ancient family curse, and a love potion that ends up in the puff puff by mistake.

🌑 BLACK ARTS (Sept 8) Megan Giddings' first story collection. Thirteen stories where marriages come apart, ghosts get flirty, and artists go looking for a voice on the other side.

Siblings, preorders are how Black and Indigenous speculative fiction reaches the lists it keeps getting left off of.

🎧 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.