Sheree Renée Thomas
BLACK PANTHER:
Panther's Rage
An all-new re-imagining of the legendary Black Panther comics arc, Panther’s Rage, from an award-winning author.
T’Challa, the Black Panther, returns to Wakanda to show Monica Lynne his home. But he finds violence in the streets, discontent brewing in his people, and the name Killmonger following him everywhere he goes. When a revered storyteller—and T’Challa’s mentor—is murdered, he uncovers the first threads of a growing rebellion that threatens to engulf his beloved Wakanda.
Wakanda’s high-tech king must travel the savannah, into the deepest jungles and up the snow-topped mountains of his homeland in this prose adaptation of the landmark comics series by Don McGregor, Rich Buckler and Billy Graham. Discover the life and culture of the Wakandans, and see T’Challa channel the strength of his ancient bloodline to take out foes such as Venomm, Malice and the fearsome Erik Killmonger!
THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN:
And Other Stories of Dirty Computer
singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, futurist, and worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe and an esteemed cohort of collaborating writers bring to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of her critically acclaimed album, exploring how different threads of liberation -- queerness, race, gender plurality and love—become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape ... and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms.
AFRICA RISEN:
A New Era of Speculative Fiction
Sleeping under the Tree of Life evokes the realm of ancestral knowledge with a deep respect for the natural world, a love of language, and an invitation—for survival, and asks: Who survives without being transformed? Beneath luminous layers of imagery and mythology, science and nature, fantasy and the recounting of history, is the grace and tenderness of a poet's heart, the unwavering gaze of an oracle's vision, and the dreamlike whimsy of a storyteller's mind. Hope, love, and hard truths spring from these pages of a writer whose imagination conjures an unforgettable journey. Readers enter these poems and stories the way some souls enter church, a quiet garden, or a stand of trees—for rest, for the blessing of silence and reverie, for beauty if not redemption.
TROUBLE THE WATERS:
Tales From the Deep Blue
Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue gathers the tidal force of bestselling, renowned writers from Lagos to New Orleans, Memphis to Copenhagen, Northern Ireland and London, offering extraordinary speculative fiction tales of ancient waters in all its myriad forms. Meet techno savvy water spirits, bayou saints and sirens, robots and river rootwomen, a pod of joyful space whales, and a castle of water-born terrors and mysteries. Including work by Nalo Hopkinson, Jaquira Diaz, Andrea Hairston, Linda D. Addison, Rion Amilcar Scott, Marie Vibbert, Maurice Broaddus, and other breakout beautiful voices, these stories and poems celebrate the most vital of elemental forces, water.
"Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue's confluence of stories range from the salt-edged to freshwater clear. The anthology's powerful water-buoyed voices represent international understandings of water's multiple mythos, its futures possible, and its pasts unforgotten. No matter where you enter these stories, you will not leave unchanged; and when you return, you may find the stories themselves have transformed as well. A fantastic collection."
— Fran Wilde
Nebula-award winning author of Riverland and Updraft
BLACK PANTHER:
Tales of Wakanda
T’Challa faces the gods of his parents. Vampires stalk Shuri and a Dora Milaje in voodoo-laced New Orleans. Erik Killmonger grapples with racism, Russian spies, and his own origins. Eighteen brand-new tales of Wakanda, its people, and its legacy.
The first mainstream superhero of African descent, the Black Panther has attracted readers of all races and colors who see in the King of Wakanda reflections of themselves. Storytellers from across the African Diaspora—some already literary legends, others who are rising stars—have created for this collection original works inspired by the world of the Panther and its inhabitants. With guest stars including Storm, Monica Rambeau, Namor, and Jericho Drumm, these are stories of yesterday and today, of science and magic, of faith and love.
These are the tales of a king and his country. These are the legends whispered in the jungle, myths of the unconquered men and women and the land they love.
These are the Tales of Wakanda.
NINE BAR BLUES:
Stories from an Ancient Future
Sheree Renée Thomas is a two-headed woman, one crown, earthbound, rooted in the Mississippi Delta and the New Weird South, the other spinning far off into space. And if music is the embedded memory of a culture, then her remarkable fiction collection is its excavated soul. Individually, these tales explore nearly every genre of music that has formed the heart of American culture, but their shared song is the story of the blues. Thomas’s writing haunts and mesmerizes you. Her imagination takes you down through it like the best traditional blues song, then opens you up again, delivering you into that mysterious, transcendental space that is the ninth bar.
SLEEPING UNDER
THE TREE OF LIFE
Sleeping under the Tree of Life evokes the realm of ancestral knowledge with a deep respect for the natural world, a love of language, and an invitation—for survival, and asks: Who survives without being transformed? Beneath luminous layers of imagery and mythology, science and nature, fantasy and the recounting of history, is the grace and tenderness of a poet's heart, the unwavering gaze of an oracle's vision, and the dreamlike whimsy of a storyteller's mind. Hope, love, and hard truths spring from these pages of a writer whose imagination conjures an unforgettable journey. Readers enter these poems and stories the way some souls enter church, a quiet garden, or a stand of trees—for rest, for the blessing of silence and reverie, for beauty if not redemption.
SHOTGUN LULLABIES
In this first collection of the stories and poetry, memory is the only force strong enough to counter the terrors of a scarred and forgetful world.
Thomas' characters are people scraping by in slave quarters and institutional margins, people in search of freedom and transformation who come face to face with apocalyptic powers.
Thrown back on their wits and their lore, they turn to unexpected sources to make sense of things: to girl-children, old women, old skills, old magic and forgotten ties of kinship with the natural world.
Rooted in the Mississippi Delta, Thomas' language is the stuff of life and the struggle to call things by their true names. It reaches through time in search of the transformation that will allow us to survive diaspora with memory and soul intact. These shotgun lullabies puncture the walls between us and our past, the people and their birthright.
DARK MATTER:
A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
Like many good book titles, this one has more than one meaning. “Dark matter“ in astronomy makes up most of the mass of the universe but is undetectable except by the effects of its gravity.
“Like dark matter,“ Ms. Thomas wrote in the introduction to her book, “the contributions of black writers to the genre have not been directly observed or fully explored.“ And in an interview she gave the title a third meaning: “When I think in general of the black experience here, blacks are like dark matter. They've always been in this country, but yet there's been a conscientious effort not to see our contribution.“
DARK MATTER:
Reading the Bones
Dark Matter is the first and only series to bring together the works of black SF and fantasy writers. The first volume was featured in the New York Times, which named it a Notable Book of the Year.