Sistah Scifi | Bookstore

1st Black bookstore focused on Science Fiction & Fantasy in US validated by ABA

[sistahscifi]

🩸 The question none of the ""prestige horror"" panels ever ask: what happens when the monster is the system?

The Monsters We Know: Black Horror as Resistance brings together @tamikathompson (The Curse of Hester Gardens), @justinckey (The Hospital at the End of the World), moderated by @ayizejamaeverett (Heroes of an Unknown World) for a conversation on what Black horror does that other horror won't touch.

Sistah Scifi is proud to amplify this one, hosted by Frontier Tower and Aunt Lute.

📍 Saturday, July 11 🕑 2PM to 4:30PM PDT 📍 Frontier Tower, San Francisco 👉🏾 Details and RSVP at sistahscifi.com/pages/events

If you're in the Bay, this is not one to sleep on. 🤎

[sistahscifi]

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧 Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Dana is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday in 1976 California when she is yanked across time to the antebellum South, summoned to save the life of a drowning white boy named Rufus. She keeps getting pulled back. Each trip lasts longer, costs more, and carries her deeper into a history that turns out to be her own.

This is the one people hand to anyone who claims the past is over. Butler doesn't let you watch from a safe distance. She makes you live inside the question of survival, kinship, and how much a person endures to exist at all.

Some books you read. This one rearranges something in you.

🎧 Listen through our @Libro.fm partnership at https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781436116961-kindred or borrow free via @libby.app

[sistahscifi]

📚✊🏾 Four Wednesdays in July, four authors, and four books worth clearing your evening for.

July 1 - @tlotlotsamaase on House of Margins. A young writer vanishes from an exclusive residency inside a colonial mansion on Devil's Peak. The only record of what happened is a true crime podcast, and her sister listens to every episode knowing the truth is worse than the story being sold. Horror that sits in your chest long after.

July 15 - @clpolk on The Feywild Job. Saeldian swore off love as a literal magical pact, the source of their power. Then a heist goes sideways, and the crew they're forced to join includes the ex whose heart they broke a decade ago. A cozy fantasy where the real danger is feelings.

July 22 - @clarenceahaynes on The Broken Hearts Agency. Washington DC is unraveling under a ghost plague that leaves people wandering the streets with no memory. The one person tracking it is an empathic PI who feels every heartbreak around her. Orisha spirituality, urban fantasy, and a slow dread underneath the romance.

July 29 - @greg_burnham7 on The Search for Sadiqah. It's 1921. Thirteen-year-old Sadiqah flees the Black Wall Street Massacre with a torn map and two unlikely companions, heading west to find a place that may only exist in legend. History and folklore braided into one quest, carried by a girl who turns out to be far more than she knows.

🗓 Wednesdays in July

⏰ 5PM PST / 8PM EST

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

[sistahscifi]

📚 Happy pub day, Siblings. THE FEYWILD JOB by @clpolk is out today.

Saeldian doesn't fall in love. Not because they're guarded, but because their magic depends on it. Give your heart away and you lose your power. So they keep things simple. Heists, no strings, a trail of broken hearts behind them. Then a job comes along that's too good to pass up. Steal a gem called the Kiss of Enduring Love and carry it into the Feywild. The complication isn't the magic or the danger. It's Kell. The bard on the crew. The ex they walked away from years ago, after a kiss turned into a betrayal.

A heist romance set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, from the author of the Kingston Cycle.

📚 Grab your copy at www.sistahscifi.com or request it from your favorite #library.

[sistahscifi]

🗓️✊🏾 Three Saturdays. Three rooms worth being in. July is stacked, Siblings. 🩸 July 11 | The Monsters We Know: Black Horror as Resistance

Frontier Tower, San Francisco | 2PM to 4:30PM PDT

@tamikathompson and @justinckey on Black horror as truth-telling, survival, and resistance. Moderated by @ayizejamaeverett. 📚 July 18 | A Is for Afrofuturism

West Oakland Public Library | 3:30PM to 4:45PM PDT | FREE

@isisasare and @angeladalton_author in conversation on Afrofuturism at the West Oakland Library. Made possible through the Oakland Literacy Coalition. 🌌 July 25 | Octavia's Legacy: Imagining the Futures She Made Possible

Berkeley Public Library | 2PM to 3:30PM PDT

@besteadwell, Duane Horton, and Imani Sims on the worlds Octavia Butler opened up. And who's building in them now. Organized by Aunt Lute Books.

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

[sistahscifi]

🎧 Audiobook of the Week🎧 The King Must Die by Kemi Ashing-Giwa.

Fen has spent her whole life surviving an empire that killed her family. When the Sovereign executes her fathers and marks her for the same fate, she runs. What she finds at the end of that road is messier than any rebellion she imagined.

This one is a slow build that earns every moment. Found family forged under pressure. A world that is starving and still full of beauty. Politics that make you question every side. Kemi Ashing-Giwa builds worlds that feel lived in, and this audiobook drops you straight into the middle of one.

👉🏾 Listen through our @Libro.fm partnership at https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781668154366-the-king-must-die or borrow free via @libby.app

📚 Can't get enough? Grab the print edition at www.sistahscifi.com or request it from your favorite #library.

[sistahscifi]

✨Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine Spotlight ✨

Now available in the Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine at @naamnw

📚 Africa Risen

Winner of the 2023 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology and the 2023 Locus Award for Best Anthology, Africa Risen is a landmark collection edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight.

This extraordinary anthology features thirty-two original stories showcasing the brilliance, breadth, and power of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora. From ancestor-guided supercomputers to child robots on dying planets to descendants of rain goddesses discovering their inheritance, these stories are bold, imaginative, and unforgettable.

A 2023 NAACP Image Award nominee, a 2023 British Fantasy Award nominee, and an NPR and Book Riot Best of the Year pick, Africa Risen continues the legacy of the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthology series and reminds us that Africa is not rising—it’s already here.

📍 Stop by the Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine at @naamnw and grab your copy today.

[sistahscifi]

🎨📚 Join us for the next meeting of the Sistah Scifi Graphic Novel Club!

We're discussing HoverGirls by the incredible Geneva Bowers, the WEBTOON sensation turned gorgeous graphic novel featuring magical girls, supernatural powers, family bonds, and monsters threatening an entire city.

✨ Meet cousins Jalissa and Kim Vasquez as they navigate a new city, newfound powers, and the challenges of becoming heroes when fame, friendship, and destiny collide.

📅 Saturday, June 27, 2026 ⏰ 4:00 PM PT / 7:00 PM ET 📍 Online

Whether you're a longtime comics fan or new to graphic novels, we'd love to have you join the conversation!

Register today and read along with us!

🔗 www.sistahscifi.com/pages/events

Please join the Fabulize book channel on Discord for updates and communication: https://discord.gg/KRqAcSjfq

Tag your graphic novel-loving friends and tell us: What was your favorite magical girl story growing up?

[sistahscifi]

📚🌌 Sometimes you need strange fiction to show you the truth.

The best speculative novels don't run from reality. They drag it into the light and make you look. Vaishnavi Patel pulled these together in the New York Times, and every one uses the impossible to expose something very real.

The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin. New York's five boroughs come alive as people, and the rot trying to swallow the city wears the face of bigotry itself.

The Dream Hotel, @lailawrites. An algorithm reads Sara's dreams and decides she's about to commit a crime. She hasn't. She gets detained anyway. Surveillance fiction that lands a little too close.

Lakewood, Megan Giddings. A young Black woman takes a job that's too good to be true: free housing, full coverage, secret medical research. The horror here isn't invented. It has a history.

Three books that hold a mirror to now. 🤎

📚 Grab your copies at www.sistahscifi.com, our Bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/SistahScifi, or on audio through @Libro.fm.

You can also request them from your favorite #library. Which one are you reading first? 👇🏾

[sistahscifi]

🌟 Starred and sealed.

Season of the Serpent just landed its first trade review, and Kirkus made it a star. That's the close of The Nameless Republic trilogy from @suyidavies, and the verdict is "a shattering, transformative conclusion." The continent is split, the islands have sunk, and Bassa is gone. What's left is the season of serpents. Lilong, Danso, and Esheme each have to choose a side or fall with the old world.

Two stars from Kirkus across this trilogy now. The kind of send-off this story earned.

Out August 11. Preorder yours at www.sistahscifi.com or ask your favorite #library to stock it. ✊🏾

[sistahscifi]

🍷 Tonight, Siblings. Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesday is sinking into Year of the Mer.

@ellethevillain joins us to talk Year of the Mer, a dark sapphic reimagining of The Little Mermaid that has zero interest in the happily ever after.

Arielle got her fairy tale ending. Her granddaughter Yemi inherits the wreckage. A father assassinated, a mother dying of a poisoned wound, a kingdom that never thanked her family for what it cost them. Then the throne gets ripped away, and the only one left to bargain with is the sea witch. Legacy, fury, and what you'll trade for vengeance. We're getting into all of it tonight.

Grab a glass and pull up. Which deal would you make if the throne was yours to take back?

🗓 Tonight, Wednesday June 24

⏰ 5PM PST / 8PM EST

👉🏾 Register at sistahscifi.com/pages/events

[sistahscifi]

📚✨ Happy Pub Day to The Broken Hearts Agency by @clarenceahaynes!

Linda Villanueva is a queer private investigator with a gift for reading heartache. Literally. She can sense other people's pain, and she's built a whole mystical detective agency around it. But while helping a devastated client navigate a ghost-invaded DC, Linda starts picking up on something darker: people losing their memories, wandering the streets in a daze, and a force that seems to be feeding on desire itself.

Urban fantasy. Glam horror. A queer detective who sees through you before you open your mouth. This is the kind of story that doesn't let you put it down quietly.

Grab your copy at www.sistahscifi.com or request it from your favorite #library. 🛒

[sistahscifi]

🌌✨ June 22 hits different in the Sistah Scifi universe.

Today we celebrate two visionaries who share more than a birthday.

@octaviaebutler was born on this day in 1947. The Godmother of Afrofuturism. The first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. The author who looked at the future and wrote Black people into it like we always belonged there.

And @ibizoboi, born June 22, 1977. New York Times Bestselling Author. National Book Award finalist. The writer who gave us American Street, Pride, Punching the Air, and Star Child — a love letter in poems and prose to Octavia herself.

Same date. Different eras. One lineage.

Pull up and celebrate with us. 🤎

📚 Browse their titles at www.sistahscifi.com or request them from your favorite #library.

[sistahscifi]

🎉 Happy Birthday, @tracydeonn.

Legendborn took Arthurian legend and turned it inside out. Put a Black girl from North Carolina at the center of it. Built an entirely original magic system around her grief, her ancestry, and her power. The New York Times bestseller list noticed. Then Bloodmarked hit #1 too. Then Oathbound.

Three books in the Legendborn Cycle. Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Award. Ignyte Award for Best Young Adult Novel. A Collector's Edition out this spring. A fourth novel confirmed.

The full Legendborn Cycle is at Sistah Scifi, including signed editions. 📚

👉🏾 Shop at www.sistahscifi.com

[sistahscifi]

✊🏾 Freedom has always lived in our stories. This Juneteenth, five reads that hit different. Past, present, future. All liberation.

📖 Ours by @phillipbw_author A conjurer destroys plantations and builds a hidden free Black town. But what does freedom really cost?

📖 Blood Slaves by @markusredmond The enslaved free themselves 150 years before the Civil War. Supernatural horror meets alternate history.

📖 Caramelle & Carmilla by @vampyrevamp & Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Two vampires seek sanctuary at an Underground Railroad way station. Gothic horror. Black women's resilience.

📖 We Will Rise Again edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz & Malka Older Speculative fiction about protest, solidarity, and the futures we build. NK Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, adrienne maree brown, and more.

📖 The Dream Hotel by @lailawrites Detained for crimes not yet committed. A fight for freedom in a near-future surveillance state. Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Read boldly. Read free. 🤎

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

[sistahscifi]

✨ Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine Spotlight ✨

Now available in the Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine at @206langston and @naamnw

📚 SIGNED Kinning (Book 2 of the Everfair Duology) by Nisi Shawl

The powerful sequel to Everfair, continuing a sweeping alternate history where African resistance reshapes the world.

In this imaginative steampunk-inspired saga, the independent nation of Everfair faces new challenges after the Great War. As leaders compete for the future of their young country, others travel the world spreading a mysterious empathy-generating fungus meant to inspire solidarity, revolution, and equality.

But outside forces—and tensions within Everfair itself—threaten everything the nation was built to represent.

✨ Signed via bookplate.

📍Stop by and grab your copy from the Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machine today!

[sistahscifi]

🍷 Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesdays🍷

Same energy, different conversations.

Mayhem and the Mortal by Shanora Williams. A mortal hires a sorcerer assassin to break her sister's curse. Romantasy with grit and an ending that wrecks you.

The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson. A debut that flips the haunted house. A mother fights gun violence and something older stalking the projects.

You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom by Vincent Tirado. One of you is a demon. Find them before you're all damned. Knives Out meets the Exorcist.

🍷 Sistah Scifi Wine Down Wednesdays🍷

Same energy, different conversations.

Mayhem and the Mortal by @reallyshanora. A mortal hires a sorcerer assassin to break her sister's curse. Romantasy with grit and an ending that wrecks you.

The Curse of Hester Gardens by @tamikathompson. A debut that flips the haunted house. A mother fights gun violence and something older stalking the projects.

You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom by @v_e_tirado. One of you is a demon. Find them before you're all damned. Knives Out meets the Exorcist.

Pull up. 🤎