5 Books by Scribente Authors for your Summer Reading List

New Book Releases from our Scribente Community

Happy Summer Everyone!

This is a big travel week for many, so we’re hitting your inboxes with some book recommendations from our incredible Scribente community. Writers from our community have been busy these last few months and several have published incredible books that you can add to your summer reading list.

We have plenty of recommendations on our Bookshop.org storefront, but scroll on through and we’ll provide links to all of them below.

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Crazy As Hell: The Best Little Guide to Black History by V. Efua Prince and Hoke S. Glover

V. Efua Prince has been attending Scribente Maternum retreats since our inaugural in-person retreat in Baltimore in 2022. And we can tell you, she is a prolific writer-mom. We also learned the Pacific Northwest Retreat in 2023 that she never gets writer’s block, and it shows because Crazy As Hell is not her only book release this summer as her newest book Kin: Practically True Stories will be published on August 27th!

More about Crazy as Hell

A refreshing, insightful, sacrilegious take on African American history, Crazy as Hell explores the site of America's greatest contradictions. The notables of this book are the runaways and the rebels, the badass and funky, the activists and the inmates--from Harriet Tubman, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali to B'rer Rabbit, Single Mamas, and Wakandans--but are they crazy as hell, or do they simply defy the expectations designated for being Black in America?

More about Kin

Kin is a story and a celebration of Black womanhood, of resistance, and of perseverance--while simultaneously an indictment of American history. Kin is a tree--alive in places, broken in others--that offers shelter for women seeking respite in the midst of family-making. This tree depicts family grafted together by blood, law, or choice; its stories are voiced through blues-infused poetry, one-act plays, oral history, and reportage that are combined to form an orchestra of Black history and re-memory.

Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women by Maggie Mertens

Maggie attended our 2023 Pacific Northwest retreat and, has since, become a Scribente Maternum powerhouse. We shared some of Maggie’s reflections on writing a book as a mom in the post How I Spent My Book Advance. Maggie has been incredibly prolific in the sports-writing sphere and posts regularly at My So-Called Feminist Life by Maggie Mertens on Substack. You can also see Maggie in-person as she’s currently on book tour! Follow her on Instagram for those updates as well as her hot takes on women’s sports.

More on Better Faster Farther:

Despite women proving their abilities on the track time and again, men in the medical establishment, media, and athletic associations have fought to keep women (or at least white women) fragile--and sometimes literally tried to push them out of the race (see Kathrine Switzer, Boston Marathon, 1967). Yet before there were running shoes for women, they ran barefoot or in nursing shoes. They ran without sports bras, which weren't invented until 1977, or disguised as men. They faced down doctors who put them on bed rest and newspaper reports that said women collapsed if they ran a mere eight hundred meters, just two laps around the track. Still today, women face relentless attention to their bodies: Is she too strong, too masculine? Is she even really a woman?

Mertens transports us from that first boundary-breaking marathon in Greece, 1896, to the earliest "official" women's races of the twentieth century to today's most intense ultramarathons, in which women are setting all-out records, even against men.

Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj

There is nothing more timely than 2022 retreat facilitator and Palestinian-American author, Susan Muaddi Darraj, that centers the Palestinian immigrant experience. The book has received critical acclaim and has topped recommendation lists. We are so grateful to have Susan in our orbit.

More about Behind You Is the Sea

Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families--the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars--Palestinian immigrants who've all found a different welcome in America.

Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose own family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for "dishonoring" their name. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.

Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

At our 2023 retreat, Kimberly King Parsons facilitated a workshop on pushing through writer’s block through playful games. She also shared about how she used such games when she was feeling stuck with her recently published debut novel, We Were the Universe. She was so relatable in showing how to tap into your creativity even in the most stuck moments. We’re so grateful Kim got through her writer’s block because what she produced is a masterpiece of a trippy, horny, funny, and melancholy story of a young mother dealing with the grief of her dead sister. It’s honestly the perfect summer read.

More about We Were the Universe

A young mother, in denial after the death of her sister, navigates the dizzying landscapes of desire, guilt, and grief in this darkly comic, highly anticipated debut novel from Kimberly King Parsons, author of the story collection, Black Light (long-listed for the National Book Award).

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They'll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she's lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and--most heartbreaking of all--her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.

When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine--long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother's phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit's mind, she's reminiscing about the band she used to be in--and how they'd go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She's imagining an impossible threesome with her kid's pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?

Room Swept Home by Remica Bingham-Risher

And last but not least, 2022 retreat facilitator and wonderful human and teacher, Remica Bingham-Risher published this extraordinary book of poetry. The topic of the book isn’t light, but we can’t just spend our summer thinking of light things and need to hold the stories of trauma and sadness along with those lighter topics. There’s no better way than to spend one’s summer existing on that spectrum than this beautiful book of poetry.

More about Room Swept Home

Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"--postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery--nine days after birthing her first child. Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living?

Do you have a book coming out? Or do you have stories you’d like us to share on our Substack? Email us at elizabeth@scribentematernum.com and we might share them on the Substack.