📚 In honor of Sinners being ridiculously good, have some book recs with Sinners/Southern Gothic vibes! 🪕🧛🏾‍♂️🎶

📚 The UK Climate Fiction Prize finalists! 📚 🦁 Abi Daré, And So I Roar 🌌 Samantha Harvey, Orbital ⏳ Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time 🦌Roz Dineen, Briefly Very Beautiful 🦢 Téa Obreht, The Morningside #BookSky

SO MUCH has happened in my creative life over the past few weeks. Among them... My short script, TO THE FAMILY OF VERLEAN BANKS is officially on its way to reality with 1019 Productions! 💜 I am both honored & hyped! 😎 Get ready for Black history, civil disobedience, good trouble, & family ties.

SO MUCH has happened in my creative life over the past few weeks. Among them... My short script, TO THE FAMILY OF VERLEAN BANKS is officially on its way to reality with 1019 Productions! 💜 I am both honored & hyped! 😎 Black history, civil disobedience, and good trouble. Stay tuned! #FilmSky

📚 Books you need physical copies of: Censorship and Language 📚 WARNING: "Free speech" & "censorship" are often used as right wing 🐶 whistles. Vet your sources! 📖 Encyclopedia of Censorship, Jonathan Green 🔥 Burn This Book, Toni Morrison 📺 Media Control, Noam Chomsky #BookSky

📖 Books for Women's History Month reading! Feminine Rage 🔥 💄 Grotesque, Natsuo Kirino 👠 Sula, Toni Morrison 🦊 Sacrificial Animals, Kailee Pederson 🔫 Man Hunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin 🍞 The Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh 🍼 The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan #BookSky

📖 Books for Women's History Month reading! Witchy Vibes 🧹 🌲 In The Pines, Mariah Stillbrook 🫒 Clytemnestra: A Novel, Costanza Casati 🖐🏾 Magic For Liars, Sarah Gailey ⚜️ Witches Steeped in Gold, Ciannon Smart 🌳 Forest of Souls, Lori M. Lee 🌿 Modern Divination, Isabel Agajanian #BookSky

Confession time, I didn't have the Libby app. 😭 But I got it earlier this week and the hype is warranted. Libraries are kewl, kids! #BookSky

Are you worried about vaccines? Read "The Doctor Who Fooled the World" by investigative reporter Brian Deer. It traces the history of the infamous (& debunked) "vaccines cause autism" paper & the lawsuits attached to it. It also esamines the monetary incentives of anti-vaccine rhetoric. #BookSky

Dante's Inferno is a fanfic, most of Charles Dickens' and Edgar Allan Poe's work was considered 'popcorn' reading, & Jane Eyre was viewed as a fluffy lady book not to be mentioned alongside 'real literature.' Literary merit is made up. Today's "stupid genre books" are tomorrow's classics. #BookSky

📚 DNFing a Book 📚 If you find yourself thinking, "I'm going to DNF because... - It's too dense - I don't relate - I don't get the cultural references - it depicts a lived experience I'm uncomfortable with" Consider sticking it out OR trying again later instead of DNFing entirely. #BookSky

"The price of culture is a Lie." 📚 On this day 157 years ago, Bl@ck writer and social commentator W.E.B Du Bois was born. How book "The Souls of Black Folk" is a seminal work part memior, part anthropological study, and part sociological commentary on race in America. #BookSky

Friendly reminder that effective boycotts take time! They rely on people losing steam and becoming complacent and falling back into old habits out of routine or convenience. If you want your boycott to work, it can't just be for a day or a week or a month. We're in it for the long haul.

"Why do you only rec 'diverse' books??" 📚 🚩 Black and Asian authors each make up only ~5% of published books 🚩The # of published Indigenous authors is dropping 🚩 Books by and about LGBT people make up over 50% of bans in the US 🚩 Disabled authors aren't even tallied in this conversation #BookSky

📚 Actionable steps to fighting book bans: ✅ Follow & get pointers from the Unite Against Book Bans initiative from the American Library Association. ✅ Attend local town halls and bring this concern to your mayors and city counsel. More below... #BookSky 👇🏾

As a "small blue dot in a red state" & ⚫ woman, I feel the need to address my liberal friends who love when bad things happen to 🟥 states as "karma:" - 🟦 states aren't less r@cist. Most ⚫ people live in the South, & the 🟦 Northeast is also the best example of redlining & defacto s3gregation.

💊 I take psychiatric meds. It was not an easy or thoughtless decision, and took literal years. This is why R0e v W@de was so important. It prioritized privacy between you and your doctor, and without that precedent we're going to be seeing more examples of RFK and Co trying to butt in.

📚 Books you need physical copies of: Actual Science 📚 🪵 The Forest Unseen, David George Haskell 🌌 Cosmos, Carl Sagan ⏳ The Illustrated Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking 🏙️ The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert 🦴 Notes From Deep Time, Helen Gordon

Valentine's Day is my yearly reminder that I am NOT a romance girl. 😂 BUT I do have some faves with romance in them... 🐦 This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone 📼 Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro 🏹 The Sculptor, Scott McCloud 💭 Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa #BookSky

📽️ Bl@ck History Month + Valentine's Day movie recs 💜 💌 Poetic Justice (1993) 🌬️ Waiting to Exhale (1995) 💍 The Best Man (1999) 🏀 Love & Basketball (2000) 💋 Brown Sugar (2002) 🗓️ The Weekend (2018) ❣️ Premature (2019) 👠 Sylvie’s Love (2020) 🧁 From Scratch (2022) 🥖 Rye Lane (2023) #FilmSky

📚 For everyone still hyped up by the Kendrick Lamar performance and rap/hip hop as a socially conscious art form, this book is coming out in a few months! Keep your eyes out 👀 "Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur"

👩🏾‍🏫 The decades-long devaluing of literature, humanities, and social sciences in primary and higher education and the current lack of media (and general) literacy is not a coincidence. It's also not an accident, but that's another post. 💅🏾 Moral of the story: Read books

Hey, artists and writers and musicians feeling weird about doing art with the current state of the world: Let Kendrick Lamar's half-time performance be your motivation that "doing art" and "speaking truth to power" are not mutually exclusive.

📽️ Bl@ck Hist0ry Month in film: Drama edition 🐑 K*ller of Sheep (1978) 🦢 Daughters of the Dust (1991) 👒 The Watermelon Woman (1996) 🥘 Soul Food (1997) 📒 Pariah (2011) 🐚 Moonlight (2016) 🎶 If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) 👸🏾 Miss Juneteenth (2020) 👓 Rustin (2023) 🤲🏾 Nickel Boys (2024) #FilmSky

My horror novel is DONE. 🤯 Cover: approved. Edits: finalized. Manuscript: copyrighted. Trenches: queried. And (most amazingly) cut down to 85k from a 100k first draft thanks to some excellent editing help. Time to sleep 😴 #AuthorSky

📚 Books you need physical copies of: LGBT+ History 📚 👨🏾‍⚖️ From the Closet to the Courtroom, Michael Bronski & Carlos A. Ball 🪨 Stonewall, Martin Duberman 🏳️‍🌈 A Que3r History of the US, Michael Bronski 🏙️ The G@y Metropolis, Charles Kaiser ✊🏾 When We Rise, Cleve Jones 👇🏾 #BookSky

I got one sentence for any publishing house thinking about releasing any kind of anti-open door romance click bait: Read 👏🏾 the 👏🏾 room 👏🏾 #BookSky

Speaking of Black History, my short script TO THE FAMILY OF VERLEAN BANKS is up for a people's choice award! 🤯 If you'd like to support a Black filmmaker this month AND see a criminally under acknowledged piece of history (that happens to be very relevant) give me a vote below! 👇🏾 __🚌💭__ #BlackSky

📚 Things to do this Black History Month in the bookish community that aren't just asking for recs or reading the classics... ✨ Show your algorithm you WANT to hear us ✨ Review & rate OwnVoice books ✨ Subscribe to a Black writer or reviewer ✨ Buy *modern* Black indie & small press authors

📚 Very popular opinion: I don't mind dog-earring book pages, or annotating books, or breaking the spine. These are all indications that a book has not only been read but poured over and enjoyed and thought about and gone back to again and again. The things we love get worn down, and that's okay. 📖

📚 This is my friendly reminder and official invitation to ALL readers to support Black books year-round, not just in February. And if you're already reading Black authors, I invite you to do an inventory to see how many of those authors have other marginalized life experiences. Never stop growing!

📖 Even more Black History Month reading... 🛶 Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham 📜 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson ✨ Brown Girl In the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson #BookSky

📖 Kicking off Black History Month reading with a bang. 🌻 Vagabonds!, Eloghosa Osunde 🧍🏾‍♀️Lone Women, Victor Lavalle 👰🏾‍♀️ Where the Dead Brides Gather, Nuzo Onoh 🤍 White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi 🌺 The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon ⭕ Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark 🪵Little Rot, Akwaeke Emezi

Finally have the time to dig into the books for the Indie Ink Awards this year, and there are some gems 💎 If you haven't picked up any of the nominated works yet, we're eating good in the horror and sci-fi category 🚀 👻 #BookSky

📰 "IS THIS PROP@GANDA??" (PARTS ONE - THREE) 🚩 Below, find all 18 points about the psychological and cognitive biases and heuristics-- aka "shortcuts"-- that our 🧠 uses to be more efficient... And that prop@ganda and PR spins take advantage of. These 18 points ARE NOT an exhaustive list.

📚 To make it 100% clear: I will be working with indie, small presses for my work. Trad publishing didn't need this recent normalization of anti-DEI rhetoric to keep people like me at arm's length, and I'm not overly interested in arm-twisting my way to a seat at that incredibly dubious table. 🤷🏾

Today in BS: the 🍊 admin has canceled the meetings/panels the NIH uses to determine grant allocation. For real life impact: doctors doing research on things like cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, etc. who rely on NIH grants to pay themselves and their staff are now unsure if they can continue.

🚪 OG Twilight Zone episodes you should watch, for no particular reason 🌀 🏘️ "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street." How easy it is to turn on your neighbors. 🧑🏾‍⚖️ "The Obsolete Man." A total*tarian state decides who is obsolete. 🥼 "Eye of the Beholder." A d*ctator shapes the world in his image. 👇🏾

Hi. Autistic person here to say THAT is not what autism is. I also just did a book rec 👀 that is an autobiography of a woman late-diagnosed with autism, and- spoilers- stigmas and infantilization like this were some of the reasons WHY.

🚀 Sci-Fi Dystopia Book Starter Pack 📚 There's a lot of interest in picking these up *for some reason.* "Classics": WE, Yevgeny Zamyatin 1984, George Orwell Brave New World, Aldous Huxley This Perfect Day, Ira Levin The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler 👇🏾

Let's talk about Echo's 14 points of fascism: 1. The cult of tradition - Make America great AGAIN 2. The rejection of modernism - the time Trump signed an EXECUTIVE ORDER condemning modernist art and architecture 3. Action without intellectual reflection - what happened with TikTok today 👇🏾

📚 What is Dystopian Lit?? 📚 In dystopian stories you'll find: 🎛️ Autocratic government. 1984 by Orwell. 👥 Lack of autonomy. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. 🖼️ Bad technology. Feed by M.T. Anderson As Octavia Butler says: "Look at the problems we’re neglecting & give them 30 years to grow." #BookSky

Henry Selick ("Coraline" writer and director) does not have horrid accusations against him, and has also made huge strides in normalizing and humanizing goth culture. He also championed and produced "Wendell & Wild", which has done more for diverse goth inclusion than anything Gaiman has made, imo.

If you're a writer who says this, try this method instead... 🧠 "I use AI for outlining!" 💭 📊 Research different story structures. Read examples of each. Learn how to spot them. -Hero's journey/collective journey -3/4 acts -Dan Harmon's story circle -Fichtean curve -Ki-sho-ten-ketsu #BookSky

RIP screenwriter and director David Lynch (1946 - 2025). In an interview a few years ago, Lynch discussed some of his favorite books: 📚 📽️ The Name Above The Title by Frank Capra. 🪓 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 🐜 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. #BookSky

In light of the Neil Gaiman news, here are my recs that scratch the same itch. 📚 So instead of.... 🪓 Coraline, try "It Came from the Trees" by Ally Russell 🕷️ American Gods, try "Age of Godpunk" by James Lovegrove 🪽 Good Omens, try "When the Angels Left the Old Country" by Sacha Lamb #BookSky

📚 Even more tales to give you goosebumps (most anticipated horror and sci-fi) 🏯 Strange Pictures, Uketsu and Jim Rion (Translator) 🏨 The Pink Agave Motel & Other Stories, V Castro 💾 Casual, Koji A Dae 🤫 The Nga’phandileh Whisperer, Eugen Bacon 🍒 Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou #BookSky

I'm not a fan of the Empyrean series. This is not a "leave Becky alone 😭" post. 📚 This IS a reminder that books are written by people. And the Fourth Wing books happen to be written by a disabled person. Rebecca Yarros' turn arond between book one and two was unreasonably fast. (1/2)

🇺🇸 Happy Korean American Day! 🇰🇷 Some books by Korean American authors: ⬅️ East Goes West by Younghill Kang (often called the first Korean American novel) 🔥 Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha 🍜 Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner 🙈 Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear by Matthew Salesses #BookSky

📚 DNFing a Book If you find yourself thinking, "I'm going to DNF because... - I can't see myself as the MC - I don't get the cultural references - it depicts experiences I'm uncomfortable seeing" Consider sticking it out or trying again later. Reading what is unfamiliar is how we grow. #BookSky