Alyssa Cole returns with a fun, sexy romance novella in the Reluctant Royals series!
While her boss the prince was busy wooing his betrothed, Likotsi had her own love affair after swiping right on a dating app. But her romance had ended in heartbreak, and now, back in NYC again, she’s determined to rediscover her joy—so of course she runs into the woman who broke her heart.
When Likotsi and Fabiola meet again on a stalled subway train months later, Fab asks for just one cup of tea. Likotsi, hoping to know why she was unceremoniously dumped, agrees. Tea and food soon leads to them exploring the city together, and their past, with Fab slowly revealing why she let Likotsi go, and both of them wondering if they can turn this second chance into a happily ever after.
First up is November’s Bingo Love, Vol 1: Jackpot Edition,
which represents the original release by Franklin and Jenn St-Onge,
alongside 50 pages of additional material from Margeurite Bennett,
Beverly Johnson, Shawn Pryor, Paulina Ganucheau, Gail Simone, Sara
Alfageeh and Ariela Kristantina. To be released simultaneously in both
hardcover and softcover formats — for $19.99 and $14.99, respectively —
the 136 page collection will also feature an afterword by novelist and
comic book writer Gabby Rivera, along with a preview of the next volume in the series, Bingo Love Vol. 2: Dear Diary.
That release will follow in February 2020. Again written by Franklin,
with art by Beverly Johnson — who also provides the cover — the 128
page graphic novel sees Mari’s granddaughter discover diaries her
grandmother had written throughout her life, sharing stories of her life
not only as a married woman to Hazel, but of life before that as a
preacher’s wife raising five children.
Bingo Love Vol. 2: Dear Diary will be released as a softcover graphic novel on Feb. 12, 2020 for $16.99; the Jackpot Edition of the first volume November 7 this year. From that release, Heat Vision can share “Honeymoon,” a story by Margeurite Bennett and Beverly Johnson.
“Some black women complained that when they moved outside the ghetto into integrated lesbian communities in certain areas, even in the 1970s, white women sometimes automatically assumed that black women would be butch in a sexual relationship or even manipulated them into being butch. As Iris, a black lesbian from Omaha, Nebraska, remembers, “They didn’t like you to wear make-up. They wanted you in masculine dress, but they wanted to be real ‘fou-fou’ themselves.” She attributes the predilection to a covert racism that is blind to femininity in black females.”
— Lillian Faderman, “The Return of Butch and Femme: A Phenomenon in Lesbian Sexuality of the 1980s and 1990s.” 1992. (via theorynotebook)
Cudjo Lewis, who was born as Kossola, was nearly 90 years old and living in Plateau, Alabama. He was thought to be the last African man alive who had been kidnapped from his village in West Africa in 1859 and forced into slavery in America aged 19.
Hurston, who was an anthropologist, documented her interviews with Lewis during the late 1920s and wrote a book in his own words about his life titled, ‘Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’.
But the manuscript she wrote was turned down by multiple publishers in 1931 who felt as though Lewis’s heavily accented dialect was too difficult to read.
For decades, Hurston’s manuscript of the book was tucked away inside Howard University’s archives until The Zora Neale Hurston Trust found a buyer for the book – more than 50 years after her death in 1960. On Tuesday, May 8, 2018. ‘Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’,’ was published by Amistad/HarperCollins.
Of her time spent with Lewis, Hurston wrote in a letter to her friend, fellow Harlem Renaissance author and poet Langston Hughes, that the experience left her deeply moved, according to her biography, ‘Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston’ by author Valerie Boyd.
‘Tears welled in his eyes as he described the trip across the ocean in the Clotilda,’ Hurston wrote, as cited in Boyd’s biography.
‘But what moved Hurston most about the old man — whom she always called by his African name, Kossola — was how much he continued to miss his people back in Nigeria. ‘I lonely for my folks,’ he told her.
‘After seventy-five years he still had that tragic sense of loss…That yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation. It gave me something to feel about.’
Just Sha 