SCB FALL 2020 SCB: TRULY INDEPENDENT To our publishers, sales representatives, authors, customers, staff, friends and everyone in our distribution network: We want you to know we look forward to this Fall 2020 season, the next and the next and beyond, as we rise to the challenges of how Covid-19 will affect the future of bookselling. As we experience this new landscape together, we also want you to know: YOU make us strong. With your support, SCB has successfully surfed every dramatic change in the publishing business over the last 30 years. We also credit our loyal, long-tenured staff (with 150+ combined years), as well as the diligence and sincerity each one of us brings to our beloved profession. We’re one of a kind because you’re one of a kind. Thank you, and stay well, Aaron Silverman and Molly Maguire SCB: TRULY INDEPENDENT The cover image for this catalog is from the book The Works of Hayao Miyazaki: The Master of Japanese Animation, by Gael Berton, published by Third Editions, and found on page 15 of this catalog. Catalog layout by Dan Nolte, based on an original idea by Rama Crouch-Wong. I’ll Fly Away By Rudy Francisco In this stunning, intimate follow-up to Helium, Francisco’s poems savor the day-to-day. Treating the ordinary as worthy of worship, he turns each moment into an opportunity to plant new seeds of growth. He even creates his own words for the things our language cannot give name to, for example: “Felenter (Noun) Definition: Someone who finds joy in things that people believe to be mundane.” There aren’t enough songs about minding your own business or staying home on a Saturday because you think most people are exhausting, but I do believe that we deserve an anthem. An ode with a catchy hook and beat by DJ Mustard. Something we can dance to after the plans we regret making are canceled at the last minute. Whenever the weekend is visited by the Patron Saint FRANCISCO HAS 110+ MILLION of empty schedules, we throw a party in his honor POETRY VIDEO VIEWS but only invite ourselves. ■ Author’s Helium has sold over 70,000 copies Rudy Francisco’s art is an amalgam of social critique, introspection, honesty and humor. He uses personal narratives to discuss the politics of race, class, gender and religion, reinforcing interconnectedness. He holds a BA in psychology, an MA in organizational studies I’ll Fly Away and lives in San Diego. ISBN: 9781943735693 MARKETING ALSO AVAILABLE $16.00 | paper ■ Author has over 600,000 social media followers 52 x 82 ■ Author tours and performs extensively across US 124 pages ■ Website: www.iamrudyfrancisco.com December ■ Twitter: @rudyfrancisco ■ Instagram: @rudyfrancisco ■ Facebook: @RudyFranciscopoetry ■ YouTube: @rudyfranciscothepoet Poetry Helium: Poems by Rudy Francisco BUTTON POETRY 9781943735198 SCB DISTRIBUTORS..|..FALL 2020..|..1 Crown Noble By Bianca Phipps This poetic debut navigates the crossroads of familial ties and forgiveness. Phipps ruminates on the ways we are shaped as humans. Is it nature or nurture? Fate or happenstance? What teaches us to love: our generational inheritance, no matter how harmful? Phipps takes us to the most intimate parts of family matters in hopes of understanding conflict as a means of overcoming. IT JUST HAPPENED SO FAST One minute everyone clambered onto the same couch & the next we didn’t. Or is that just memory? Anyway, I betrayed them. I told Dad where we were going. I thought they loved each other. I loved them both. I couldn’t imagine a world where they didn’t—love each other like I loved them. I could forgive them for anything. It all changed. But it was me: I unlocked the door & left a note & told him where we were going. I wanted him to follow. My fault. My love. POEMS ABOUT GENERATIONAL TRAUMA My inability to separate them. AND FORGIVENESS Bianca Phipps is a Chicago-based spoken word poet, originally from San Antonio, TX. She graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a BA in acting, and was featured on UNCo’s SOAPbox POETRY GRAND SLAM CUPS team from 2014-2016. Crown Noble MARKETING ■ Phipps has 3+ million poetry video views ISBN: 9781943735792 ■ Extensive promotion across author and Button Poetry social $16.00 | paper ALSO AVAILABLE media platforms ■ Author tours and performs extensively across US 2 2 5 x 8 ■ Facebook: @BiancaPhippsARTS 48 pages ■ Twitter: @biancaphipps August Poetry Date & Time: Poems by Phil Kaye BUTTON POETRY 9781943735365 2..|..SCB DISTRIBUTORS..|..FALL 2020 Ain’t Never Not Been Black By Javon Johnson Johnson foregrounds Black pleasure, Black pain and Black love in unflinchingly Black ways. Engaging with themes of masculinity, racism, love, and joy, Johnson is at once critical and creative. In a world of individualism, whom can you hold close? In a world of danger, what makes you feel safe? His spoken word performances transfer effort - lessly to the page in these encompassing poems. from America In this poem, Black people will be replaced by the word America. America has a deep history, can trace its roots before colonial expansion, you know. Refuses to be reduced to the slave trade. America never needed a Declaration of Independence to know that all “are created equal.” America knows that. Knows that Lincoln did not free the slaves, Knows, in fact, America did. America remembers the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, THE INSEPARABLE FUSION OF BLACKNESS The Birth of a Nation, and AND SURVIVAL IN THE US Jim Crow. Knows the KKK. America loves its hoods, but hates the hood. America remembers the Civil Rights Era. Javon Johnson is a highly-awarded spoken word poet and Professor of African American Studies at UNLV. He holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern and was a Postdoc Fellow at Ain’t Never USC, and the Program Manager of History at Not Been Black California African American Museum. He wrote Killing Poetry: Performing Blackness, Poetry Slams and the ALSO AVAILABLE ISBN: 9781943735846 Making of Spoken Word Communities (Rutgers University $16.00 | paper Press) and was co-editor of End of Chiraq: A Literary 52 x 82 Mixtape (Northwestern University Press). 100 pages November MARKETING ■ Author’s video poem “cuz he’s black” has 2.3million views ■ Author tours and performs extensively across US The Crown Ain’t Worth Poetry ■ Twitter: @javonism Much: Poems by ■ Facebook: @javonisms Hanif Abdurraqib BUTTON POETRY 9781943735044 SCB DISTRIBUTORS..|..FALL 2020..|..3 Concrete & Juniper By Johnny No Bueno “Johnny No Bueno writes with the grittiest of voices. Reading his poetry is like jumping into the moshpit at a punk rock show. The brash language spins around to hit you in the jaw while bringing up the nostalgia for cheap booze.” —Claire Valentine-Fossum, Street Roots A stunning glimpse into the bloody, raw world of Johnny No Bueno. Drafted into conflict at an early age, No Bueno’s first siege takes place in his violently broken home. In adolescence, he becomes a soldier of the streets, a mercenary imprisoned by addiction and fighting a losing battle. As an adult, freed from those shackles, he finds himself at ground zero of a brand-new war, now a crusader for divine revolution. Vulnerable and vitriolic, his distorted lens humanizes us. We cheer, we cringe, we are, at times, collateral damage. We bear witness. We are moved. We are changed. from 5TH & MORRISON: The cleansing odor of hot wet concrete SEQUEL TO JOHNNY NO BUENO’S would open our pores as the click of high heels WE WERE WARRIORS & the blurt of car horns would séance the whiskey out of us like the forgotten spirits we had become. We taste blood & body odor sitting as righteous as indignant punk would allow, lulling out feet comatose listening to the ambulance music & the choir of breaking glass. Johnny No Bueno has had poems and essays published in Criminal Class Review, Present Tense, Concrete & Juniper Unshod Quills, and Nailed magazines. Co-founder of Boston’s Dharma Punx group, Profound ISBN: 9781938753367 ALSO AVAILABLE Existence, No Bueno facilitates poetry and $15.00 | paper meditation workshops at Maclaren Youth 54 x 8 Correctional Facility. He lives in Portland, OR. 116 pages August MARKETING ■ Publicity in conjunction with author’s many performances nationwide, especially NW ■ Review copies available Poetry We Were Warriors: ■ Twitter: @johnnynobueno Poems by UNIVERSITY Johnny No Bueno OF HELL PRESS 9781938753015 4..|..SCB DISTRIBUTORS..|..FALL 2020 Thirst for Beginners Poems, Prose, Quizzes By Thomas Lucky Richards “..witty, sharp social commentary, wisdom, laugh-out-loud humor, and, of course, heartbreak. Richards’ work is exuberant and present.”—Chrys Tobey, A Woman Is a Woman Is a Woman Is a Woman “...a crackling collection that upsets notions of genre and form... entertaining and stirring...”—A.M. O’Malley, Expecting Something Else These poems hover somewhere near the states of melancholy, loneliness, introspection, acceptance, and laughter. Richards wrote these poems hoping to find real avenues for living without destroying the trails of his quixotic quests. His stories and prose wander about the landscape of Italo Calvino, and his quizzes twist the dial, filling the room with nitrous oxide causing us to laugh at the absurd states we find ourselves in. from Quiz for Yesterday: 1. What’s your favorite color in the dark? 2. Say a word for the last time? 6. How many Shakespearean plays are you able to recite from memory? POETRY AND PROSE THICK WITH a. In the original Latin? b. In Klingon? HEARTBREAK AND HUMOR c. While texting and driving? d. Or would you rather suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or you can do that taking-up-arms thing which is an enormously popular option here in the United States? 8.