BOOKS TO NOURISH YOUR SOUL
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We Birth Freedom at Dawn, volume one
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BOOK SUMMARY
If you have read my prior work, you know that all of this is just a Love letter from the Great Mystery to our earthly yearning souls. As such, with these two new volumes of poems, stories, essays, prayers, and devotions, I desire that you feel the intimacy and urgency of where you and I now find ourselves. Since late 2023, as horrific massacre, new and old, slow and swift, in many forms and lands, has at last captured our collective human attention, our pain and grief and resurgent Love have gushed through my heart and being night and day. Like many of you, my every cell and molecule has been both decimated and revived. I have given myself to this, our profound upheaval. I have crumbled our heartbreak into the sea of this unbearable season, this ongoing sermon of sorrow and solace. In these soul waters, I have soaked up our manna and nectar to bring home to you.
These two volumes are the entire balm I have been able to gather for you. We Birth Freedom at Dawn is a book and birth water. The title came to me as I ran up a steep hill on a recent summer morning, sun blessing my skin, sweat baptizing my ascendant birthing time to push and deliver. Our ancestors have been with me in a hushed and cradling way during these months of mourning and morning. As this title came to me, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman in particular settled in my bones and blood and breath. These two sturdy grandmothers have wet eyes as they hold us now. It is their insistence that we be free of our oppressive ways that has ushered forth these tribal words.
Sojourner and Harriet… Have you ever seen two monarch butterfly mates dancing in sunlight? They may to our eyes seem incredibly light of wing. Their flight, though, is a consequence of unimaginable struggle and endurance. And yet, here they are, still dancing, still joyful, filled with the orange of sun, bringing forth their generations.
This title, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, is what its offering is: A radical call. An invocation. A summons. To stir and galvanize and mobilize us. The word We is for our collective humanity. Birth speaks to our unconquerable Divine Feminine and its reclaimed role as we go forward, for the conception, gestation, and birth labor. For we already have this freedom. We do not have to chase it down. We have only to bring forth what is already in us and of us. The word Freedom: An acknowledgement of my life’s work and ministry, including my earlier and kindred book Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution. And Dawn, a hopeful word, for our freedom soon come. It is not long now, dear soul. Not long. Our dark night of the soul too has its end.
This title is a declaration and decree. A promise and prophecy. An awakening and activation. A chant, hum, ceremony, remembrance song. To speak and feel this title is to call forth this freedom alive within each of us. Our freedom is stirring, nascent, divine, and truth. Soon, the fawning sprout begets the forest, and the raindrop begets the river. I pray these words bring back from the brink the many who are on the edge of despair, fear, hopelessness, terror, and fatigue. To allow us to see and feel and be what is coming and indeed what has always been here in the fertile earth of our sacred architecture. My God, these words are prayer.
2024. 5 x 8. Hardcover and softcover. First Edition. Volume One of Two. 258 pages. Inspirational / Social Issues / Personal and spiritual growth and healing.
We Birth Freedom at Dawn, volume two
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BOOK SUMMARY
If you have read my prior work, you know that all of this is just a Love letter from the Great Mystery to our earthly yearning souls. As such, with these two new volumes of poems, stories, essays, prayers, and devotions, I desire that you feel the intimacy and urgency of where you and I now find ourselves. Since late 2023, as horrific massacre, new and old, slow and swift, in many forms and lands, has at last captured our collective human attention, our pain and grief and resurgent Love have gushed through my heart and being night and day. Like many of you, my every cell and molecule has been both decimated and revived. I have given myself to this, our profound upheaval. I have crumbled our heartbreak into the sea of this unbearable season, this ongoing sermon of sorrow and solace. In these soul waters, I have soaked up our manna and nectar to bring home to you.
These two volumes are the entire balm I have been able to gather for you. We Birth Freedom at Dawn is a book and birth water. The title came to me as I ran up a steep hill on a recent summer morning, sun blessing my skin, sweat baptizing my ascendant birthing time to push and deliver. Our ancestors have been with me in a hushed and cradling way during these months of mourning and morning. As this title came to me, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman in particular settled in my bones and blood and breath. These two sturdy grandmothers have wet eyes as they hold us now. It is their insistence that we be free of our oppressive ways that has ushered forth these tribal words.
Sojourner and Harriet… Have you ever seen two monarch butterfly mates dancing in sunlight? They may to our eyes seem incredibly light of wing. Their flight, though, is a consequence of unimaginable struggle and endurance. And yet, here they are, still dancing, still joyful, filled with the orange of sun, bringing forth their generations.
This title, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, is what its offering is: A radical call. An invocation. A summons. To stir and galvanize and mobilize us. The word We is for our collective humanity. Birth speaks to our unconquerable Divine Feminine and its reclaimed role as we go forward, for the conception, gestation, and birth labor. For we already have this freedom. We do not have to chase it down. We have only to bring forth what is already in us and of us. The word Freedom: An acknowledgement of my life’s work and ministry, including my earlier and kindred book Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution. And Dawn, a hopeful word, for our freedom soon come. It is not long now, dear soul. Not long. Our dark night of the soul too has its end.
This title is a declaration and decree. A promise and prophecy. An awakening and activation. A chant, hum, ceremony, remembrance song. To speak and feel this title is to call forth this freedom alive within each of us. Our freedom is stirring, nascent, divine, and truth. Soon, the fawning sprout begets the forest, and the raindrop begets the river. I pray these words bring back from the brink the many who are on the edge of despair, fear, hopelessness, terror, and fatigue. To allow us to see and feel and be what is coming and indeed what has always been here in the fertile earth of our sacred architecture. My God, these words are prayer.
2024. 5 x 8. Hardcover and softcover. First Edition. Volume Two of Two. 260 pages. Inspiration / Social issues / Personal and spiritual growth and healing.
Dear Artist: A Love Letter
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Dear Artist is Jaiya John’s mystic Love letter to artists and to all souls, to enrich your creative life. A full-blooded, sensual, intimate honoring and celebration of the divine spark of creativity in you. Jaiya’s letter reads like a private sharing from an old friend, offering an affectionate voice of purpose and clarity.
You may be startled by how deeply your tender heart feels seen, listened to, honored, affirmed. Find in these pages tide pools of poetry and passion. Wade into any rejuvenating page and soak your weariness.
Jaiya traces back to your beginning in life, to touch with Loving medicine those points in your journey that harmed or nourished your river of soulful expression. These offerings will help you dissolve your barriers, transcend your fears, and transform your challenges into a composted kind of peace.
The passages also activate the collective, communal, interdependent nature of creative expression. For your art is not only about you. It is also about your ancestral place and duty in this sacred web of life. Art is how Life Loves itself.
Dear Artist is concerned with resuscitating the human soul, helping us remember our sacred ways of being together and honoring the beauty of this world. It is a revival for artists, activists, revolutionaries, healers, students, teachers, and anyone who yearns to ignite the embers of their passion.
Jaiya’s Love letter reintroduces you to your original soul condition: vivacious, awestruck, unimpeded, fully alive. If you hunger to find and liberate your truest voice, to free your tears of grace, to express what your ancestors could not, Dear Artist serves a feast for you. If you thirst in the desert of your disillusion, Dear Artist is a well water, bright and clear and plenty. This is no art instruction manual. These words will have you naked, making Love, making art.
2023. 5 x 8. Hardcover and softcover. First Edition. 220 pages. Inspiration / Personal growth and healing / Spiritual growth.
all these rivers and you chose Love
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You are a cane of sugar. Your stalk is cut and crying. Your Love pours out. You cannot stop. This is why you are free.
With All These Rivers and You Chose Love, Jaiya John continues his mystic storytelling and passionate pouring of medicine words. This compilation of reflections floods your soul and heart with an intimately personal mercy for your tenderness, painting beauty over the landscape of your inner and outer life.
Sometimes its words feel like those of a doting grandmother, prickly and soft at once, always dripping wisdom. Its language is a delirious treasure map, a sanctuary you revisit time and again. Like licking sugar, these compact pieces infuse you with feel good. They are your morning lemon water. Your evening bubble bath. Your oracle on the summer porch. Massage, prayer, and spiritual practice all at once.
All These Rivers and You Chose Love will have you laughing, crying, and reflecting on your soul and life with a gentler gaze. Wrap this comfort blanket around you. Sip its heart-seasoned broth. All These Rivers will entrance you to remember yourself and send you on a journey of sweeter dreams. Before you turn out the light in bed, you will want this book to kiss you goodnight.
2023. 5.5 x 8.5. Hardcover and softcover. First Edition. 286 pages. Inspiration / Personal growth and healing / Spiritual growth.
no man came
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No Man Came is the short story of a woman faced with a terrible choice. Inheriting love, pain, and a haunting warning from her Mammy, she grows into a fateful relationship with herself and others, especially her relationship with men. She begins her story in a thick vernacular voice, a voice as rich and deep as the soil of her cultural roots. Naked, raw, and urgent, No Man Came bleeds out its words with a surgical intensity that pierces the reader's emotional and spiritual womb. The peril and dire desperation this woman endures stick like summer cotton on the sharp seed hull. No Man Came is the story of a woman who waits. And waits. Until she can wait no longer. Finally, she chooses.
Written when Jaiya John was 23, No Man Came is a rare taste of his earliest work, revealing the nascency of a mystic storyteller who seems inhabited by endless souls. Limited Edition Hardcover Exclusive. 2022. 5 x 8. 130 pages. Fiction / short story.
Fragrance After Rain
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Jaiya John follows up his books Daughter Drink This Water, and, Freedom, with this aromatic delight for your soul. Fragrance After Rain is a sensitive, hopeful, intimate movement through your many seasons of tenderness, and the beautiful meaning and grace that grow from that fertile ground. If you love Rumi, Hafez, Gibran, and other classic mystic poets, here is your honey jar. This book is pregnant with balm and salve so personal and intuitively attuned, you will be certain the words were birthed just for you. Sustenance as you live through your personal moments, and through the collective moods of the world.
Fragrance is a free flowing melody of petite stories and mystic whispers, a wildflower meadow you may enjoy wherever you lay yourself within it for a moment and breathe beautifully. These inspirational pieces are entirely liberated from chapters and sections, freely roaming, drifting on spirit breeze as they wish. Each word-bouquet is gathered and growing according to the sunlight, soil, and water of Love’s orchestral conducting. Open this book, turn to a page, let your eyes arrive to any brief orchard of words, and allow your heart to taste the fruit and meet its craving. Whatever words you meet are the words you need in the moment. In this Fragrance story, the one who speaks, is spoken to, and is spoken about is you, BeLoved. All of this is you.
This is a book of bright clouds in the sky of your life. Bringing you beauty, meaning, the downy reflection of sunlight, life-replenishing rain, and a sweet fragrance thereafter. Walk, dance, sing, and repose yourself through this aromatic pasture, and feel a peace that is both medicine and music for your soul. Be careful, dear Lover. If you sip these words slowly and savor their essence, you may become a mystic. 2021. 5.5 x 8.5. Hardcover and softcover. First Edition. 306 pages. Inspiration / Personal growth and healing / Spiritual growth.
Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution
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In the beginning, two spirits roamed every soul. One was Love. The other, fear. Fear, being restless and unsettled, mutated into two other spirits: supremacy and inferiority. Both of these would inhabit every human soul and space, forever. Waiting. To be fed.
This is a Love story. A Love for freedom that blooms into a willingness for revolution to eradicate oppression, supremacy, and inferiority. In his newest book of sacred contemplation, Dr. Jaiya John plunges us into the naked soul of social revolution, the divine nature of freedom, and the human reality of being a revolutionary. Freedom is an origin story, a message for today’s global realities, and a tale for all times. A prayer poem from the ancestors.
Since his orphan birth in the Indigenous New Mexico desert, Jaiya, formerly a professor of social psychology at Howard University, has spent his entire life contemplating, learning, teaching, and reaching for personal and collective freedom. This book is his offering of a lifetime for those brave, humbled, sacrificing souls called to give their lives for freedom work. Revolutionary labor can be lonely, isolating, discouraging, and depleting. Freedom is a Love-soaked trove of affirmation, appreciation, reassurance, and renewal.
Freedom is for poets and professors, parents and activists, leaders and students, and for anyone whose inner healer rises and roars, stirs and sings. Anyone who dares to help birth a new world of human dignity, a world that dissolves the old structures, systems, ideologies, and spirit that incarcerate and traumatize generation after generation.
Freedom is a wild flock of verses, each offering its own distinct medicine: window, door, compass, shelter, quiet, hope, courage, oasis, revelation, assurance, encouragement, faith, music, dance, prayer, light, laughter, tears, nourishment, rest, solidarity, strategy, ancestral presence, generational duty, reminder of Love. Freedom is presented in deep-breath verses that float on the page in space, unbound from one another. Savor this book as both an inspirational, reflective, daily devotional, as well as an academic and strategic resource. Drop in on any page for your daily bread and grace. Freedom is poetry, proverb, and prophecy as much as practice protocol. In the tradition of Jaiya’s book Daughter Drink This Water, Freedom will replenish the intangible wellspring that is your soul. 2020. 5.5 x 8.5. Hardcover and softcover. First edition. 228 pages. Inspiration / social issues.
Daughter Drink This Water: A Book of Sacred Love
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Many believed he was thousands of years old. The women had prayed for an ancient one to come. They wanted to remember. The ancient one came. He was the father of all their fathers. The son of all their mothers. And on that day, in a valley where the sky hangs low, he spoke.
Daughter Drink This Water is a sacred Love song. A timeless affirmation for girls and women in particular, and all people who are nurturing a beautiful life. Reminiscent of Khalil Gibran’s, The Prophet, Daughter Drink This Water feeds you short, devotional passages in an ancestral voice that penetrates the heart and reveals the divine nature of your phenomenal journey. Covering terrain such as relationships, romance, and inner peace, these words will reverberate in your very cells. Soak in this warm river of self Love, self care, healing, and freedom. Share this soul-full keepsake in your family and kinship circles, as a cherished blanket of memory and meaning. Drink deeply.
Daughter Drink This Water is epiphany and medicine for boys, men, and all souls as well. Especially for fathers, sons, brothers, Love mates, husbands, and friends. That they may behold the sacred in womanhood, and in doing so, heal their own person, freeing the sacred within themselves. 2018. 5.5 x 8.5. Hardcover and softcover. First edition. 236 pages. Inspiration / affirmation / self care.
Perfect for book clubs; and youth development, mentoring, and rites of passage programs.
Calm: Inspiration for a Possible Life
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Jaiya John’s Calm: Inspiration for a Possible Life, follows his books Fresh Peace, and Sincerity of Sunlight, as tonic for our modern epidemic of anxiety. Calm is written in Jaiya’s customary light, colorful, dreamy language. Use these petite reflections and stories as daily affirmations, mantras, reminders, practice projects, or prompts for meditation. Open the book to any page and drink its healing water. See how you can move through life with unconditional peace and clarity, literally a living Grace. Calmness is a Loving act, an intentional kindness, a soul savings account. Refresh yourself in this medicine book. Let Calm be your testimony of a possible life. 2017. 5 x 8. Softcover. First edition. 168 pages. Inspiration / affirmation / self-care / spirituality.
Sincerity of Sunlight: A Book of Inspiration
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In the tradition of his popular book, Fresh Peace, Jaiya John offers a revitalizing new book of inspiration. With one reflection on each page, Sincerity of Sunlight is designed for easy access and quick, in-the-moment reading. Drop in on any page for a bright dose of affirmation and insightful tastes of inner peace. Whenever you need a pick-up for your spirit, pick up Sincerity of Sunlight. Jaiya’s soothing words are a gifted masseuse for the soul, touching gently on wellness, self-care, self-Love, healing, personal growth, social relationships, and purposeful living. The message at this book’s heart: When we hold our idea of life up to the Light of Truth, its uncompromising radiance burns away the illusions that cause our suffering. What grows up from the after-burn is new life. Rise today. Love like the sincerity of sunlight. Make the whole world glow and blush back at you. 2017. 5 x 8. Softcover. First edition. 162 pages. Inspiration / affirmation / self-care / spirituality.
Fresh Peace: Daily Blossoming of the Soul
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Fresh Peace: Daily Blossoming of the Soul (A book of inspirations). Imagine if your every breath filled your soul with undeniable, blissful Peace… Jaiya John, who has shared his deeply resonant messages with audiences worldwide, gathers these heart-stirring inspirations, stories, and healing words for those who cherish and yearn for a lasting inner Peace. Stroll through this garden of Sacredness and feel your soul awaken to its own true and flowering fragrance: the unmistakable perfume of Peace. Renew. Refresh. Rediscover the essence of your life. 2015. 5.5 x 8.5 Softcover. First edition. 216 pages. Inspirational / Spirituality / Mindfulness.
Your Caring Heart: Renewal for Helping Professionals and Systems
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Your Caring Heart: Renewal for Helping Professionals and Systems is Dr. Jaiya John’s warm companion for your compassionate servitude. In gentle clarity, lightness, and humor, Jaiya’s soothing reflections flow straight into the tender truth of your caring nature and calling. Discover the promise of mutual care, harvesting story, and compassionate leadership for transforming you and your work tribe into your optimal giftedness for serving lives. These are words you will keep close, drinking from them for your renewal. Reinvigorate your wellspring of devotion. Heal your tenderness. Supercharge your system, and bless the ones you serve. Welcome, you Lovers, leaders, activists, agitators… You soul suns, deep drums, healers, hope dealers, sacred dancers. Here is a spa day for your inner peace, birth print for your revival, as you give yourself to the ones who dearly need your healing touch. 2016. 6 x 9. Softcover. 200 pages. First edition. Helping Professionals and Systems.
Agencies, organizations, and school systems nationwide are acquiring this title in bulk as a professional development resource for workers, and leaders. It can enrich college and graduate programs, recruitment, hiring, orientation, and ongoing development.
Clear Moon Tribe
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Twelve brave 18-year-olds encamp on a mystical island in the presence of a mysterious shape shifter. These children of many tribes–African, Maori, Samoan, Native American, Latino, and Aboriginal–have come to enjoy the paradise, with its ocean shores, towering dunes and mountains, spectacular waterfall, and crystal clear lagoon. The island has other ideas. As human souls encounter island spirit, lives that have been touched by family disruption, homelessness, delinquency, and trauma face a reckoning. An ancient scroll forebodes a great danger: If they do not face their pain and fears in this surreal land, they invite their own demise. Through adventure, calamity, conflict, passion, and friendship, a tribe is born. The true purpose for their challenging childhood journeys is revealed in ways that will transform their lives forever.
Clear Moon Tribe is a coming of age revelation. A richly crafted healing story, bathed in cultural myths, fables, and legends. Its words are the smoke of incense, drum, and ceremony, and will tattoo your heart hilariously, poignantly, unforgettably. Come, fall deliriously into a new tribal language. It all began that summer, on an island, beneath a provocative clear moon. 2015. 6 x 9 Softcover. First edition. 288 pages. Fiction.
Great for schools, youth programs, organizations, book clubs. A powerful resource for foster care, juvenile justice, homelessness, child welfare, human services, social services, and family & community service.
The Day Jumoke Found His Name
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Once, there lived a boy with no name. Join him on a very special day as he and his dear sister go on an adventure to discover his name, and receive priceless life lessons along the way. This is the unillustrated story of an 8-year-old boy, living in quite a magical world, inside of a single, crystal-clear raindrop that fell 2,000 years ago onto the palm of a 3,000-year-old leaf, in the tree-top of an ancient tree, growing in an ancient land on a planet we call Earth, inside of a wide, wide universe. 2016. 5 x 7. Softcover. Unillustrated. 116 pages. First edition. Children / Family / Adventure.
Legendary: A Tribute to Those Who Honorably Serve Devalued Children
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Legendary: A Tribute to Those Who Honorably Serve Devalued Children (2nd Edition. New Material.) is Jaiya John’s celebration of teachers, social service professionals, advocates, caregivers, counselors, mentors, and the like. Those compassionate souls who honorably serve youth devalued by society due to material poverty, heritage, language, family separation; or challenges with learning, behavior, mental health, or physical ability. Here are poetic stories to awaken your spirit, massage your heart, and remind you of the reasons you do this work. Your service touches lives, and miracles are born. Your grace endures forever.
Are you experiencing compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, burnout, disillusionment, doubt, lack of appreciation and support, lost direction, fear, emptiness? You deserve relief. Legendary is well water drawn from the very soul of your compassionate endeavor, offered back to you in your own yearning voice. Come here and drink to your replenishment. Regain your spark of purpose. Word by word, renew your wholeness, your humanity, and your vital health. Take a dose daily. Soon, you will be breathing freely again, like the first time you answered your sacred calling. 2014 (Originally published 2008). 5.5 x 8.5 Softcover. Second edition. 216 pages. Social Services & Education.
Beautiful: A Poetic Celebration of Displaced Children
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2ND EDITION. The many fictional voices of displaced children in Beautiful: A Poetic Celebration of Displaced Children are inspired by youth Jaiya John has worked with over a lifetime. This second edition contains 8 NEW POEMS. Beautiful is much more than a source of inspiration. Its words reveal the majesty and vulnerability of all children. Beautiful is an empowerment anthem for youth, a resource for those who love, care for, and work with these purposeful souls. Child light shines through these pages, asserting the demand of our young for their dignity, while portraying their limitless power to heal, grow, and flourish. A poetic companion to Jaiya John’s Reflection Pond, Beautiful is the kind of treasure we polish repeatedly, its truth seeping into our compassion. Struggle and triumph. Solitude and belonging. A journey of sunflowers toward the sun of selfhood. In these pages we find Beauty born. 2014 (Originally published 2008). 5.5 x 8.5 Softcover. Second edition. 200 pages. Poetry / Child & Youth Development.
An empowerment tool for youth! Great resource for: parents • social workers • counselors • therapists • community leaders • juvenile justice and mental health • policy makers • legal & court • child welfare • educators • advocates • mentors
Reflection Pond: Nurturing Wholeness in Displaced Children
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Reflection Pond is a meditation on identity, culture, and healing in children separated from family. Among the numerous causes for these displacements are poverty, abuse, neglect, natural disaster, epidemic, immigration, incarceration, addiction, war, genocide, oppression, and child labor and trafficking.
In the face of such loss and trauma, our children have the power for healing and growth within them. Every aspect of their lives is affected by an often solitary quest for beauty and belonging. We who raise and serve these displaced young, through our embrace, are a vital factor in their ultimate healing.
Jaiya John has shared time with thousands of uprooted children through his global rehumanizing mission and freedom work. Reflection Pond offers us his personal meditation, a looking glass for what these youth have whispered into his spirit. They have shared their need for reflection ponds: people, places, and experiences through which their own beauty and purpose are reflected back to them.
Reflection Pond is an invaluable resource for MSW programs, staff development, parents and caregivers, social workers, counselors, therapists, community leaders, youth justice, foster care, adoption, homelessness, policy and lawmakers, legal & court, child welfare, educators, advocates, and mentors. 2007. 5.5 x 8.5 Soft cover. First edition. 244 pages. Child & Youth Development.
Habanero Love: A Poem of Sacred Passion
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Habanero Love: A Poem of Sacred Passion is a wildfire sweeping through the heart, clearing the way for the romantic and the Sacred in us to sprout anew. This epic Love poem blazes with passion and unbridled surrender. It is a mythic Love story. A naked declaration. A revelation that the Love we fall into is a current within Divine Love Itself. Our hearts yearn so achingly for a reason: Love is the carriage taking us to the mystic territory that is our Sacred home. Habanero Love is a carriage on fire. Taste these words. They are divine dark chocolate and scorching red pepper. You have never burned like this before. When Love’s mood strikes… become a match. 2016. 5.5 x 8.5. Softcover. 192 pages. First edition. Poetry / Romance / Spirituality.
Father to Son: Ode to Our Black Young
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Revised edition (May 2021), seasoned and spiced with a deep gumbo pot of new stories.
Father to Son: Ode to Our Black Young is a spoken word celebration and drum call to duty. A blazing testimony to the phenomenal journey of African American and African Diaspora people. A dying father’s inspired and hopeful last conversation with his 17-year-old son serves as the opening context for this uplifting, ancestral, powerful narrative. Jaiya John’s compassionate, hopeful voice weaves a rich Kente cloth tapestry of Love, celebration, challenge, and honor.
Father to Son, with its rich rhythmic wordplay, flavored with a gumbo recipe for self-Love, frames the journey of Black boys into manhood and personhood, and African Diaspora people into healing and soulful freedom. Here is a role call for the spirit warrior in us who wants our families to be whole. Come beat the drum.
Father to Son is a generational resource for young people, families, parents and caregivers, leaders, youth programs, agencies, schools, libraries, places of worship, sororities and fraternities, and community initiatives. Among many social issues, the book addresses the following: parenting, fatherhood, womanhood, family and community, Love relationships, education and empowerment, history and heritage, ancestry, positive identity and self-Love, leadership and role modeling, spirituality and sacredness, healing from trauma, anger and violence, racism and sexism, stigma and prejudice, purpose and giftedness, the power of creativity and self-expression, dehumanization and oppression, rehumanization, resilience, holistic wellbeing, and rites of passage. 2016. 5 x 8. Softcover. 200 pages. First edition. Poetry / African American / African Diaspora / Child and Family.
Lyric of Silence: A Poetic Telling of the Human Soul Journey
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Lyric of Silence: A Poetic Telling of the Human Soul Journey is a reunion with an old friend: the divine uniqueness we came here to be. Like a bay window in spring, we open, and bright new glory rushes in. Poetry, parable, and inner conversation have all been brought to this union fire, kindling for our illumination flame. A living thing with wings lands on our window, looking in. We look out, wishing we too could fly. All that yearns inside us is saying: You already have wings! The curiosity that lands on your window is you! Break the glass separating inward from outward seer, hush the worldly voices, and slowly tune to your sacred song, those hidden notes of masterpiece. 2016. 5.5 x 8.5 Softcover. First edition. 240 pages. Poetry / Spirituality / Philosophy.
Black Baby White Hands: A View from the Crib
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Black Baby White Hands: A View from the Crib. SOUL WATER RISING PROUDLY PRESENTS A LANDMARK MEMOIR. It is only months following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the nation is burning. Black and White America are locked in the tense grip of massive change. Into this inferno steps an unsuspecting young White couple. Neither truly knew even a single African American person while growing up. Now, a child will change all of that forever. Over the fateful years to come, a Black child becomes perhaps the first in the history of New Mexico to be adopted by a White family. Here is a brazenly honest glimpse into the mind and heart of that child, a true story for the ages that flows like a soulful river—separated from his mother at birth, placed into foster care, adopted, and finally reunited with his biological family in adulthood—an astounding journey of personal discovery.
Jaiya John has opened the floodgates on his own childhood with this piercing memoir. Black Baby White Hands, a waterfall of jazz splashing over the rocks of love, pain and the honoring of family. Magically, this book finds a way to sing as it cries, and to exude compassion even as it dispels well-entrenched myths. This story is sure to find itself well worn, stained by tears, and brushed by laughter in the lap of parents, adolescents, educators, students and professionals. Here comes the rain and the sunshine, all at once. Second Edition, 2005 (First edition 2002). 5.5″ x 8.5″ Soft cover. 350 pages. memoir/African American/adoption.
“Penetrating. John’s is a truly fresh voice emergent from an insightful American childhood.”
—Terrie Williams, author of The Personal Touch and Stay Strong: Simple Life Lessons for Teens. Founder, The Stay Strong Foundation
“One of the few books to examine transracial adoption from a balanced perspective and to make a strong case for considering culture in placement decisions. It should be read by all adoptive parents, caseworkers, agency heads, policymakers and groups concerned about the best interests of children of color in foster care.”
—Robert B. Hill, Ph.D., sociologist and author of the seminal book The Strengths of Black Families
“Our concept of civil rights and spiritual responsibility has been peeled back afresh and rendered deeper with this book.”
—James M. Jones, Ph.D., author of Prejudice and Racism
“This is a pot of gold for adoptive parents, and especially for transracially adoptive parents. But more than that, this book is priceless for anyone who cares to voyage into the wonderland that is a child’s heart.”
—Sydney Duncan, MSW, Founding Executive, Homes for Black Children, The nation’s first African American adoption agency
“Powerful. This book is not only beautifully written, it also deserves a wide audience.”
—Writer’s Digest
Black Baby White Hands: A View from the Crib is a memoir that, via the intense intimacy of one child’s life, represents in microcosm the experience of many youth in this society. Beyond race, this story also mines the culturally rich texture of contemporary U.S. American youth and their families. This book has been adopted for high school and college courses nationwide. In addition to its obvious child welfare implications, it reveals much of the complex psyche of African American and Caucasian American children and adults, as well as those of people of all heritages and backgrounds in today’s overwhelming social world.
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