Books by Maya-Gawonii
Some things are harder to survive than murder.
Hakeem Morales wants to be the kind of horror actor people build midnight screenings around. At the moment, he’s mostly working nights at a Los Angeles horror bar, The Last Cue; trying not to spiral about his stalled life; and wondering whether his new roommate is trying to kill him.
Antonio Sanchez is older, private, unfairly attractive, and suspicious in ways Hakeem feels should be illegal. He writes cryptic things in notebooks. He jokes too much about Hakeem’s upcoming twenty-seventh birthday. Every time Hakeem almost convinces himself he’s being dramatic, Antonio does something else deeply alarming.
Unfortunately, Hakeem’s growing list of evidence is matched only by his growing attraction—because nothing improves a possible murder situation like developing a crush on the man you’re pretty sure is planning it.
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When novelist Eliza McMillan escapes to a fog-soaked town on the Pacific Northwest coast, all she wants is quiet—an attic room, a chipped mug, and the space to begin again. But Northpoint has other plans.
A line of ink appears in her notebook in handwriting that isn't hers. A voice begins to answer back. And the woman behind that voice isn't supposed to exist— she's fictional. Created. Imagined.
And yet Eliza is falling in love with her.
What follows is a story of letters, longing, and the thin places between worlds—where fiction hums with life, and love dares to write its own ending.
The Margins Between Us is a sapphic love story wrapped in fog, memory, and the small magics that bloom when we start to listen.
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Eight years after their breakup, Kaya Dela Cruz and Theo Vega start receiving voicemails the other doesn’t remember leaving—each one arriving at 12:03 am for the twelve nights before Christmas.
The messages are intimate, aching, full of things they never said. As the boundary between dream and reality blurs, Oakland hums with a strange holiday magic that seems to be pushing them back toward each other.
But some messages are meant to change you, not just find you.
And some love stories only begin when you finally call back.
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In the shadows of the swamp, fairy tales don’t end with happily ever after. They drip with moss and blood, sung by cicadas and haunted by women who came before.
Moss Mother is a spellbinding poetry collection by Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh that reimagines beloved fairy tales through the lens of Black American Southern Gothic tradition. Here, glass coffins sink in bayous, red hoods wander company towns, and witches speak in the tongues of fireflies. Each poem carries the weight of ancestral memory and the shimmer of myth, weaving together beauty and horror, grief and resurrection.
Both incantatory and elegiac, this collection asks: what happens when the stories we inherit are laced with both danger and salvation? How do we claim survival in a world that calls our magic monstrous?
For readers of Toni Morrison, Natasha Trethewey, and Lucille Clifton, for lovers of folklore, hauntings, and Southern night air, Moss Mother is a book of poems that will rock you like a hymn.
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