2024 International Book Award Winner: Fiction African American 2024 International Book Award Finalist: Anthology Behold Volume I of "The Best of the Scribes of Heru." Contained herein exist wondrous tales crafted from the pens of the scribes, incubated and curated in monthly workshops immersed in African American culture. The woven ideations of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama often offer supernatural expressions of where we have been and are destined to go: a girl's memories that unravel adult secrets, a young adventurer travels south, a woman's riddance of a stalker in the night, a tale of love spanning seventy years, and a murderous plot from the '70s. An Afro-Cuban Bata drumming guide and a tribute to P-Funk Master Bernie Worrell round out this inaugural anthology. This anthology is part of a literary underground railroad…In the 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown sustained Black literature and orature. In the 1960s, it was the Watts Writers Workshop (1965-1973), Umbra Workshop (1964), Hoyt Fuller and Haki Madhubuti’s OBAC (1967), and now The Scribes of Heru. From the Foreword by Ishmael Reed What I took away was how fluid this collection is. It is not stifled or subscribed like so many academic anthologies. It is breathing, alive, and has motion. That is also at the heart of Black writing, and within the words, there is music, wisdom, and acknowledgment that the old rules no longer apply. Where else would you find the history of drumming and a lesson on drumming, alongside how to quilt and the history of quilting (in the Black community, which was largely ignored when quilting was considered a white-only activity) interspersed with musicians, beats poets, and storytellers of all lineage. This is a multi-hued collection, not linear, not all one Pantone or country, but a reflection of the modern Black writer, who is so much more than the abounding stereotype. --Candice Louisa Daquin, Different Truths Thurman Watts is a broadcast music journalist with an extensive background in print and broadcast media. His work has appeared in The Pan Africanist, Black Creation, Holloway House Publications, The San Francisco Examiner, The San Francisco Chronicle, Cadence Magazine, Blues Blast Magazine, Glide Magazine, and Lake County News.