Books
A selection of books by Dr. Breeze Harper.
The Dragon Comes At Night
(est. Summer 2025)
Auré Jenkins-Scott has a problem.
Every night at precisely 3 a.m., she wakes up drenched in sweat—her room ablaze, a monstrous beast straight out of Dungeons & Dragons hovering in front of her, emerging from a swirling portal to who-knows-where. Naturally, she does what any rational person would do—screams for her husband. But Clyde? He just mumbles something about “night terrors” and rolls over. Seriously, why is she the only one seeing this thing?
And then a surprise guest shows up with an outrageous confession: the night sweats, the brain fog, the sudden appearance of inter-dimensional creatures? Totally normal. Because menopause isn’t just about hormones—it’s about power. And unfortunately for Auré, she’s about to get a crash course in both.
The Dragon Comes At Night is preparing for its first edition under Black Zephyr Publishing (est. Summer 2025 release)
Potato Chips & Wine:
A 90s Queer Teen Love Story
(est. Summer 2025)
Pearl Marie Thomas is a Black girl in rural white New England.
The year is 1996.
All Pearl wants is to find love and the perfect vegan meal without her pious mother bothering her about her 'unkempt dread-lock' hair style, or her stepfather reminding her that unless she 'behaves', she cannot attend the women's college of her dreams: Smith College.
With the literary ghosts of her heroine Audre Lorde' guiding her head and heart, Pearl is in the closet as a 'Black dyke' (as she lovingly refers herself as), required to attend a Catholic High school, and constantly daydreaming about sultry romance scenarios with girls she'll never have, Pearl unexpectedly meets Ramona Lee, a Korean-American teen who captures her heart.
Set to a playlist/video-list of the 1980s and 1990s, Potato Chips and Wine cleverly narrates the joys and frustrations of a Black teen girl trying to survive and find happiness in a mainstream society of the 1990s that narrated Black people as 'born criminals' and LGBTQ community as 'sinners.'
Potato Chips & Wine is preparing for its first edition under Black Zephyr Publishing (est. Summer 2025 release).
Brotha Vegan:
Black Men Speak on Food, Identity, Health and Society (2021)
Black vegan men discuss masculinity, sexuality, race, diet, health, fatherhood, social justice, animal rights, and the environment in this companion volume to Sistah Vegan.
In 2010, Lantern published Sistah Vegan, a landmark anthology edited by A. Breeze Harper that highlighted for the first time the diversity of vegan women of color's response to gender, class, body image, feminism, spirituality, the environment, diet, and nonhuman animals. Now, a decade later, its companion volume, Brotha Vegan, unpacks the lived experience of black men on veganism, fatherhood, politics, sexuality, gender, health, popular culture, spirituality, food, animal advocacy, the environment, and the many ways that veganism is lived and expressed within the Black community in the United States.
Edited by Omowale Adewale--founder of Black Vegfest, and one of the leading voices for racial and economic justice, animal rights, and black solidarity--Brotha Vegan includes interviews with and articles by folks such as Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, Doc (of Hip Hop is Green), chef Bryant Terry, physicians Anteneh Roba and Milton Mills, DJ Cavem, Stic of Dead Prez, Kimatni Rawlins, and many others. At once inspiring, challenging, and illuminating, Brotha Vegan illustrates the many ways it is possible to be vegan and reveals the leading edge of a "veganized" consciousness for social renewal.
Scars
What Happens When Your Journey Home Leads To Yourself
Scars:
A Black Lesbian Experience in Rural White New England (2014)
Scars is a novel about whiteness, racism, and breaking past the normative boundaries of heterosexuality, as experienced through eighteen year old Savannah Penelope Sales. Savannah is a Black girl, born and raised in a white, working class, and rural New England town. She is in denial of her lesbian sexuality, harbors internalized racism about her body, and is ashamed of being poor. She lives with her ailing mother whose Emphysema is a symptom of a mysterious past of suffering and sacrifice that Savannah is not privy to. When Savannah takes her first trip to a major metropolitan city for two days, she never imagines how it will affect her return back home to her mother … or her capacity to not only love herself, but also those who she thought were her enemies. Scars is about the journey of friends and family who love Savannah and try to help her heal, all while they too battle their own wounds and scars of being part of multiple systems of oppression and power. Ultimately, Scars makes visible the psychological trauma and scarring that legacies of colonialism have caused to both the descendants of the colonized and the colonizer … and the potential for healing and reconciliation for everyone willing to embark on the journey. As a work of social fiction born out of years of critical race, Black feminist, and critical whiteness studies scholarship, Scars engages the reader to think about USA culture through the lenses of race, whiteness, working-class sensibilities, sexual orientation, and how rural geography influences identity. Scars can be used as a springboard for discussion, self-reflection and social reflection for students enrolled in American Studies, Sociology, Women’s Studies, Sexuality Studies, African American Studies, human geography, LGBTQ studies and critical whiteness studies courses, or it can be read entirely for pleasure.
Scars is preparing for a new edition under Black Zephyr Publishing (est. Summer 2025 release). Pre-order options below:
Scars Reissue (ebook) - Pre-Order:
Scars Reissue (paperback) - Pre-Order:
Sistah Vegan, by Breeze Harper, PhD
Sistah Vegan:
Black Women Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society (2010)
Sistah Vegan is a series of narratives, critical essays, poems, and reflections from a diverse community of North American black-identified vegans. Collectively, these activists are de-colonizing their bodies and minds via whole-foods veganism. By kicking junk-food habits, the more than thirty contributors all show the way toward longer, stronger, and healthier lives. Suffering from type-2 diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, and overweight need not be the way women of color are doomed to be victimized and live out their mature lives. There are healthy alternatives. Sistah Vegan is not about preaching veganism or vegan fundamentalism. Rather, the book is about how a group of black-identified female vegans perceive nutrition, food, ecological sustainability, health and healing, animal rights, parenting, social justice, spirituality, hair care, race, gender-identification, womanism, and liberation that all go against the (refined and bleached) grain of our dysfunctional society. Thought-provoking for the identification and dismantling of environmental racism, ecological devastation, and other social injustices, Sistah Vegan is an in-your-face handbook for our time. It calls upon all of us to make radical changes for the betterment of ourselves, our planet, and--by extension--everyone.