Celebrate the release of Milk Blood Heat with Dantiel W. Moniz and T Kira Madden!! Loyalty's staff is OBSESSED with Milk Blood Heat and we can't wait for y'all to read it! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice or by purchasing the book below. Donations will go to Black Lives Matter DC. If you order the book from our website, we will send you a follow up email with the registration info. There will also be an option to buy the book during the event.

MILK BLOOD HEAT is the second selection in Loyalty Bookstore's Leap of Faith Quarterly Subscription Box that celebrates a new book from an emerging writer and celebrates that book with all of our might! For more info and to purchase a Loyalty Leap of Faith box, click here. Leap of Faith subscribers will automatically be registered for this event.

“The stories in Moniz’s debut collection—many of which shine a multihued light on Black girlhood in Florida—are to not only be read but felt. Like Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff, Moniz is unafraid to expose the darkened corners of the Sunshine State, and of female desire.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.

A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter--whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family's church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father's ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.

DANTIEL W. MONIZ is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. Milk Blood Heat is her first book. She lives in Northeast Florida.

T Kira Mahealani Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in Hudson Valley, New York. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut memoir, LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS, was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir. There is no period in her name.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Dantiel W. Moniz and T Kira Madden for MILK BLOOD HEAT