From looking outwardly to please others to looking inwardly to define ourselves, we constantly try to cultivate or construct our identities. But guided by the whims of culture or the faulty advice of tradition, we often find identity collapses when life falls apart or change threatens that fragile structure. Is it possible to discover an identity bolstered with unassailable confidence, strengthened for the challenges of life rather than destroyed by them, and free from the whims of cultural pressure? Yes! It is an identity received, not achieved—an identity established in the gospel. In Stop Trying, Cary Schmidt’s storytelling creates compelling scenes in which you’ll see yourself and your self. You’ll understand why defining your identity outside of Jesus Christ is ultimately fragile, hollow, and unsatisfying. And you'll discover that your truest and most fulfilling identity is a byproduct of a relationship that changes everything.

An "engrossing, affecting, and singular" (Publishers Weekly) debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world. While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with her girlfriend, Norma meets with a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one chapter missing in her manuscript, Norma is desperate to know if she needs to leave her girlfriend in order to write The Last Story. The new therapist diagnoses Norma with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder, but Norma isn’t having it. It’s just Oblivion. Haunted by SSRI side effects and life becoming less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. Does anyone else see the world’s poorly crafted plotline? Like, who even wrote this story? Norma begins sharing her manuscript with her therapist, hoping to connect the dissociative dots once and for all—or at least enough so that Google ads stop giving her panic attacks. But soon Norma is questioning everything she’s ever believed about life, writing, and love. And then there’s Norma’s girlfriend, the one with a crack of light in her eyes. Could she be Oblivion’s antagonist, the manuscript’s savior? Or is she just a human? Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today’s world, challenging all we’ve been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.

In Stop Trying to Fix Policing: Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of Black Liberation, Tony Gaskew guides readers through the phenomena of police abolition, using the cultural lens of the Black radical tradition. The author weaves an electrifying combination of critical race theory, spiritual inheritance, decolonization, self-determination, and armed resistance, into a critical autoethnographic journey that illuminates the rituals of revolution required for dismantling the institution of American policing. Stop Trying to Fix Policing is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the rhetoric of police reform, to the next step: contributing to the formation of a world without policing.

Financial Planning is More Than Investment Selection... Life is about determining what you really want and figuring out how to make it happen. Each of us needs to strike a balance―all it takes is understanding what is truly important to you. Stop Trying to Keep Up with the Joneses… They’re Broke Anyway is author Brad Berger’s personal approach to financial planning that goes beyond investment options, performance, and avoiding risk to help you identify your family’s dreams and to start planning together to make them happen. Inside, you will learn to: • Align your financial choices with your most important goals and most deeply held values • Put your entire financial house in order and keep it that way • Have confidence in your plans and your future in any financial market • Focus on the things in your life that are more important than money.

This book was impressed on me by the Lord, to wright these messages in poetic form. Never did anything like this in my life. As God would give me little titles I would wright them on paper which I kept in my pocket. Then most times within a week or two it would end up as a sermon in poetic form. This book covers multiple subjects which each of us face in life. This book is designed for whoever reads this book, to cause you to think things out, and then to form your own thinking as how God would have you process it. The emphasis of this book is to read and study it with an open mind, as you study the scriptures on your own. The reason there are few scriptures in this book is to cause you to want to search the scriptures yourself, to prove whether it is right or wrong. That is why God’s word informs us in 2 Timothy 2: 15, “Study to show thyself approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” This scripture informs us that we are to study God’s word in order to find what God requires of us, what he empresses on our heart as taught by Jesus to us in Matthew 25: 14-30. When we read and study God’s Word, read it with an open mind, asking him what he has for you today. We will never know it all, for we will keep learning till Jesus comes, or we leave this earth. Never allow people to put a guilt trip on you that you must know it all.

The majority of the poems incorporated in this book of poetry have been inspired through my association with the former base for poets from the Philadelphia and New Jersey area known as “Poetry in the Park.” This venue was located inside of Cooper river Park in New Jersey. The group met twice a month and shared poetic ideas, we were like a family, exchanging ideas and encouraging each other as brothers and sisters. Our ring leader was Brother Daoud Bey who was Mr. everything, doing anything that need to be done from MC, keeping things in order, providing music, encouragement, food for thought. And a big kind heart.! Brother Bey was the right hand of Sandra Turner Barnes, Executive Director of Camden County Cultural Heritage Commission. She worked tirelessly to maintain Poetry in The Park for 10 years at the aforementioned location. I was a part of seven of those years at my home away from home. We have found another location in a larger better venue, located in the City of Camden, New Jersey a part of The IDEA Center at the Susquehanna Bank Center.

"Allen understands the daily struggle so many of us face with the fear that we are not enough. And she invites us into a different experience, one in which our souls overflow with contentment and joy"--Amazon.com.