WINNER OF THE 2026 BCALA SELF-PUBLISHING eBOOK AWARD FOR FICTION.
His name is Silas Page. And this is the story of what the system did with him next.
A group home that warehoused thirty-one children in a house licensed for eighteen, run by a woman who collected the state checks and skimmed the difference. A caseworker who tried to hand Silas to a predator because the predator paid better than the paperwork. A funeral nobody planned. A childhood the paperwork forgot to count.
Silas Page is the literary novel at the heart of the Author TARU catalog - the book that asks what happens to the children the system has already decided are disposable, and answers without flinching. Set in the cities and institutions that produce Black American childhood, Silas Page refuses the lie that the failures are accidental. The group home is doing exactly what it was built to do. The caseworker is following exactly the incentives she was given. The boy in the middle of it is the only one keeping score.
What Silas carries, he carries alone. What he refuses, he refuses without permission. What he becomes is the question the book leaves with the reader, long after the last page.
"The voice does not soften itself for outside readers. It is the survival math of Black urban life, the lens of the people inside the experience rather than the people writing about it from a safe distance."
For libraries serving readers who deserve to see their own cities and their own systems rendered honestly on the page. For anyone who has ever been told a child's life was an accounting problem.
Silas Page is published by Black Fuego Press, the independent literary imprint founded to publish work that refuses to translate itself for outside comfort.
