Black History Book Club: The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard

Tampa's Black History Museum hosts the next session of the Black History Book Club on Monday, October 26, from 5:30 to 6:45 PM. This time, the group is discussing The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard, a novel first published in 2017.

The club launches a new season each year centered on Black life in America as shaped by economics, culture, and political struggle. It brings together novels, memoirs, essays, and works of social thought, with each meeting focusing on a single book. The goal is to create space for conversation and shared learning rather than rushing through the material. Over the course of the series, the reading spans nearly a century of Black writing, from Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel to Cornel West's Race Matters and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait.

Hubbard's novel blends speculative fiction with social satire. It follows a Black family whose inherited superhuman abilities are shaped as much by race and class as by power, and Hubbard uses humor and genre to ask how American society defines value, success, and survival for those navigating inherited systems of inequality. The session opens up a community conversation on Black authorship and imaginative storytelling.

The meeting runs from 5:30 to 6:45 PM at the museum, located at 1213 N. Central Ave in Tampa, and it's free to attend.