Books distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center
192 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 | © 2025
ISBN (pbk): 978-1-946724-89-2
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-946724-90-8
Published May 2025
Defiant Acts
A Novel
James Stewart III
James Stewart III’s powerful debut novel documents the life of a working-class interracial couple and their children in a Chicago suburb in the early 1990s. The father, Jim, is a Black man married to Connie, a white woman with two white sons from a previous marriage. Connie and Jim have three more children together, and the entire family lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a well-to-do, predominantly white community.
Defiant Acts follows the Stewarts through a year in which Jim fights to earn a promotion, the adolescent boys struggle to find themselves, one of the younger children becomes gravely ill, and the parents try to stay afloat in a shaky economy. Within the walls of the Stewarts’ home, race doesn’t factor, but when the family interacts with the outside world, it is inescapable, a basis for identity and inclusion as well as a spur for exclusion and abuse.
Rooted in the tradition of Black authors from Chicago and drawing on the author’s own experiences, Defiant Acts eschews a conventional plot, presenting a series of captured moments—past and present—and multiple perspectives to build a mosaic of the family’s lives. In clear, concise prose, Stewart focuses on the complexities of human relationships and on race relations both in and outside the domestic space, placing emphasis on the values that bind this tight-knit family together: solidarity, care, and hope.
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About the Author
James Stewart III is a Black writer and arts organizer from Chicago. His debut novel, Defiant Acts, is forthcoming from Acre Books in May 2025. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Lampblack, Zone 3, Midwest Review, The Forge, and 580 Split. He is a co-founder of the reading series and artist collective Exhibit B. Stewart earned an MFA from SAIC, an MA from North Central College, and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. He lives with his wife and daughter at the end of Dusable Lake Shore Drive.
Photo Credit: Tuan H. Bui
Praise for Defiant Acts
“Told in a series of short vignettes set around 1992, Defiant Acts recounts fictionalized stories from the perspectives of each family member. Taken together, they offer an intimate reflection of the lives of working-class Chicagoans during a pivotal time in the city’s history.”
—Charlie Kolodziej, Chicago Reader
“Chicago novels, like Chicagoans themselves, are gritty, direct, and no-nonsense. The city can also be clannish, its neighborhoods insular, and its inhabitants suspicious of outsiders, especially of ones who aren’t like them. James Stewart’s debut, Defiant Acts, brings to life a side of the city that we rarely see—the spaces where the lives of people from different backgrounds and different neighborhoods intersect and connect, in harmony and also in conflict. Defiant Acts introduces us to the Stewarts (inspired by the author’s own family). In prose that both sears and illuminates, we watch them cobble together a life in the face crushing economic pressures, of unpredictable life turns, and of casual—and sometimes not so casual—daily hostilities. Defiant Acts is an unflinching look into multi-racial America—and it is an achievement.”
—David Wright Faladé, author of Black Cloud Rising and The New Internationals
“Chicago is a forge for literary realism. Just for starters, Dreiser, Farrel, Brooks, Algren, Wright—a fierce tradition that James Stewart III extends with his debut novel, Defiant Acts. It’s a gripping story of an inter-racial working-class family surviving from paycheck to paycheck. The term working-class in this book comes with a description of work so palpable as to be memorable. Thanks to its agile, inventive design, the novel weighs in at under two hundred pages and reads with both richness and an underlying velocity that brings life to every page.”
—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago
“James Stewart III’s DEFIANT ACTS is a paean to working class America, a carefully constructed tapestry of moments depicting a multiracial family and the bonds that hold them together. I fell in love with these characters, my heart in my throat as they navigated hard work and moves and illnesses, but also laughter and holidays and togetherness. This is a new classic in the storied tradition of Chicago novels, one I’ll be thinking about for a long, long time.”
—Lindsay Hunter, author of Hot Springs Drive