DEBUT
NOVEL
WATERMELON SUMMERS
A Ceremonial Autoethnography by MR. TOMONOSHi
“EVERYTHANG’S SWEETER AND A LIL MO SPIRITUAL IN THE SOUTH.”
WATERMELON SUMMERS is a Southern Afrofuturist coming-of-age novel by MR. TOMONOSHi—a lyrical, ceremonial autoethnography blending fiction, memory, and Black theological imagination. Framed as a field journal, it explores family, ritual, and emotional inheritance through the eyes of Coltrane Johnson III. A sacred record of Black life in the South. A spiritual archive disguised as a novel.
“WATERMELON SUMMERS offers us a most unique perspective on black life and creativity.
MR. TOMONOSHi, moves between parable, reflections, hard truths and comedy to offer us a whole human being. His wit is a balm..”
— Theaster Gates
ABOUT MR. TOMONOSHi!
MR. TOMONOSHi is a multidisciplinary author, illustrator, and Pedagogical practice rooted in emotional inheritance, cultural ritual, and Black sociological imagination.
The founder of TOMONOSHi! Publishing—the home of his ceremonial philosophy, the TOMONOSHi Gospel.
His work is a celebration of the fantastical whimsy of Black life, a poetic excavation of ancestral memory through emotional archaeology, and a living form of Black American Futurism. Through books, performance, and ritual storytelling, MR. TOMONOSHi crafts mythic infrastructure for legacy, healing, and imaginative expansion—equipping generations to remember, imagine, and reimagine.