SAINT ILE PRESS
Saint Ile Press presents

EMBRACED

The Story Behind “I Like It Natural!”

a novel with portraits

Join the Plate-Passers Coming to Amazon — paperback & Kindle
Embraced book cover — a photographer backlit by golden light, holding a medium-format camera
The Book

Some inheritances are money.

A cigar box holding handwritten index cards, a vintage camera, and a black-and-white portrait
The shoebox. The cards. The blue Bic.

Milan Carter inherited a camera, a dream, and one unbreakable rule.

Milan Carter, 27, shoots weddings in Atlanta and carries her late father’s Mamiya — and his unfinished dream, scrawled on an index card: Book. Our people. Our hair. As we are. When a bride flat-irons her coils on her own wedding day to look “professional in the photos,” Milan stops waiting.

She will make the book her father never could: twenty of the most beloved Black celebrities alive, photographed in their natural crowns, their stories in their own words, half of everything to charity. She has no publisher, no platform, and no idea that the most powerful photographer in the industry is about to steal the whole thing over dinner.

A novel about legacy, betrayal, and the difference between being photographed and being seen — with the complete twenty-portrait portfolio at its heart.

The Portfolio

Twenty crowns. Their words, unsmoothed.

Black-and-white portrait of Odessa Whitfield, silver locs, caught mid-laugh
PLATE I
ODESSA “DESS” WHITFIELD
Black-and-white portrait of Kingsley Adebayo seated in his father's barber chair at opening hour
PLATE II
KINGSLEY ADEBAYO
Sepia-toned portrait of Delphine Baptiste standing in an empty golden ballroom
PLATE VII
DELPHINE BAPTISTE

Twenty celebrities you’ll swear you remember — every one of them imagined, every one of them true.

In the spirit of the story

Become a Plate-Passer.

Inside the novel, Milan’s book is saved by the people who passed the plate — nine hundred names, printed in the acknowledgments, because being named matters.

We keep the same vow in the real one:

Now it’s your turn: your name will be received into the acknowledgments listing on the Embraced website — for good. The list only grows.

And you’ll be the first to hear when the next book releases.

Join the Plate-Passers

Be named. Be first. Pass the plate.

We’ll email you about this book and future Saint Ile Press titles — nothing else, no sharing, unsubscribe anytime. Names appear after a quick human review.

Received, by name

The Plate-Passers

The plate has just been set out. The list begins with you.