THE FOUNDERS TREE - PreOrder

From the Record Keeps Collection - Vol. 1 By Malica Nailah Stallworth | Grand Ri5ing Press

The Founders Tree: Some monuments remember. This one feeds.

This is a pre-order campaign. Your contribution secures your signed copy when printing is complete.

A horror novel. A confidential historical file. A name that has been buried for over a hundred years.

The Founders Tree follows Imani Stallworth, a sixteen-year-old who wins a fellowship at a remote camp deep in old-growth redwood forest in Northern California. The brochure promised sunlight. There is no sunlight in the Grove. There is only a tree at the center of the camp that no one is allowed to approach, a groundskeeper no one else can see, and a voice coming from the direction of the Founders Tree at night... low, tired, and very far from home.

The story will carry you in. What is in the back of the book is why it matters right now.

What is The Record Keeps?

The Record Keeps is a horror fiction series built around a format that has never been done. Every volume is a complete novel. In the back, behind a section called The Receipts, is the documented historical record tied to the real person at the center of the story. Not a summary. Not a footnote. The record... with photographs, with names, with dates that do not soften what happened.

The story was the door. This is the room.

What is inside The Receipts is not revealed here. That is by design. The record is only accessible to those who fund it.

Choose your contribution tier:

The Record Holder - $22.22 One signed copy of The Founders Tree mailed to you upon printing. Your name listed in the acknowledgments as a Founding Reader. You are the reason the record made it out.

The Keeper - $44.44 Two signed copies. One for you, one to give. The book was designed to be passed on. Your name listed in the acknowledgments as a Keeper of the Record.

The Record Keeps (Key) Founders - $75 Two signed copies, plus your name printed permanently inside the book as one of The Record Keeps Founders. Not in an acknowledgments section - inside the record itself, alongside the history this series exists to carry. This designation holds across all future volumes in the series.

For contributions above $75, simply enter the amount that reflects your support. All Founders benefits apply at any amount $75 and above.

Why now?

Curricula are being cleared. Archives are being reclassified. The stories of Black Americans are being labeled controversial content and removed from schools. We are watching, right now, the same machinery that buried this man's name trying to bury it again.

A book is harder to erase than a curriculum. A physical record in your hands, in your home, passed to your child, is an act of resistance.

"I have learned that the people most afraid of tearing down a monument are almost never the ones the monument was built on top of." 

• The Founders Tree

Details:

• Trade paperback, 5.5 x 8.5 inches
• Illustrated with original artwork throughout
• Historical photographs in The Receipts section
• Published by Grand Ri5ing Press
• Copyright 2026 Malica Nailah Stallworth / Grand Ri5ing LLC
• Ships to US addresses upon print completion
• International orders welcome - contact us at GrandRi5ing.com for shipping rates
• ISBN pending (campaign funding)

The record keeps.