# The Houston Trio *A Biography of Beyonce* — Legendary Biographies No. 167 - **Subject:** Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter - **Written by:** Keisha Morgan - **Shelf:** Music / Pop - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 141 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 141 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-132-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Kennedy Lane (ISBN 979-8-90623-236-6) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/167-the-houston-trio.html ## About this book She was born Beyoncé Giselle Knowles on September 4, 1981, in Houston, Texas, the elder of two daughters of an IBM account executive and a beauty-salon owner. She was a member of Girl's Tyme, the precursor to Destiny's Child, by ten. She lost on Star Search on March 6, 1993. She rode home in the family Suburban and her father quit his Xerox job ten weeks later to manage the group full time. Destiny's Child signed to Columbia in 1997, released The Writing's on the Wall in 1999, and Survivor in 2001. Dangerously in Love (2003) launched her solo career. Lemonade (2016) and Renaissance (2022) defined the second decade of her solo work. She married Jay-Z in April 2008 and has three children — Blue Ivy (2012), Sir and Rumi (twins, 2017). She won the Album of the Year Grammy on her fifth nomination at the 2025 ceremony for Cowboy Carter — her first AOTY win and the first time the country category had been won by a Black woman. Keisha Morgan's biography traces the arc through the Houston childhood and the long Destiny's Child years, the Mathew Knowles management and the family-management complications, the Crazy in Love solo breakthrough, the 2008 Jay-Z marriage and the long Roc Nation joint career, the 2013 Pepsi-Super-Bowl-and-self-titled-album visual-album invention, the 2016 Lemonade and the Beyhive cultural-criticism era, the 2020 Black Is King and the 2023 Renaissance world tour, and the 2024 Cowboy Carter and the country-music conversation it forced. What emerges is a portrait of the most decorated American popular musician of the post-2000 era — and the family infrastructure that has made her career possible. ## Contents 1. Star Search 2. Mathew 3. Survivor 4. Dangerously in Love 5. Jay-Z 6. The Surprise 7. Becky 8. Formation 9. The Elevator 10. 4:44 11. Homecoming 12. Renaissance 13. The CMA Snub 14. Cowboy Carter 15. Grammy Night 16. Firing Mathew 17. The Machine 18. Blue Ivy 19. The Postscript ## Questions **Who is The Houston Trio about?** Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Houston Trio — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,128 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 141 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Keisha Morgan is an American cultural biographer and essayist who writes the lives that pop culture devoured. Born in Detroit, raised between Chicago and Brooklyn, she came to nonfiction through music journalism — five years at Vibe in the late 2000s, then long-form work for The Atlantic, where she ran the culture section before leaving in 2021 to write books full-time. Her subjects are the artists and entertainers culture loves and then loses: R. Kelly, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Wes Craven, Ana Mendieta, Bruce and Brandon Lee, Octavia Butler, Anthony Bourdain. She lives in Brooklyn with two cats and an unreasonable record collection.