John Soderberg will be hosting a book signing for several local authors on Sunday, Dec. 13, at his gallery.

One of those authors is Bev Jenai-Myers. The author of “Cowboys of Color” will be signing copies of her sophomore effort, “Passing it On: Moving Stories of Activists 1960-2000.”

“I started recruiting people about a year-and-a-half ago,” she said of the anthology. The idea originally came up in 2003, when she was still working at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“I was working with at-risk students and I was worried about students being bullies to each other,” she said.

Despite and because of the town’s diversity, that was the case for many of the youth. In order to alleviate this, she had them do “I am’s,” where they would explain to the rest of the children what was important to them.

Using her array of contacts from her hometown of Detroit and beyond, she then began trying to gather stories of people who cared and who had made an impact to undo prejudices like her youth faced. She sent out a survey and asked that each person respond with three to five pages.

Iris Gordy, former vice president of the record company Motown, founder of Central Park East School in New York City Deborah Meier, Soderberg and a representative of the local LGBTQ community are some of the people represented in the anthology.

Often, the second work in any artist or writer’s career sags either financially or critically — the sophomore slump — and Jenai-Myers has had her own hiccups during hers.

“I wanted to get people who if I didn’t get their story told, it wouldn’t be,” she said, referring to people’s age.

One of the problems she didn’t expect were the several octogenarians she sent the survey out to having computer difficulties.

“Then I had my divas, who said I couldn’t print this,” she said.

Despite the hard work, and the general trouble anthologies have with publishers, hers said it was well done.

“That felt good. I needed that. It was very, very hard,” she said.

Jenai-Myers is looking forward to going to the signing with other local authors.

“I’m thrilled to be a part of the signing,” she said, though her book only recently came out.

“I haven’t even gotten to exhale yet,” she said.

Another book signing with the authors is being worked on for the spring at Andrea Smith Gallery.

“Passing it On: Moving Stories of Activists 1960-2000” is available online at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon.