MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A new book celebrating Black bookstores just hit the shelves. It's called "Prose To The People," and it includes profiles of more than 50 bookshops - old and new - that have shaped the country's literary landscape. The bright scrapbook-style book includes the stories behind individual stores with a foreord by the late Nikki Giovanni written before her death last December. The collection has been described as a road trip companion for Black history buffs as well as bookstore fanatics. So buckle up as we meet booksellers from New York City to Portland, Oregon. But we're going to begin in Atlanta, Georgia, with Katie Mitchell, the editor behind "Prose To The People."
KATIE MITCHELL: "Prose" started from a deep curiosity. I'm a book seller, and I'm also a customer of bookstores, and I saw how transformative they had been in my life. And I see them as transformative as the Black church or Black colleges, but I saw that they were understudied as an institution. So the book starts in 1830s with D. Ruggles' books and goes all the way till today. And, you know, I think it'll be really cool if people read "Prose To The People" and then are inspired to go to these bookstores when they find themselves in those cities.
COURTNEY WOODS: Hey. My name is Courtney Woods, and I co-own Da Book Joint with my mom, Verlean Singletary. We own a bookstore on the South Side of Chicago. I came back home from college, so I started researching literacy rates on the South Side and that's really what aligned me with the mission. There are bookstores in Chicago, but most of them focus on downtown and the North Side. Adult literacy rates on the South Side are very, very low. So we saw that. We saw that there does not seem to be a plan of bringing more bookstores over here.
So we decided that's where we need to be. And from there, we opened a shipping container, and we were there in that shipping container for three years. So throughout the brutal winters, the super-hot summers, but with the support of our community, we worked really, really hard in that box. So last year, we finally made it to the point where we could go ahead and open a physical storefront.
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VICTORIA SCOTT-MILLER: I am Victoria Scott-Miller, co-owner of North Carolina's first Black-owned children's book store, Liberation Station, and we are based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Liberation Station Bookstore started with curiosity of our eldest son, Langston, who was interested in writing books. What is it like to sell books as a family? I think it is a communal opportunity. You have my husband, who represents fatherhood. You have Emerson, who is an artist but he also represents a community of neurodivergency, right? So we get to see creativity and how reading and writing impact him. And then also you have our now 14-year-old, Langston. And then you have me as mother, creator, also a children's book author. And so selling a book is - you know, is one component, but I think curating our inventory collectively has been a really profound experience for all of us.
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GABRIELLE DAVENPORT: My name is Gabrielle Davenport. I'm a co-founder at BEM Books & More, and we are based in Brooklyn, New York. We specialize in Black food literature. Food really gets at all the conversations that are most pertinent. Culturally, we can talk about climate. We can talk about race and place. We can talk about education. There's so many things that food is a pathway into. We also have a huge collection of kids' books that are, you know, grandparents cooking with grandbabies, and it's wonderful. We have, you know, there's a Dominican one and a Haitian one, and plenty of Black American examples and everything in between. I don't think you need to enjoy cooking to get into food writing. Even if you are not a person who enjoys cooking or likes being in the kitchen, it can still transport you to a time and a place and a specific set of feelings.
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CHARLES HANNAH: It's always amazing when people tell me they put this bookstore on their itinerary because they feel this is a place to be. All right. Hello, my name is Charles Hannah. I am the co-owner, with my wife, Michelle Lewis, of Third Eye Books Accessories & Gifts, located in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Well, to live in Portland is a process of reexamining oneself as a Black person because you have to have the information how this state was organized, how this state was chartered and set up as a white-only state at the very beginning.
There's certain laws that people just kind of wrap their head around. It's like, wow, 'cause Portland was kind of behind the times. Now Portland is kind of picked up progressively but there's still a lot of a history here that still needs to be unpacked. We're positioning this bookstore to be an oasis in a desert. There's a desert of knowledge out there. People are looking for more voices, more opportunities to learn new things.
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HANNA OLIVER DEPP: A really good day starts out with some kiddos coming in. My name is Hanna Oliver Depp. I am the co-owner of Loyalty Bookstores. We are based in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Petworth, and we are dedicated to uplifting marginalized and diverse voices from BIPOC, queer, disabled and immigrant communities. People want to sell our tragedies, but we're here to celebrate the full breadth of what it means to be Black in America, to be part of the diaspora. There's so much to our stories. To be represented in a book like "Prose To The People" is really seeing the depth of this beauty that loyalty is just one link in the chain of. It really just shows how varied all of the different Black bookstores are but also represents how we are interwoven together. It's just - honestly, it makes me quite teary.
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MARTIN: That was Katie Mitchell, Courtney Woods, Victoria Scott-Miller, Gabrielle Davenport, Charles Hannah and Hanna Oliver Depp. "Prose To The People" is out now.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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