Elizabeth's Bookshop & Writing Centre Pop Up Shelves x The Well, CDC hosted a grand opening celebration Saturday inside Compass Coffee shop in Akron, Ohio. The Beacon Journal reported that owner, activist and author Rachel Elizabeth Cargle "continues to push for greater inclusiveness in the literary canon. In May, she drew on the tradition of other Black-owned bookstores as safe havens and literary and cultural hubs and launched Elizabeth's Bookshop & Writing Centre, an online bookstore and literary center that aims to center the voices of marginalized writers."
Elizabeth's Bookshop.org site notes that ths bookseller "is committed to contributing to Akron's vibrant economic resurgence as a safe gathering space rooted in the values of community, curiosity, justice, and joy." A percentage of all sales from Elizabeth's will go to the Loveland Foundation to support its mission of making mental health care accessible for Black women and girls.
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| Rachel Cargle | |
"A lot of spaces, whether you're walking into a library or bookstore, there is a very low percentage of books that either center Black voices, Black experiences, queer experiences, disabled experiences," Cargle told the Beacon Journal. "Literature is often the gateway into which we understand so much about life. We're reading stories, we're understanding how we interact with each other, we're understanding how we relate to the world, we're understanding through different characters how other people live their lives.... There's a lot to be said for when a Black child can pick up a book and know that what they're reading can be in some way reflective of their life, that they can see themselves in the magic of it, in the drama of it, in the excitement of it."
The pop-up will offer an array of books for sale by Black, indigenous, queer and other writers spanning children's and YA literature, science fiction, poetry, romance, historical fiction and nonfiction, biographies and more. Elizabeth's also has a list of books written by authors who are from or grew up in Ohio, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Celeste Ng and the late Toni Morrison.
Cargle observed: "There's a lot of reckoning that America has to do in general about how they approach literature, how they approach racism literature, and I hope that Elizabeth's will give people a wide range of resources to start approaching a variety of topics with a center and celebration (of) the Black voices that have been doing this work for a long time, and that that will be a launching pad for people to really start decolonizing their bookshelf and their understanding of the world."