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| Danielle Mullen at Semicolon Bookstore | |
From February 3 to February 27, Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago, Ill., will be running a pop-up shop at Time Out Market Chicago in Fulton Market.
Per TimeOut Chicago, the pop-up's inventory will rotate each week, from "anti-racism basics" during the first week of February to the final week featuring "in-depth histories of the Black Panthers, Assata Shakur and other Black revolutionaries." In addition to those rotating selections, there will be fiction and nonfiction from BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors. Three storytime sessions for children are also planned at the pop-up.
"Every day we get to change the narrative of what Black literature looks like," store owner Danielle Mullen told TimeOut. "There has long been an idea that Black people don't read when, statistically, Black women buy more books than everyone else. We're just showing that new narrative and putting it on display for the world or anybody who ambles into my store to be able to see."
Mullen founded Semicolon in summer 2019 in Chicago's River West neighborhood. Since then she's moved the bookstore and gallery space to a larger location in Wicker Park and launched a literacy nonprofit. An author and entrepreneur, Mullen was inspired to open her bookstore after a cancer diagnosis in early 2019. While she was told to take it easy, she wanted instead to find a way to combine her interests in art and literature.
"A semicolon represents where an author could choose to stop a sentence but move forward," she said. "Semicolon was me deciding to move forward after that diagnosis."