Congratulations to Charis Books & More, Decatur, Ga., which is celebrating its 50th anniversary next month.
Per Rough Draft Atlanta, Charis will host a ticketed event celebrating the anniversary on November 2 at Letitia Pate Evans Dining Hall on the Agnes Scott College campus (since 2019, Charis has resided in a building owned by Agnes Scott College). Following the event on November 2, there will be a series of lectures, readings, and more, from November 4 to November 9.
The Charis team has chosen to theme its anniversary celebration on Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower, which was written in 1993 but is set in 2024. The bookstore explained in a statement: "We’ve chosen this invocation from Butler because it dares us to change the world. It dares us to struggle through scarcity and collapse, to build community with the tools available to us, and to imagine a future that is only possible with our people alongside us.
"2024 is a pivot point in Parable of the Sower and in Charis' history, just as it likely will be a pivot point in human history. We mark this 50th anniversary as a moment on a continuum followed by tomorrows we are still creating."
Founded in 1974 by Linda Bryant, Charis originally resided in Atlanta's Little Five Points neighborhood. During its 45 years there, it hosted authors Octavia Butler, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, and many more. In 2019 Charis moved to Decatur, and is today owned by Sarah Luce Look and Angela Gabriel. It also has a nonprofit events arm called Charis Circle.
The Charis team wrote: "We weathered the hardest parts of our history because of the mostly invisible labor of a handful of staff, board members, and volunteers, and the commitment of a small number of donors who helped us keep the doors open when so many other feminist, queer, and literary institutions could not survive. We did this by refusing many traditional capitalist and nonprofit modes and returning again and again to the will and the wisdom of our people."