Yesterday the American Booksellers Association's 2025 Children's Institute kicked off in Portland, Ore., with a keynote from librarian and advocate Mychal Threets and an opening reception costume party with booksellers dressed as their favorite children's book characters. Attendees voted for the winners, who received Amex gift cards. 

ABA board president Cynthia Compton of 4 Kids Books & Toys in Zionsville, Ind., and MacArthur Books, Carmel, Ind., posed with husband, Stephen Schultz, to remind partygoers it is imperative they Don't Trust Fish (by Neil Sharpson, illus. by Dan Santat).

Hanna Fischer and Kalli King from Rediscovered Books, Boise, Idaho, were absolute perfection as Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth (by Tamsyn Muir).

Karina Dominguez, Katelyn Larson, and Miracle Lucketti (all from Ballast Book Company in Bremerton, Wash.) brought to life The Tea Dragon Society (by K. O'Neill), and had the pleasure of meeting Strega Nona, personified by Steph Opitz from Bookshop.org.

No children's book costume party would be complete without a Frog and Toad, played by Charlie Williams and Paul Thomason-Fyke from Square Books Jr., Oxford, Miss.

There was a political march on the floor lead by characters from Sid Sharp's Bog Myrtle: (from l.) bookseller JoAnn Yao (Books are Magic, Brooklyn, N.Y.), Amanda Olson (Annick Press), booksellers Arianna Arroyo and Kristina Rivero (Books Are Magic), Zainub Syeda (Annick Press).

"We gather at a time when the world feels heavy, the headlines are relentless, and the headwinds you face in your businesses are fierce," American Booksellers Association CEO Allison Hill said in opening remarks at the Children's Institute in Portland, Ore., yesterday. "But being here together reminds us of something essential: you are not alone. You are part of something bigger. The work you do as independent booksellers is not just important--it is crucial.

"You uplift diverse voices. You offer third places--safe spaces for dialogue, connection, and belonging. You defend the freedom to read. You stand against censorship. You champion ideas over ideology. You promote long-form reading in a world of sound bites and short-attention spans. And in doing so, you help protect fundamental rights, critical thinking, even democracy."

Allison Hill

Hill observed that "everyone in this room knows that reading makes people more informed, more empathetic, and more engaged. When you put books into people's hands, you all are cultivating informed, empathetic, and engaged citizens. And a functioning democracy depends on that. Your work could not be more vital right now.

"To the children's booksellers and bookstores here today: you have long been the heartbeat of this industry. You carry the beautiful responsibility of nurturing the next generation of readers, sharing books with them that help them become themselves and encourage them to dream--two necessary steps to them becoming the changemakers we desperately need.

"For all of you, we hope this week affirms your work, strengthens your resolve, and reminds you of the deep joy and tremendous opportunity that lies in bookselling in these challenging times."

Hill also thanked the publishers who sponsor Children's Institute, including lead sponsor Ingram; as well as "our heroes," the authors and illustrators attending Ci; the booksellers participating on panels who are sharing their experience and insight; ABA staff who "have done amazing things to make this happen"; and finally all the attendees, "for taking time away from your bookstores, your people, your pets, your plants, your busy lives, and hopefully your worries, to be here in community and in celebration."

Clarksville Book Shop was vandalized earlier this week, just days before the store's scheduled soft opening on June 20 and grand opening June 26 at 3900 Hollingwood Blvd., Suite D., in Clarksville, Tenn. WKRN reported that co-owners Franklin and Rachael Mir, who have started working to get back on track, saw the damage when they arrived at the bookstore Tuesday morning. "From the door you can see the dust and my daughter was asking me, 'Did something happen to the floors?' " Franklin Mir said. "And then when we opened the door, we realized that someone had been here."

The dust was foam from their fire extinguisher "and covered nearly everything. In addition, the owners found drinks and tools thrown across their business and a giant hole in the wall," WKRN noted.

Kir said he called 911, and "in less than two minutes, they were here. It was fast. Three officers came--two patrol cars--they were really thoughtful, thorough, they took their time." He added that he suspected the officers may be fellow bookworms: "They were sad because they were waiting on the store to open. I'm guessing they're book readers because they really wanted to be here. They were also here this morning." 

Having worked for more than two years to launch the business, the Mirs are now trying to stay on track to open, and hope to soon put this chapter behind them. "It's a major setback because, as you can see, this is not going to be a one-day clean up," he said. "So I don't know how long it's going to take, but hopefully we will be opening next Friday." 

The bookstore posted on Facebook: "So grateful to Clarksville Police for their quick response and super grateful that our friend was on duty today. Our building manager rushed out and FiveStar Construction was there so fast to do all they could. And we couldn't ask for better neighbors either. All in all, I'm grateful the vandalism wasn't worse and I appreciate the outpouring of love and support."

BEM, a bookstore focused on Black food literature that debuted online in 2021, has signed a lease for a bricks-and-mortar location in Brooklyn, N.Y., Eater reported. 

Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport

Founders and sisters Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport have found a space at 373 Lewis Ave. in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood and are planning for a fall opening. The bookstore will focus not only on cookbooks but also on literature in which food plays a prominent or interesting role, with all titles written by Black authors. 

In addition, BEM will have a kitchen and bar counter. Customers will be able to order pastries, coffee, snack plates, and drinks, while the Davenports will be able to host supper clubs, cooking classes, and other culinary events.

The Davenports have been working toward opening BEM for a long time. They had always planned on having a bricks-and-mortar space and created a business plan for the bookstore in September 2019, as part of the Brooklyn Public Library's PowerUP program. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, forced them to debut as an online bookstore.

Per Eater, the Davenports had been eyeing the space at 373 Lewis Ave., which previously housed a Danish and Colombian cafe, since about 2022. At the time, though, the owner wouldn't rent it, which led to the Davenports launching a Kickstarter campaign early last year to help them open in a different space. 

Although the campaign proved successful, the space was not ideal, and the Davenports returned to the 373 Lewis Ave. space, this time trying to buy it with a Small Business Administration Loan. The owner then decided not to sell, but did finally offer a lease. 

One benefit to the long wait, Danielle Davenport noted, is that it has allowed them to develop a strong following and cultivate a community.

The Dusted Shelf Bookstore has opened at 15845 Hwy. 105, Ste. 112, in Montgomery, Tex. Community Impact reported that Sydney Walker, co-owner of the shop with her daughter, Gretchen Walker, "is hoping to build and grow a community that allows book clubs to meet at the store and writers to work in a creative environment."

The bookstore offers a titles in a variety of genres, as well as tabletop games, apparel, bookmarks, T-shirts, tumblers, hats, and more. Sydney Walker added that she wants to host poetry slams, local author readings, and other community events. 

After opening, the Dusted Shelf posted on social media: "We are a small, but rapidly growing bookstore that has books (of course), apparel, bookish merch, snacks, and much more!... Can't wait to see what you pick for your next summer read!"

Books-A-Million is remodeling a new bookstore location at 2920 Meadow Creek Drive in Bossier City, La. K945 reported that the bookstore chain is not a newcomer to the city; a BAM store on Airline Drive closed in 2014.

Although an official opening date for the new BAM bookstore has not been announced yet, K945 noted that "there is a QR code posted that gives residents information on how they can apply for a job at the new store." 

At the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City, Alexandra Eldridge (left) spoke with Red Wheel/Weiser's creative director, Kathryn Sky-Peck, at the launch event for The Oracle of Rewilding (Weiser Books), coauthored by Eldridge and Sherry Salman. 

Oprah Winfrey has chosen The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb (‎Marysue Rucci/S&S) as the June Oprah's Book Club Pick, describing the novel as "a page turner and emotional journey exploring addiction, forgiveness, grief and ultimately redemption. A tragic accident spurs powerful questions about fatherhood, marriage and friendship."

"Wally Lamb takes us on an incredible and transformative journey from the depths of despair to the healing power of being able to face the truth--and eventually find forgiveness," Oprah said. This is the third time Oprah has chosen Lamb for her book club. It is her 115th pick.

Winfrey interviewed Lamb for the most recent Oprah's Book Club: Presented by Starbucks podcast, available here.

The Chatham Bookstore in Chatham, N.Y., shared photos of the shop's Pride Month displays in a Facebook post, noting: "It's hard to put into words just how much Pride means to us here at The Chatham Bookstore, especially at a time when the rights of the most marginalized among us, including the LGBTQ+ community, are being threatened every day. We know that queer books can be a lifeline for many readers; they're also some of the most exciting, boundary-pushing literature out there. We're proud of our excellent selection all year round, so drop in anytime to take a look/ask us for recommendations! Hope to see you all in the store, in a book, and in the streets this Pride."

The two most popular books in May at Reading Group Choices were Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey (Bloomsbury) and Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books).

Cate Turner has been promoted to publicist from associate publicist at Nicole Banholzer PR.

Mary Harron will direct The Highway That Eats People, based on the 2010 novel The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, Screen Daily reported. Harron has co-written the script with her American Psycho collaborator, Guinevere Turner. WestEnd Films is handling international sales. 

Anna Cobb (Bones & All) and Charlie Plummer (The Return) lead a cast that also includes Rory Culkin, Jim Gaffigan, Jack Haven, and Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney. The film is produced by Emily Kim Wiedemann of Greencard Pictures, Euphoria costume designer Heidi Bivens, Kevin Shulman and Joshua Astrachan of production company Animal Kingdom. Filming is set to begin this fall in the U.S. 

"I am very excited to work with WestEnd Films to bring The Highway That Eats People to the screen," Harron said. "The story is both violent and darkly funny, frightening and poignant--a road movie through a hallucinatory American no man's land that I believe is perfectly attuned to these unsettling times."

Winners of the 35th annual Reading the West Book Awards, sponsored by the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association and chosen by booksellers and readers, have been announced. The virtual event featuring acceptance remarks from each winning author can be seen here. The winners:

Fiction: The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
Debut fiction: The Turtle House by Amanda Churchill (Harper)
Poetry: The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake (University of Georgia Press)
General nonfiction: By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle (Harper)
Memoir/biography: Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian's Journey Home by Chris La Tray (Milkweed Editions)
Picture book: The Ballad of Cactus Joe by Lily Murray, illustrated by Clive McFarland (Silver Dolphin Books)
Young reader/middle grade: Buffalo Dreamer by Violet Duncan (Nancy Paulsen Books)
YA/teen: The Glass Girl by Kathleen Glasgow (Delacorte Press)

photo: Alex Rice

Olive Senior is the author of 20 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's literature. She was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2021 to 2024, and has received numerous awards and honors, including honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) and York University (Canada), Canada's Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She splits her time between Toronto, Canada, and Kingston, Jamaica. Her new book, the historical novel Paradise Once (Akashic Books, June 3, 2025), brings to life the resiliency of the Indigenous Taíno people in the Caribbean whose culture was virtually destroyed within two generations of their "discovery" by Christopher Columbus.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Learn about the Caribbean Taíno, the Indigenous people Columbus met in 1492. Paradise Once captures a world of encounter, genocide, and resistance. 

On your nightstand now: 

I'm rereading Elmore Leonard's Cuba Libre. I turn to genre fiction for relaxation but also when, from the masters like this, I need to sample perfect storytelling. 

Favorite book when you were a child:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Still my favorite. It unconsciously instilled in me, a little country girl from Jamaica, both curiosity and courage to go forth into the unknown. 

Your top five authors:

I keep changing over time (and a long life of reading), but fiction always: Charles Dickens, Gabriel García Márquez, Terry Pratchett. Currently: Edwidge Danticat, Bernardine Evaristo. All passionate storytellers with a strong moral compass and engagement with the human condition. For poets, for the same reason, I could add Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, Pablo Neruda.

Book you've faked reading:

I won't confess to any contemporary author so I'll say John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire. A genius way to make New World history come alive.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I never have, but I hope someone might buy Paradise Once for its beautiful, evocative cover (and read it, of course).

Book you hid from your parents:

MAD magazine and comics generally as they were believed by all authority figures to lead to brain rot. But I learned so much about writing humor and satire from the early days of MAD. So, "What, me worry?"

Book that changed your life:

Sorry, I am cheating here with three. Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote was the first book outside of the English literary canon (on which I was fed) where I became conscious of a landscape like my own (palm trees!) and people of color in literature. This was probably the first adult book by an American author that I read, on my own in a little library beside the sea in Montego Bay. As a teenager yearning to write, it made me realize that the world I inhabited could be my subject matter. That world has remained the source of everything I have written since. (I might add that I read this before the upsurge in Caribbean writing or my later exposure to African American literature). 

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez swept me off my feet with the sheer exuberance of the storytelling. But it too made me realize how fabulous stories existed not just in storybooks from far-flung lands, but in the very fabric of our everyday Caribbean lives. 

Only much later did I realize that the book that did change my life was my own first collection of stories, Summer Lightning, set in rural Jamaica. The fact that it won an international literary prize was the affirmation I needed that my desire to be a writer in a world that did not then support the idea, was the right one. 

Favorite line from a book:

Not from fiction or poetry but from seed biologist Carol Baskin. Her description of a seed as "a baby plant, in a box, with its lunch," also perfectly describes a nascent poem as self-contained and ready to sprout, with a little nurturing. Like all seeds. Perfect!

Five books you'll never part with:

Dictionary of Jamaican English by F.G. Cassidy and R.B. Le Page. A book that broke the colonial mirror and showed us ground truth reflected in our own language and cultural practices. 

Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions by Lawrence E. Sullivan. This has been my bible in trying to understand the worldview of the Taíno (subjects of Paradise Once) but also of the peoples of the Americas pre- and post-Columbus. Our Indigenous ancestors. 

Elemental Odes by Pablo Neruda. I hold on to all of Neruda but the Odes are there to remind me always of how poetry can be crafted from the simplest of materials.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with the Tenniel illustrations. Forever down the rabbit hole.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

I'd like to read again for the first time, the early publications by three leading (and very different) Caribbean poets to find the seeds of their future greatness (à la Baskin, above). In a Green Night by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Rights of Passage by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Tamarind Season by Lorna Goodison.

Closing thoughts:

I could give different answers to everything on different days. I don't keep a record of what I read, and books and authors flash in and out of my memory. So tomorrow I'll say, why didn't I include... ? Readers might be surprised that my book list is not all fiction or poetry. My creative spirit is greatly nourished by my nonfiction reading. 

Journalist Alexis Okeowo's insightful second book, Blessings and Disasters, examines the complicated history of Alabama through a mixture of history, reporting, and personal reflections on her experience growing up in Montgomery. "In Alabama, I learned how to speak my mind and make my way by force," Okeowo writes. She explores the intersections of the state's environmental, social, and political histories: its lush and fertile climate, the enduring legacies of colonialism and slavery, the close-knit (sometimes exclusionary) nature of its communities (religious and otherwise), and the wide gaps between stereotypes and reality. As she delves into Alabama's contrasts and contradictions, Okeowo (A Moonless, Starless Sky) shares her love for--and sharp criticism of--her home state.

A graduate of Princeton University who later became a foreign correspondent, Okeowo is "familiar with how places can be stereotyped and neglected." She goes beyond the broad strokes that often represent Alabama to the rest of the U.S.--cotton fields, white Southern religion, and a long history of poverty and racism--to tell a more intriguing and much more complex story. She chronicles the forced removal of Native American peoples from Alabama, interviewing several members of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians who still live in the state and are determined to secure greater political and financial success for their community. Okeowo also chronicles her parents' separate journeys from Nigeria to Alabama during their student days, their eventual decision to raise their family in Montgomery, and the ways her background separated her from her Black American classmates. She interviews Alabamians of multiple races, genders, and generations about their experiences, piecing together a mosaic of different ideas about what it means to be from Alabama. Along the way, she examines the influence of evangelical Christianity on state politics; the intertwined effects of race and class on education and other outcomes for children; and the narratives the state has created to justify its policies.

"In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster," Okeowo writes, musing on how the realities of her home state--its weather, culture, and religion--reflect (and swing between) those two extremes. With a keen eye for detail and a thoughtful big-picture perspective, Okeowo paints a layered portrait of a state whose green fields contain more heartbreak and more hope than most people realize. Alabama is more than cotton, Confederate flags, and civil rights, and Okeowo's book is a nuanced look at a place she wrestles with and will always love. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Shelf Talker: Journalist Alexis Okeowo's insightful second book delves into the complicated social and political history of her home state of Alabama.