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Tag: eso won books
For a 2021 literary lookback, we noticed Los Angeles is evolving into a haven for Black female-run literary ventures amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. But the evolution started years ago for many of the women taking up space physically and consciously in the LA literary scene.
California’s most populous city only had one renowned Black-owned bookstore with Eso Won Books founded by James Fugate and Tom Hamilton in 1990. The bookstore, located in the Leimert Park Village, recently had a cameo along with The Vanishing Half author Brit Bennett in HBO’s Insecure since star Issa Rae is a producer of the upcoming book-to-TV series for the network.
Years of Black women building safe, conscious spaces for readers of color and allies came into fruition in 2021 through indie bookstores, libraries, and book club festivals.
The new Black woman-run bookstore in the greater LA area is The Salt Eaters Bookshop that had a soft opening earlier this month. Named after Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel, the bookstore was funded through GoFundMe after the George Floyd protests erupted nationwide. One of the main conversations that came out of the 2020 protests were the lack of Black-owned bookstores to supply anti-racist and diverse reading material to local communities and beyond.
Asha Grant, director of The Free Black Women’s Library LA chapter, started the fund online in July 2020 and has since raised $84,500 out of her $65,000 goal to renovate a brick-and-mortar and maintain it for a year. The bookstore is located in downtown Inglewood on Queen Street.
“We did it, ya’ll,” reads the bookstore’s Instagram post after the Dec. 18 and Dec. 19 opening. “There aren’t enough words to describe how blissful this opening weekend was with you all. It was so incredible meeting SO many of you who donated to help make the dream a reality and have been following us and rooting us on from jump. We thank you for your support, all the shared stories, laughs, tears, and sweet messages.”
Already serving the LA area, Reparations Club doubles as a cultural space and a bookstore. Jazzi McGilbert opened the space in 2019 near the Crenshaw area. This year, the bookstore debuted on its new block in the same neighborhood. Reparations Club even hosted socially distanced, in-person Noname Book Club meetings in the last year.
Indie rapper and literary activist Noname aka Fatimah Warner unveiled the Radical Hood Library in October under her namesake book club. The mission of the library is to make rare works by authors of color available to interested readers. It correlates with the mission of the book club to bring works by underrepresented authors to readers via social media and to incarcerated readers advocating for books.
Two of the largest Black female book clubs center around LA with growing virtually beyond the city during the pandemic. Well-Read Black Girl, known for its New York roots, has more of a bicoastal presence with founder Glory Edim spending time in LA. Based in Inglewood and founded by Alysia Allen, Mocha Girls Read boasts over 9,000 members via Meetup.com across 14 chapters nationwide.
WRBG hosted its fifth annual book festival virtually in late October exploring the theme of Black girlhood to complement Glory’s new anthology On Girlhood. The festival featured a message from former First Lady Michelle Obama and a keynote conversation with Gabrielle Union who recently released her second collection of autobiographical essays in You Got Anything Stronger?: Stories.
Glory will headline a podcast with producer Pushkin Industries debuting in February 2022.
Marking a decade of existence in 2021, the original LA book club for Black women celebrated its milestone with a conference also held on the last weekend of October. Mocha Girls Read co-hosted its first Black Readers Conference with Black Men Read that featured authors Kalynn Bayron, Christina Hammonds Reed, and Kimberly Latrice Jones.
The book club is looking for book reviewers in the new year.
With so many developments happening in the last year, LA will be a place to watch for the bookish community in 2022.
Elaine Welteroth, who reached prominence as the first black Teen Vogue editor and now as a Project Runway judge, stopped in Los Angeles Thursday for her book tour and discussed why she wrote the women empowerment memoir to an estimated 400-member audience.
What appeared to be a well-read black girl magic rally at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park started with the cheerful announcement that Elaine’s book had notched itself to the coveted New York Times Best Sellers list. She was then introduced by her former Teen Vogue colleague and friend Lynette Nylander, who conducted the fireside chat.
Right away, Elaine began reading from Chapter 16 in More Than Enough: Claiming Space For Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), which is dubbed “Disturbing the Peace,” which starts with a quote from Audre Lorde and describes how Elaine returned to work from a Christmas vacation from Rwanda for a surprise racial interaction. Her hair was braided into Senegalese twists down her waist—the first time she came to a corporate setting in an overly ethnic hairstyle—and a white female colleague in disbelief asked how her hair had allegedly grown feet over a short amount of time.
This question is sometimes posed to black women who decide to add synthetic or real hair to their braids for a new look to celebrate their heritage, so Elaine took it in stride after an inner dialogue berating the beauty industry for neglecting what is considered beautiful to women of color with telling the woman, “Oh, you of all people must know these are extensions.”
That set the tone for the evening: Elaine describing her humble background in the San Francisco Bay Area as a first-generation college graduate to a high-ranking editor in a magazine media empire. Starting her career in the beginning of the recession, she said she felt the weight of being “black, young, and female,” the trifecta of the media industry teeming with racism, ageism, and sexism.
“We all live in a 180-character world where we are scrolling each other’s success stories every day, and we’re only getting the shiny slice, we’re only getting the prettiest picture, we’re only getting the clearest caption,” she said. “I felt like I owed this community more than I can fit into a caption on Instagram about the most universal aspects of the success story. The parts that get left out from the messy relationships that so often intercept with how we show up in our careers.”
At 32, she said she feared her audience would doubt she was ready to write a memoir, even as her own brother echoed this sentiment soon after she submitted a manuscript questioning her reason to pen an “autobiography.”
“I wanted to throw the plate in his face,” she said of the interaction over a Christmas vacation while he was washing dishes in the kitchen. “I was so emotional because that was the very question that threatened to keep me from doing this and leave it to be my family—it’s always family—that are your harshest critics. At the time, I was so emotional I can only think to say, ‘They don’t even call it autobiographies anymore, you asshole!'”
A round of laughter erupted from the audience, but she continued with the true translation of that moment.
“Then later I really sat with it. I don’t blame my brother for asking that question. That’s the patriarchy talking. We’ve all been conditioned by this mindset that tells us, ‘Your stories are not valid if you look like me.'”
The two-hour event brought up more gems from Elaine’s book like her decision to attend a state university because the boy she was dating was supposed to be there but turned out to be in jail and how on her first Ebony photo shoot she had a serendipitous moment with the hairstylist who happened to be friends with her aunt.
Eso Won Books, the main black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, was the official bookseller at the event.