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New Year, Old Books

SHE LIT: New Year, Old Books 🥳

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Out of the 16 books below, I’ve only read seven 📚😬

Books with red covers by female authors on the shelit.com bookshelf.

Staying relevant as a book blogger by still reading new books, rediscovering old books

Happy 2023! Champagne clinks and literary links ushered in the new year. Innovating shelit.com for another year means thinking more about the blog’s future and purpose.

Like many readers, my library has expanded beyond its limits, multiplying on several shelves and already outgrowing those spaces. I love buying books from thrift stores, used bookstores, new bookstores, book festivals, library fairs, yard sales, garage sales, estate sales. Anywhere a book can be bought, I bought it.

The urge became more important when I noticed books by Black women on sale, sometimes a rare sight, a revelation I learned from The Free Black Women’s Library Los Angeles. Books by Black women are usually not uplifted online or in the bricks-and-mortar as much as they could be. Neither are books by women of Indigenous, Latine, and Asian descent.

Young adult author Kalynn Bayron shared her disdain for walking into a bookstore that promoted books by BookTokers and noticing only one out of the 10 books was by a non-Black author of color. Diversity is still a problem in the publishing industry in many aspects, especially when it comes to fewer marketing dollars being given to non-celebrity authors of color.

While I’ve been collecting gems by female authors, I also haven’t been reading as many books as I want. As a book blogger promoting new books for search engine optimization and overall audience boost, I ignored most of my books in favor of buying new books, getting new books from publishers, and checking new books out from the library.

Books were piling up like I hadn’t learned anything from Christine Platt’s The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less where she offers the viewpoint of having too much stuff to meet a Eurocentric society’s desire for excess. Or when Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace advised on how to ask yourself what’s working and what’s not working and reflect on how to make things work for you. So, I have too many books that will take me years to read. And I need to refocus my love for books on forgotten treasures while still checking on the over-marketed new books, especially if they’re written by a woman of color. #PublishingPaidMe is still relevant today as it was in 2020.

I have read books in the last year that I want to share more with readers who may not have known about the book or maybe never had the chance to read it. One example is Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, which I bought from Myopic Books in Chicago. Another is bell hooks’ Bone Black. Both had been on my bookshelf for a while, so it felt gratifying to finally read these great works by great authors and discuss those stories.

More bookish outlets are also trying to elevate older works like Belletrist’s 2021 book club selection with Tananarive Due’s The Between, which was originally published in 1995. That book is also on my bookshelf. Thanks to the Ladera Heights Goodwill Store in Los Angeles for that find.

Books from previous years and even decades still need our support and attention. The marketing problem is a historic problem, where books by women, particularly women of color, got lost in the mix among Harry Potter-type fantasies, mysteries by men, and celebrity memoirs, just to name a few. I look forward to sharing my library and love for curation this year by discovering works that deserve to be rediscovered.

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What we’re highlighting

2023 forecasted to be a rough year for books

The spike in book bans spreading from school libraries to big-box retailers over the debate of what’s appropriate in children’s literature is considered to be a major factor in the book sales slump, according to end-of-year media reports. Mostly works by non-White authors and LGBTQ+ authors are at the center of these book bans.

How the publishing industry markets books was one of the insider secrets the public received during last year’s blockbuster trial between the U.S. Department of Justice and Penguin Random House over the publisher’s proposed merger with Simon & Schuster. A federal judge blocked the merger in October. PRH’s global CEO stepped down. Authors and readers alike worried about the Big Five becoming the Big Four. Most of the books we tell you about are from Penguin Random House, as you will notice linked below in other news.

Publishing industry employees going on strike echoed all last year. The only major unionized publisher, HarperCollins, went on strike in November. Workers are still on strike, according to updates to the union’s Twitter feed. They claim that “untrained temps” will be hired to replace them to edit stories, design covers, and promote books. This week, the union asked the publisher’s CEO to return to the negotiation table to end the strike. The employees are demanding mostly fair wages to live in the publishing megalopolis of New York City.

Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry sold less than one quarter of the first week print sales of her 2018 memoir Becoming, the NPD Group found, as the Forever First Lady’s book had a massive book tour with rock concert audiences (and prices) and still became a No. 1 best-seller. The NPD Group also noted Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home by the global superstar organizer ranked as low as No. 4,742 on Amazon.com upon its release, as reported by The New York Times. The reason for the lower book sales: The industry is trying to rebound from the pandemic highs. And a recession is looming.

Ketanji Brown Jackson announces upcoming memoir

The first Black female Supreme Court justice will write about her journey to the highest court. Titled Lovely One for the translation of her West African name, Justice Jackson plans to discuss her upbringing in Miami and her advancement in Big Law as a mother, a wife, and a Black woman. Publisher Random House has not shared a release date.

“Mine has been an unlikely journey,” she said in a statement from Random House. “But the path was paved by courageous women and men in whose footsteps I placed my own, road warriors like my own parents, and also luminaries in the law, whose brilliance and fortitude lit my way.”

Celebrity-helmed book clubs select January picks

What we’re reviewing

From Scratch Episode Recaps

Luckiest Girl Alive Film Makes Character’s Traumas Leap Off the Page

What we’re watching

Kindred on FX Hulu

Octavia E. Butler’s debut novel Kindred has been adapted to the screen with an eight-episode series streaming now on Hulu via FX. The story follows a Black woman living in modern-day Los Angeles who keeps getting transported to antebellum Maryland. She ends up saving her White ancestor as a child and embarks on a journey of fighting for her freedom physically on the plantation and mentally in order to return to her present life. Our book review can be found here.

Want your book and bookish news to be featured? Write us at shewrites@shelit.com.

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Black Women Are Transforming the Literary Scene in Los Angeles

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.

Issa Rae and Amber Dancy, holding The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, outside Eso Won Books in “Growth, Okay?!” episode.

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.

Reparations Club

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.

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what's lit

The Free Black Women’s Library Is Fighting Ban on Facebook, Instagram

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

Update: As of Friday morning, The Free Black Women’s Library founder Ola Ronke tweeted that the organization’s Facebook and Instagram account access had been restored.

On Thursday morning, The Free Black Women’s Library founder Ola Ronke tweeted that the national group’s Facebook and Instagram accounts had been suspended for violating community standards possibly over sharing works by Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde.

With the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world, Ola Ronke said her events had been canceled, so the social media pages now are the sole source of income for her as a single mother and provides a much-needed connection to supporters during this time of social distancing.

Ola Ronke started a Change.org petition to fight the social media ban, emphasizing that she had been building on the organization’s online engagement for five years. The original goal was to gain 1,500 signatures, but by Thursday afternoon, the petition was asking for 2,500 signatures. By 5 p.m. PST, the petition had over 2,350 signatures. In the petition, Ola Ronke writes:

I have not violated any standards. I post about books and the lives of Black women, I never use hate speech or promote violence. I share Black Women’s poems, stories, history and culture.

The ban came after Ola Ronke said she shared a video of her reading “Sweat,” a short story by Zora Neale Hurston in the author’s latest book, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, and “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde in honor of April being National Poetry Month. Ola Ronke said she soon couldn’t log in to the social media pages and received an email about violating community standards that she called “very generic, vague and automated.”

Facebook Inc., which owns Instagram, writes that it prioritizes safety and privacy in its community standards: “Expression that threatens people has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others and isn’t allowed on Facebook.”

The Free Black Women’s Library is a pop-up book exchange that collects books written by black women and shares those books with the community through events such as poetry readings and book swaps. The organization is based in New York with chapters in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, and Detroit. Since we’re based in LA, we have attended several events with The Free Black Women’s Library LA, which launched in April 2019.

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experiences

Free Black Women’s Library Holds Lavender + Lit Poetry Reading

The Free Black Women’s Library held a read-and-relax event Sunday afternoon at the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights section of Los Angeles.

Taking place in the Purple Garden among purple parasols and plants, the Lavender + Lit on July 21 featured a reading by poet Mahtem Shiferraw, who shared her new collection of poems, Your Body Is War. Her curated reading list sparked a conversation on handling generational trauma.

“With the newer generation trying to distance themselves, they end up replicating the same traumatic act of violence or aggression without actually doing it themselves,” said Mahtem, who spoke from her cultural experience of being Ethiopian and Eritrean. “So part of the process of healing, or when distancing ourselves, we can also recognize what happened because of that ugliness and beauty. We came from that.”

Under the parasols shielding the 40 attendees from the 80 plus-degree heat, the poet and attendees, mostly millennials, discussed their roles in helping an older generation understand the obstacles.

“For Ethiopian people specifically, I know they open more when they’re around friendly faces and when they’re eating and they’re joking, so things come out like that, then they get serious,” Mahtem said. “If I try to have a one-on-one sit-down, they will never talk to me. It’ll be like, ‘Who are you asking me this?’ I don’t mean with just strangers; even my family members will not talk to me like that.”

The two-hour event also allowed the attendees to roam among woven baskets of books separated by genres that make up the library that includes hundreds of works all by black women writers. The Los Angeles arm of the New York-based organization launched in April.

 

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experiences

Free Black Women’s Library Los Angeles Holds Launch Party in Slauson Community

Asha Grant, founder of The Free Black Women's Library Los Angeles, at the launch party on April 27, 2019.

Free Black Women’s Library celebrated its Los Angeles launch Saturday night at the Hilltop Coffee & Kitchen on Slauson Avenue in the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood with the performances by eight Black female poets.

The featured local poets were Amoni Thompson-Jones, bridgette bianca, Camari Carter, Iman Milner, Jessica Gallion aka YELLAWOMAN, Nadia Hunter Bey, Shakira Peterson, and Shonda Buchanan.

The party started with a networking hour for attendees to bond over literary happenings in the coffeehouse that’s quickly becoming a haven for similar events. A live artist, Brittney Price, painted a piece she later donated to the cause. Quotes were pasted on the glass from Black women writers such as bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange. Bouquets of flowers sat on the tables with most attendees sitting in seats in front of the window that provided a backdrop of the sunset with painted skies for the poets as they recited their melodies.

As each poet spilled her soul to the crowd, applause naturally erupted. The poems magnified the Black female experience from different perspectives. For example, bridgette bianca and Camari Carter mentioned the death of six adopted Black children killed by their White lesbian mothers where one drove their SUV over the cliff in Mendocino County, a story forgotten in the constantly ticking news cycle. YELLAWOMAN lyrically spoke about her experience as a light-skinned woman with Louisiana roots while Shonda Buchanan played a drum and chanted a song before her poetry to honor her African-American and American-Indian roots.

The library’s goal is to compensate Black women for their artistry while collecting #300BlackWomenBooks, or 300 books authored by Black women, by June. Donations will be accepted at subsequent events and this address: 5350 Wilshire Blvd P.O. Box #36618 Los Angeles, CA 90036.

The original branch of the library was created in 2015 by Ola Ronke Akinmowo in Brooklyn, New York, the same year and place where Well-Read Black Girl began. The idea is to provide “a free, feminist pop-up library and book swap with Black women writers at the center,” as its mission states.

Asha Grant, the director of the Free Black Women’s Library LA, was the mistress of ceremonies at the launch party. She said she recently moved back to the LA area and wanted to bring Akinmowo’s mission here.

The next event has not been announced yet but Grant said it will involve interactive journaling with sitting on pillows, a more relaxed atmosphere compared to the party.