SOUTH LOOP — A community of Chicago’s Black woman booksellers will celebrate the diversity of Black writers and stories with a book fair this weekend.
The Black Girl Book Fair is 7-10 p.m. Saturday at Kido Chicago, 1137 S. Delano Court in the South Loop. Admission to the adult-focused event is free. These bookstores will sell books and merch at the fair:
The sellers will have a wide variety of genres on hand, from fantasy and romance to children’s books and more. The fair’s name reflects the makeup of its organizers, but “we want everybody” to come and shop, Kido owner Keewa Nurullah said.
The book fair was created “with the mission of making it easy for book lovers [and] our supporters to support small businesses and support Black woman-owned booksellers intentionally heading into the holiday season,” Nurullah said.
The event “lets everybody know what the Black woman-owned bookstores are all about,” said Verlean Singletary, co-owner of Da Book Joint. “You can meet a group of us that you can commune with, depending on what side of town you live in.”
Many of the sellers have worked with each other at points, sharing what they’ve learned about successful business practices, said Jurema Gorham, executive director of Burst into Books.
But the Black Girl Book Fair marks the first time “all of us [will come] together” for a public event, Gorham said.
“In general in industries, people are competitors, but they’re also collaborators,” she said. “Wendy’s and McDonald’s, up front, look like competitors. But in the back rooms, they’re together saying, ‘How can we work together to get this money?’
“We all preach the importance of sustainability, [which comes] from our communities coming together. Hopefully this is the catalyst of what will continue to be the case.”
The Black Girl Book Fair gives shoppers a chance to explore the “diversity” of Black writing, said Courtney Bledsoe, owner of Call and Response Books. Black authors are sometimes wrongly assumed — by audiences and by publishers — to only write stories about their traumatic experiences, she said.
The book fair will challenge that perception by showcasing cookbooks, science fiction, poetry and other writings on a variety of topics which comes from the Black community, Bledsoe said.
“Having this representation across the spectrum of literature is important to see, so there’s not this perpetuating narrative that there’s ‘only one story to tell,’” she said. “You could fill libraries with the vast amount of stories we can tell. … It’s really neverending how many diverse and nuanced stories there are out there.”
The fair will similarly show off the diversity of the booksellers who are organizing it, as “even though we are all Black bookstores, we all have unique flairs, unique passions and unique talents we all bring to the table,” Bledsoe said.
The book fair will be one of the final events hosted at Kido, as the children’s boutique is set to close Dec. 23 after six years in business.
“Events like this are helping really make this time, for me, less about sadness and more about celebration,” Nurullah said. “I know that the South Side is in safe hands with all of these women doing the work, and hopefully I’ll figure out another way to stay in the community.”
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