Prose to the People

A stunning visual homage to Black bookstores around the country along with profiles and essays that celebrate the history, community, activism, and culture these spaces embody, featuring an original foreword by Nikki Giovanni. Black literature is perhaps the most powerful, polarizing force in the modern American zeitgeist. Today--as Black novels draw authoritarian ire, as Black memoirs shape public debates, as Black polemics inspire protest petitions--it’s more important than ever to highlight the places that center these stories: Black bookstores.; Traversing teeming metropolises and tiny towns, Thoughtfully curated by writer and Black bookstore owner Katie Mitchell, Interspersed throughout are essays, poems, and interviews by <New York Times <bestsellers Kiese Laymon, Rio Cortez, Pearl Cleage, and many more journalists, activists, authors, academics, and poets that offer deeper perspectives on these bookstores'' role throughout the diaspora. Complete with a foreword by world-renowned poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, <Prose to the People <is a beautiful tribute to these vital pillars of the Black community.

Auteur
Katie Mitchell is a writer and co-owner of Good Books, a Black online and pop-up bookstore based in Atlanta, Georgia. Good Books has been featured in the New York Times and Oprah Daily and on NBC, NPR, PBS, Mailchimp’s Bloom Season and Going Through It podcast, and many more media outlets. Katie is an inaugural NPR How I Built This fellow, Dorothy Porter Wesley fellow, and Pellom McDaniels fellow. She co-hosts an iHeartRadio-produced podcast about Black storytelling called On Theme.