Lucy Yu is the founder and owner of Yu & Me Books, a “bookstore / café / bar” that focuses on the stories of immigrants and people of color. Yu & Me, which is based in Chinatown, Manhattan, NY, originally opened its doors in December 2021, and reopened in January 2024 after a fire. You can follow the bookstore on Instagram. Tell me what led you to become a bookseller. I believe books are the gateway to understanding experiences deeper outside of our own and they lead to true human connection. I’ve always gravitated towards literature because I’ve always been curious about people. During the pandemic, I feel that we all were restrained to just glimpses of connection which were  fabricated by technology but left us aching for the real thing. I was hoping I wasn’t the only one that desired that, so I started to build out Yu & Me Books to create a community bookstore home to encompass all these intersectional ideals I wanted. It turns out I wasn’t the only one and …

Ashley Valentine is the founder and owner of Rooted MKE, a BIPOC children’s bookstore, makerspace, and academic support center. Rooted MKE opened in March 2022 and is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You can follow Rooted MKE on Instagram. Tell me about your journey to becoming a bookseller.  I would certainly say that I am a non-traditional bookseller and bookstore owner. My background is in education; I was previously a Special Education Teacher and owning a bookstore was a dream that I didn’t know would ever come to fruition in the way that it had. I opened Rooted MKE to serve a need for Milwaukee. As an educator, the stories within the curriculum, in my school libraries and provided in my classroom did not look like the community I was serving. I often felt that the challenges many of my students faced related to comprehension and reluctance to experience literature were attributed to the lack of representation. I also felt that there was a lack of community outside of the school setting for families looking for …

Tia Hamilton is the founder and owner of Urban Reads Bookstore, which uplifts Black and incarcerated authors. Urban Reads is based in Baltimore, Maryland. You can follow and support Urban Reads on Instagram. Tell me about your journey to become a bookseller. Why did you open a bookstore?  My magazine, it’s called The State vs. Us Magazine, it taps into the streets and prison and highlights high-profile cases. It talks about the corruption that goes on in the prison, police, and government. It highlights wrongful convictions and success stories of the formerly incarcerated, such as myself. So, I rolled it up in a dope situation, and it’s in the prisons; it’s the number-one source from prisons to the streets, and there’s no other magazine like it. I wanted a store presence. I went to Downtown Locker Room (DTLR), which is an apparel sneaker store where a lot of the gangsters go. I went to these locations with no success. So, I said, “Fuck it. Ya’ll want me in the game? I’m in the game.” But …

Katherine Morgan is the founder and owner of Grand Gesture Books, a new, online-only (for now!) bookshop that specializes in romance books. Grand Gesture opened in November 2023 and is based in Portland, Oregon. You can follow Katherine and Grand Gesture’s journey on Instagram. What led you to open a romance bookstore? It felt like a natural kind of instinct to do. I’ve been working as a bookseller at Powell’s Books for about four-and-a-half years. I currently still work there, running the romance section, and it’s always been my happy place, especially since I got into romance during the pandemic. There are so many romance bookstores, which is great, but very few of them are in the Pacific Northwest.  I knew, based on how much traffic the romance section gets, that if there are this many people who are interested in it, there are going to be people who are interested that live in Portland, or Washington, and want to travel down. That’s when I got the idea: I don’t know if [a romance bookstore] …