A home for LOVING ROOM: diaspora books & salon!

LOVING ROOM: diaspora books + salon is a Black-owned community reading room (bookstore + cultural salon) in the Central District, Seattle WA, featuring various genres of literature by Black + African writers for readers of all ages. We curate a selection of new and used reading material from US-born Black authors, African, Caribbean, and other Diaspora writers to be read on-site, with a variety of new current titles available for purchase. Our collection includes Children's and Young adult literature, as well as a vast and varied selection of Fiction and Non-Fiction works from Black writers past and present. We aspire to cultivate a space for collective Black ancestral healing and transformation through a commitment to Black literature and African Diasporic decolonial aesthetics.

Our public programs will include a weekly children’s story hour, youth read-aloud, and young writers’ club. Our monthly offerings will consist of our teens’ book club, grown folks’ book club, poetry soirées, film screenings, and whatever else we collectively dream. Through these activities and more, we seek to cultivate a space of welcome and connection for Black readers of all ages and to reclaim thriving Black cultural space in the historic Central District.

Remaining present and aligned with these intentions, we welcome collaboration with Black creatives across all genres— authors, poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other performance artists. Our space will also be available for private events and bookings outside of operating hours.

How your contribution will benefit our endeavors:

While we are a business, LOVING ROOM is truly a community and socially driven project. We aspire to create a literary space for Black joy, connection, affirmation, and creativity to abound. In order for us to manifest this vision, there are some key elements with which we seek your support. At this time, we have invested considerable personal funds in securing the lease for this beautiful space to flourish! We open in August 2022, with our Community Opening tentatively scheduled for August 21, 2022.

This fundraiser requests your support toward:

We deeply honor and thank you for your contribution... and we can't wait to see you and your loved ones at LOVING ROOM!

Blessings + gratitude!

kristina clark, creator + curator of LOVING ROOM: diaspora books + salon

Greetings beloveds! I am honored and excited that you found LOVING ROOM: diaspora books + salon. A little about me—I find joy in warm sunny days near / in water, beads, small smooth stones, incense, natural fibers, and the earthy rhythmic eloquence of natural dye prints in traditional textile design. I love to cook and break bread with friends and chosen family. In another life I danced and played liberatory musics of resistance to colonial oppression from the Black diaspora in Latin America (México, Cuba, Perú). I am a solo mama to two beautiful children. I dream a world where my kids, our communities and the generations to come experience robust belonging, dignity, safety, and abundant love.

A life-long lover of literature, I have been dreaming this project (which I originally called “Living Room”) for over a decade, going all the way back to 2012. At the time I was working on my MEd in Curriculum + Instruction at the University of Washington, and I was simultaneously a bilingual paraprofessional and BSU advisor serving youth at Garfield High School (my alma mater! Bulldogs!). I spent my days immersed in the theorizing and daily lived realities of the ways Black youth encounter and produce knowledge in institutional spaces. I witnessed the possibilities and limitations of reading Black-authored texts in white-directed learning spaces. I took note of the way Black students were consistently policed in libraries (in and out of school), frequently getting kicked out for literally “not having a pass” (!!!); for talking, laughing, being loud—for being kids, and being Black.

Image: Emory Douglas, Black Panther Party 10-Point Plan, #5.

Reflecting on all of the above, I savored the truth of Black ways of knowing and being, that fact that our epistemologies do not consider learning to be an individual act taking place in isolation. Reading alone in silence, taking a test alone in silence, does not suffice as a measure of what it means for us to know. Echoing ubuntu, I know because we know. I verify validate value repudiate in dialogue, dialogically. We meet, we converse, we share, we reflect, we digest, and we approximate the truth. What could it mean for our youth to access a literary space that nurtures the entirety of our radiance? A space that encourages us to read, to know, and at once to stay bold, bright, and Blackity-Black-Black-Black?

Becoming a parent, and working to serve other Black and Brown families in the Seattle area, has only heightened my sense of urgency about the need for such a space. Especially now, in 2022, in this moment of backlash against the teaching of critical race theory (CRT)-- with outright attempts to ban teaching the truth about our histories as Black and African Diasporic peoples, to remove the works of Black and Brown writers, theorists, scholars in institutional learning spaces-- community sites like LOVING ROOM become more vital than ever.

So my wondering has only deepened-- what kinds of books would such a place house? What would this reading room/community bookstore look like, sound like, smell like, feel like? And, how to activate the space in a way that could honor our ancestors as much as these ancestors to be?

I have imagined, curated LOVING ROOM in response to these questions. In choosing the name, an obvious reference to “living room” and a perhaps less notable homage to Ilé-Ifẹ̀ (lit. “House of Love” in Yoruba), I am invoking a vessel that can buoy us, as Black people, toward embodying the Love Ethics that bell hooks so clearly delineates for us. LOVING ROOM exists to nurture a #BlackLoveEthics. I hope you find a home here, with joy, dignity, and melanated ease.

Photo credit: Bryanna Boyd

______________

For more information and to connect:

web | lovingroombooks.community

IG + FB | @lovingroombooks