Events

Since late March, Program in Theater Director Jane Cox has invited special guests to join her students for informal conversations about theater-making and the creative process. The broader community is invited to join these virtual conversations on Zoom. We ask — what inspires these significant theater artists? What does community mean to them?

For this week’s event, the conversation is turned over to Turn The Page: A Movement to Uplift Black-Owned Bookstores. Turn The Page is a collective striving to ignite a community of readers who commit to decolonize their bookshelves, to redistribute wealth into black communities and to take actions toward Black liberation.

Founder and Princeton alum Edwin Rosales ‘17, along with fellow alum Abigail Jean-Baptiste ’18, will be in conversation with Patrice McKinney and Dexter George from Source of Knowledge, one of two Black-owned bookstores in all of New Jersey. McKinney and George will discuss the importance of telling Black stories and their favorite works from the August/September TTP Black Literature Collection.

The conversation is free and open to the public.

Join the event on Zoom at: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/122252650
Meeting ID: 122 252 650

ABOUT TURN THE PAGE

books in circle with arrow and black thick lettersTurn The Page: A Movement to Uplift Black-Owned Bookstores is a collective striving to ignite a community of readers who commit to decolonize their bookshelves, to redistribute wealth into black communities and to take actions toward Black liberation.

The founders of Turn The Page watched as Amazon sold out of books featured on anti-racist reading lists, while Black bookstores, which have been selling so-called anti-racist books for decades, struggled to stay open during the Covid-19 pandemic. This inspired us to question our definitions of allyship and activism, and Turn The Page was born with the simple challenge to our community: buy and read a book from a Black-owned bookstore each month.

We are grounded in practices of grassroots activism and radical Black collectives that have done the work of Black liberation before us and continue to do the work today. The Turn The Page Collective is a group of multi-racial young artists hoping to deepen our own work in Black liberation through partnerships and collaborations with Black-owned bookstores who are rooted in their communities. We build relationships with Black-owned bookstores and seek out how our collective and our community of readers can best support their business and their community. Our work is about easing the workload of the bookstores with whom we partner, to help counter the ways white supremacist capitalism has consistently worked to stifle Black-owned business.

Turn The Page efforts always center Black literature, Black artists, and of course Black-owned bookstores. With our bookstore partner, we develop bi-monthly Black Literature Collections for our Community of Readers. From these Collections, our readers select the books they want to purchase from the bookstore and commit to reading and engaging with these books . We sponsor events and conversations with Black writers, scholars, activists, artists, and more, which are curated around the works, themes, and questions highlighted in the current Black Literature Collection. Finally, we practice non-reciprocal giving by fundraising for Black-led literacy programs and events in our partnered bookstore’s community and our first fundraiser is for Source of Knowledge’s annual Read and Feed event taking place this Fall.

In just two months, the Turn The Page Community of Readers brought in over $25,000 in sales to Source of Knowledge, purchased over 1,300 books, and raised over $3,000 to Source of Knowledge’s Read & Feed. Our next Collection launches on August 7th and for this launch, we are partnering with Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, who are hosting the first Turn The Page conversation. At this event, we will be speaking with Patrice McKinney and Dexter George from Source of Knowledge Book Store, who will discuss the importance of telling Black stories and their favorite works from the August/September TTP Black Literature Collection.

Starting August 2nd, all Turn The Page book purchases and any donations for our Read & Feed fundraiser can be made at turnthepagemovement.org/move.

On Instagram follow @turnthepagemovement for all updates.