May 7, 2025, 11:27am
We can celebrate a nice bit of bookstore news this week. Three community rock stars—including self-identified “book girlie” Eve L. Ewing—are joining forces to save an imperiled indie.
As Maxwell Evans of Block Club Chicago reports, an impressive trifecta is coming to save the clocktower. (Otherwise known as Build Coffee & Books.)
There’s Ewing, the author, scholar, and educator behind titles like Ghosts in the Schoolyard and Electric Arches; trina reynolds-tyler, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and data director behind Invisible Institute, a South-Side based journalism production company; and Andrea Faye-Hart, director of the Tiny News Collective.
All three organizers were early supporters of the South Side café and bookstore. Build co-founder Hannah Nyhart calls them “some real day-one folks.”
Build Coffee and Books opened in 2017 on the heels of a successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s housed in the Experimental Station, a cultural infrastructure non-profit on Chicago’s South Side (Woodlawn, to be precise). For the past eight years, the store has functioned as a coveted “third space.”
Home to a coffee shop, many poetry and art workshops, and a meal-based artist residency(!), the store is dedicated to serving its community.
The new volunteer-owners, who don’t intend to take profit from their stake in the project, plan to maintain Build’s sterling reputation. Ewing wants to increase literary events. Hart, who lives in Durham, hopes to facilitate some cross-pollination between South and South Side-based writers. All three of the new owners intend to flesh out the store’s catering program and prioritize staff work-life balance.
I’m personally delighted by this joyful bit of bookstore news. If you’re in Chicago, know you can held build the new Build by subscribing to their newsletter here. And while you’re thinking local, it’s probably not a bad idea to get on the lists of Invisible Institute, Block Club Chicago, and Tiny News Collective, if you aren’t already.
For the rest of us? There’s always Bookshop.
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