Black garnet books
“So, for me, every business that I open, every initiative that I have, all has that throughline and so they’re just intrinsically connected whether it is me visually telling the story or selling the story, I’m still going to somehow talk about us and uplift our voices and our narratives. ”
Image courtesy of Terresa Hardaway
1319 University Avenue W, Saint Paul
Year: 2020, opened brick and mortar in 2022
Owner: Terresa Hardaway
Black Garnet Books exclusively offers books by authors and illustrators of color. Founded amid the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, the store is dedicated to cultivating an anti-racist community space. Founder Dionne Sims, a Saint Paul community member, wanted to address state the historic exclusion of Black people from the fields of literature and publishing. The bookstore runs on an ethic of community care, from its product curation to the events it hosts and everything in between. Black Garnet Books is now owned by Terresa Hardaway, a professor of design at the University of Minnesota and the owner of a social justice-focused design studio.