Bamn! Bloom Gets LIT With Black Lit

Book lovers descended Sunday on Bloom to sample not only the assortment of flowers and soaps, but the works of James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, and Jesmyn Ward — brought into the Edgewood Avenue lifestyle store and gathering place courtesy of Bamn Books, a New Haven-based mobile bookstore that focuses on the literature of the African diaspora.

The mobile bookstore is the brainchild of Nyzae James, who opened Bamn Books — the name is an acronym for ​“by any means necessary,” a phrase popularized by Malcolm X — in May. 

“Mobile means I do pop-up shops, I do drop-offs nearby. I’m at any event people want me there for. I bounce around. I go anywhere people want to read,” she said. It also means that she takes orders for books and makes local deliveries, or ships books to people’s houses. 

Elm City LIT Fest co-sponsored Sunday’s event with Bloom. 

James, who is 25, got the idea for Bamn because ​“I have my own personal library and I just love for people to read. So people would just come and borrow my books.” Her library was a who’s who of Black revolutionary writers, from Huey P. Newton to Malcolm X, from Nina Simone to Angela Davis — ​“all of my heroes,” she said.

James had the idea for Bamn before the pandemic began. ​“I really wanted to be in the center of my community, just present and all around. Covid was the acceleration of it all,” she said. ​“When Covid happened, everyone was stuck in the house.” James realized she could deliver books to people herself, safely. ​“I thought, ​‘Hey, why not just give it a shot?’ It was in my head for so long, and I was talking to friends about it, and I had the courage to up and do it, so I did it.”

James currently delivers books in her car; she has ambitions to get a book truck. ​“That way I’ll be really on the road,” she said.

She learned the book trade working at Barnes & Noble before the pandemic. Thanks to that, when she decided to make Bamn Books a reality, she knew which wholesaler — Ingram — she wanted to work with.

“When you have experience, you can pick and choose which kind of vendors you want to go to, and I chose one that had a nice selection of the Black literature that I like,” James said. She set up a point-of-sale system to handle transactions. ​“You need a POS system to help you. It’s a life saver,” she said.

She has a selection of books currently in stock displayed on her website. ​“I always have to have a copy of Assata,” the autobiography of activist Assata Shakur, she said, as well as a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But ​“if you go on my website and I don’t have the book, I can just order it from my warehouse. You have it ordered to me or shipped to your home.”

Local book delivery is part of what caught the interest of IfeMichelle Gardin, founder of Elm City LIT Fest. Gardin reached out to James in January and introduced her to Alisha Crutchfield-McLean, owner of Bloom. ​“And here we are,” Gardin said.

“A part of our mission is to amplify upcoming artists, upcoming creators, upcoming entrepreneurs,” said Sha McAllister, co-coordinator of Elm City LIT Fest.

For Gardin, Bamn Books dovetailed nearly perfectly with her own efforts. ​“I started Elm City LIT Fest because I wanted to expose everyone to the literature of the African diaspora. It’s important for everybody,” Gardin said. ​“It’s important for people of the African diaspora to create self-awareness about themselves and know more about themselves. But it’s also important for other folks to know, and to see stories. And maybe — maybe — it can work to cast down some of the perceptions that people have of each other.”

On Sunday, when choosing what books to bring, she also had the aesthetic of Bloom in mind — ​“the peaceful vibe here,” she said. In response, she brought ​“a lot of self-care books, also philosophical books. I wanted to bring books that would stir some thought-provoking ideas, generate conversation — even if it’s uncomfortable conversation, it needs to be had. So I pick my titles with the hopes to spark something.”

Spark something the pop-up bookstore did, as the space was quickly full of people perusing books, sampling food from Afrotina, and checking out what Bloom had to offer.

“I really got the inspiration for this because I’m very community oriented. I come from a very big village, and they’re my inspiration for everything I do.” She grew up doing youth organization programs and ​“that has always stuck with me. I want to really give back. I hope everyone enjoys it, I hope they love it, and that they take something from it.”

Contact Bamn Books through its website, Facebook, or Instagram to order books or learn about where it will appear next.