Ymani Wince. Photo by Alex Lucas-Owiti
At the end of 2021, when Ymani Wince saw Black women across the country starting their own bookstores, she was inspired to form her own on the southside of St. Louis. She knew there was a need for a Black-owned bookstore in the city that celebrated the community as much as it celebrated books by Black and brown authors.
“What if we had a bookstore that wasn’t just a bookstore, but functioned to help the community and functioned to do more things than just sell stuff?” Wince says. “That's how The Noir Bookshop was born.”
Founded on three pillars—education, inspiration and community—The Noir Bookshop wants to be a hub for Black people in St. Louis to share their talents and ideas. Along with being a book retailer, the bookstore will host events such as free lunch programs, author signings, and clothing drives. Wince, 28, wants the shop to be in the community and for it. It will be the only Black women-owned, Black concept bookstore in St. Louis’ southside.
“While the store is for everybody, the concept is about the Black experience,” Wince says.
Plans for The Noir Bookshop were announced in December. Since then, the bookstore has operated via its online storefront and also hosted its first pop-up shop in February at Profield Reserve. Now, Wince is preparing to officially launch the shop’s brick-and-mortar, located at 2317 Cherokee Street, with a grand opening in June. She recently started a crowdfunding campaign to ensure the storefront has everything it needs to serve the community. But before then, Wince wants to give customers a taste of what to expect with a soft opening at the location on April 30.
“The Noir Bookshop will be celebrating its first Independent Bookstore Day, which is very exciting,” Wince says of the soft opening. “There are a lot of independent bookstores in the country, but only six percent of them are Black, so I have special merch that’s going to be created by the Midwest Independent Bookseller Association…that day people will be able to come into the store and see what I’ve been working on.”
The store will primarily sell new and used books by Black and brown authors. The practice of collecting the books is a personal one for Wince, who says she didn’t grow up reading authors who looked like her.
“When I was kid, the books that I knew, the authors that I knew, they weren’t Black,” Wince says. “They were Beverly Cleary. They were Judy Blume, Stephenie Meyer from Twilight—all of those series books that centered around white, female, heterosexual characters. I never saw myself when reading those books, so now I’m getting deeper into Black authors.”
With The Noir Bookshop, Wince aims to replicate that gratifying quest into Black literature for the southside of St. Louis
The soft opening for The Noir Bookshop will be held on Saturday, April 30, at 2317 Cherokee Street from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
