Last month, rain and a last-minute location change couldn’t keep more than 500 people from Uptown Kid Lit, one of Uptown Manhattan’s biggest family literary events. At the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, families learned about a dog that only speaks Spanish, a girl who finds her bachata beat and a swallow that croons outside the home of a singer’s abuela in Mexico. They came, too, for stories about Taiwan’s first night market, subway adventures and New York City’s first Asian American and Muslim mayor.
While most book festivals are focused on book sales, parents fresh off their back-to-school shopping were able to leave this event with free books and supplies. That’s because the goal of the festival organized by Word Up Community Bookshop/Libreria Comunitaria was more about a shared love of literature and community, said Maria Silva, the store’s assistant general coordinator.
“Books are so important because you share a perspective, you share information, you share knowledge, but then at a place like Word Up, you have conversations around these ideas that fall into another level of fostering communal aspiration, of creating a better place for all of us,” said Silva, one of the people leading Word Up’s volunteer-rooted operation in Washington Heights.
Founder and general coordinator Veronica Santiago Liu opened Word Up as a temporary bookstore across from the United Palace theater on Upper Broadway in June 2011, around when school let out and students faced the risk of summer slide.
At the time, there were no general-interest bookstores directly serving the Heights-Inwood community. But neighbors needed more than a bookshop: Upper Manhattan tenants faced housing struggles and displacement, and advocacy organizations needed a place to share knowledge and resources.
One sign of the community’s support: after a new landlord ended the store’s month-to-month arrangement in 2012, neighbors raised more than $70,000 from over 800 donors to move it into its current space at West 165th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The bookstore remained 100% volunteer-run until 2017. The team now includes three full-time staff and several part-time workers, including Silva.
In Word Up’s brick-red storefront, a display table has sections for African American, Latin American and Indigenous literature. The shop’s focus on community identity and representation is especially clear in children’s literature, with strong representation in Spanish-language and multilingual books.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the surge in ICE agents in the Heights and similar communities made it especially important for this year’s Uptown Kid Lit festival to focus on bilingual books and programs, Silva said. She left most of her family in Colombia when she was young and says she knows firsthand how crucial it is for immigrant children to see and hear stories that represent them.
Word Up also strives to be a safe place for kids to explore their family’s background and somewhere neighbors can sit, read, use the restroom, grab food from the community fridge, find solace or a free book without pressure to buy. Silva sees the shop as a so-called third space, one “where people can just walk in even though we’re not a library.”
Its offerings range from food distribution to art celebrations. For its staff and volunteers, on any given day that can mean managing the community fridge, hosting sewing circles, or making zines. Some days it also means setting up live music at its second venue, Recirculation, a few blocks away on Riverside Drive. Neighbors feel so comfortable with staff that they leave blunt messages in its WhatsApp group. Recently, when the fridge was out of order, Silva received messages asking, “What’s going on? You’re not doing food anymore?”
That kind of engagement is everything for staff: “I feel like I’m texting una abuelita or a tía or tío [a grandma or aunt or uncle],” Silva said. “It’s nice that these people have that kind of line of communication.”
Word Up, which has given away thousands of free books, relies on a combination of book sales, grants, sponsorships and community donations to stay afloat. The store has also, on occasion, expanded its social justice mission beyond the neighborhood. Soon after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, it began hosting pop-up markets with proceeds going to Palestinian families affected by the violence. Despite community tension — and losing a few customers in the process — the collective continued supporting the cause. The markets now happen less often, but another is planned for this month.
Word Up has also joined bookstores nationwide in an open letter to the American Booksellers Association opposing book bans as an infringement on freedom of speech.
“We’re so centered on the community,” Silva said. But for Word Up, that community extends to a larger network of independent and like-minded bookstores outside Uptown Manhattan: “Something that might be affecting a bookstore somewhere else might possibly eventually affect us.”
