Spring Roadtrip 2024 Bookstore Feature

No doubt, our association is bursting at the seams with passionate booksellers. In April, five of those booksellers, covering three bookstores, are inviting our membership to come and see how they do things in Columbia, Missouri. Please join us for a custom experience designed to educate our membership and provide lasting connections to fuel your work in the months ahead. 

View the main event page and register to attend

Black Tea Bookshop

Black Tea Bookshop is a uniquely curated bookstore that highlights the work of Black authors. The aim is to uplift and celebrate the variety of Black experiences in the United States and abroad. Black Tea Bookshop is a multi-genre bookstore where readers can find books for people of all ages as well as a variety of topics ranging from science fiction and fantasy to travel, cooking, and gardening. 

Before starting her current fill-time position, Candace Hulsizer, proud owner and proprietress, was a career teacher in Columbia Public Schools. Her passion for reading and desire for children to see themselves positively reflected in stories led her to open Black Tea Bookshop in the winter of 2023. She is part of The Shops at Sharp End, a local retail incubator working to revitalize the Black business community. She is excited for the future, which will include a very specially blended tea that will embrace the essence of Black Tea Bookshop.

Yellow Dog Bookshop

Joe Chevalier and Kelsey Hammond met working at indie institution Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, CA and opened Yellow Dog Bookshop in Columbia in 2013. Yellow Dog offers mostly used books with a small selection of new copies, magazines, and cards. We are small but mighty, offering a carefully curated selection of fiction, nonfiction, and children's books informed by our experience as booksellers and teachers. Our window displays, organized by Kelsey, double as art installations, providing arresting images that draw customers into the shop. Joe meanwhile culls the very best from book sales and in-store sellers to provide a rich variety of titles—new and classic, popular and obscure, comforting and challenging—for our customers. Our experienced staff happily helps shoppers forage for books and provides recommendations for gifts or the next book on the TBR stack. 

Skylark Bookshop

Alex George and Carrie Koepke opened Skylark Bookshop in 2018, two years after Alex founded the Unbound Book Festival. It was the community’s enthusiasm for the festival that convinced him that the town needed a new independent bookshop. But Alex is a novelist, not a bookseller, and so he joined forces with Carrie, an eight-year veteran of one of Columbia’s much-missed indies (and who is very much the brains of the operation.) Since then Skylark has been featured in the book 150 Bookshops You need to Visit Before You Die, and was named by USA Today as one of the country’s 30 coolest bookstores. In 2022 Alex was named Midwest Bookseller of the Year, and Carrie presently serves on the board of MIBA. Together with some of the funniest and smartest booksellers they know (and Theo the bookshop dog) they are always ready to offer an opinion about books or anything else. (Except maybe not sports.)