Building the Bridge: Dara Landry on Black Lit Weekend, Bookselling, and Carrying the Legacy Forward

Dara Landry is headed to New Orleans when we speak, preparing to spend her birthday week in one of her favorite cities and attend one of her favorite events of the year: Black Lit Weekend.

She is excited—not only for the programming, but for the opportunity to reunite with the people she affectionately calls her “bookseller friends” and spend several days doing what she describes as “good, radical bookseller stuff.”

For Landry, co-owner of Houston’s Class Bookstore and a member of the Black Lit Weekend planning committee, the gathering is more than a literary conference. It is a place where Black booksellers are centered, strengthened, and reminded of the history they are helping carry forward.

“There’s no other place for Black bookstore owners and Black booksellers to be centered in that way,” she says. “It is for us, by us.”

Books as an Escape

Landry’s relationship with books began slowly. She grew up in a home where education mattered deeply. Her mother was a teacher who valued reading, even though Landry did not learn to read as quickly as many of her classmates. She loved stories and being read to. She memorized books before she could fully read them herself. Once reading finally clicked, however, it became everything.

“I simply devoured books,” she says.

Her family did not have much money for summer travel, so books became her transportation. Every new story offered a different place to visit, another life to experience, and a new adventure to follow. That love carried her to college, where she majored in English.

“I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do,” she recalls. “But I knew I could read and I could write, and that would take me somewhere.”

Eventually, it helped lead her to bookselling.

Creating a Refuge in Houston

Landry is intentional about telling the story of Class Bookstore as a shared one. She and her husband had long understood the value of bookstores as gathering places. When they were young, broke, and looking for somewhere to spend time together, bookstores became their refuge.

“We would pick out books and say, ‘If we weren’t broke, I would buy this book for you,’” she remembers.

In 2015, the couple began researching Black-owned bookstores and discovered that Houston—then the fourth-largest city in the country—did not have a consistently operating Black-owned bookstore.

“That broke our hearts,” Landry says. “We knew we had to do something about it.” They opened Class Bookstore in Houston’s historic Third Ward, near Texas Southern University and the University of Houston. Their initial vision was to create the kind of third space they had always cherished: somewhere people could gather, browse, learn, and feel at home.

They soon realized the community needed more. “It needed a place to be encouraged,” Landry says. “It needed a place to feel loved and supported.”

Class Bookstore embraced that responsibility. Grounded primarily in nonfiction and revolutionary thought, the store aims to spark curiosity, political awareness, and action.“The revolution will not be televised,” Landry says, “but it might be started from a book you bought at Class Bookstore.”

A Gathering Built for Black Booksellers

That same sense of purpose shapes Landry’s work with Black Lit Weekend.

Unlike traditional literary festivals, the event was created with Black booksellers at its center. Throughout the year, a committee of Black bookstore owners and booksellers develops programming designed around the realities of their work. Landry says booksellers frequently attend conferences where they are expected to fit into structures created by someone else. Black Lit Weekend offers a different experience.

“You’re not being pulled into it,” she explains. “You’re being invited into an experience.” That experience combines professional development, cultural grounding, connection, and rest. Attendees gain practical knowledge about the book industry, but they are also encouraged to remember who they are and whose work made their own possible.

Landry describes the weekend as a practice of Sankofa: reaching back to retrieve what is valuable so it can be carried into the future.

“Nowhere else is Sankofa being practiced specifically for Black booksellers,” she says. “That is what makes Black Lit Weekend unique, special, and vital to the industry.” Her hope is that booksellers, authors, influencers, and other literary professionals leave feeling both equipped and empowered.

She also hopes they rest.

“Being a bookstore owner or working in the book industry, you don’t get to rest often,” she says. “I hope people get to spend some time simply existing with people who understand.”

Grounded in History, Looking Forward

Some of Landry’s most meaningful Black Lit Weekend memories come from the event’s years in Tulsa.

Walking the streets of Greenwood and learning about the businesses, institutions, and collective power once concentrated along Black Wall Street created an experience she believes cannot be replicated through a textbook or documentary. “To physically be in that space and learn the story of Black independence and Black economics was powerful,” she says. That connection between history and the present is central to how Landry views bookselling.

She sees today’s Black booksellers as a bridge between those who built literary institutions before them and the next generation preparing to inherit the work. “We’re resting on the shoulders of our predecessors,” she says. “And the next generation of booksellers is looking to us to keep this going so they can come along too.”

Houston’s literary landscape offers reason for optimism. According to Landry, the city has grown from having roughly one functioning Black-owned bookstore to six in approximately five years, including Texas’ only Black-owned comic bookstore.

She describes the growth as a literary renaissance.

The stores are not identical. Some specialize in fiction, romance, comics, or nonfiction. Rather than viewing those differences as competition, Landry says Houston’s booksellers work to practice cooperative economics and build collectively. Several will attend Black Lit Weekend together. “Houston is rolling deep,” she says proudly.

Putting Down the Next Bricks

As literacy rates decline, book bans increase, and daily life becomes more digitally consumed, Landry views her work as both an honor and a responsibility. There is meaning in placing a book in a child’s hands and watching that child return for the next installment in a series. There is value in offering adults an opportunity to disconnect from screens and encounter ideas through the printed page.

Landry is also conscious of the booksellers who created the road she now travels—from Community Book Center in New Orleans to Eso Won Books in Los Angeles and Houston’s Shrine of the Black Madonna. “I feel the responsibility to put my next few bricks in the ground,” she says, “to continue lengthening that road so the next bookseller can come along.”

Over the next five years, Landry hopes Black Lit Weekend becomes the gathering no Black literary professional wants to miss. She imagines aspiring bookstore owners attending before they have opened their doors, publishers continuing to invest resources, and booksellers returning to their communities more prepared for the work ahead.

For the broader Black literary ecosystem, her vision is direct: more reading, more books sold, and more Black booksellers on the front lines protecting Black literature. She wants future generations to continue speaking the names of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and the many literary ancestors whose work offers both answers and direction.

It is why, when asked which book she would place in every person’s hands, Landry chooses Morrison’s Paradise. It reflects the energy she is carrying now: one rooted in history, community, resistance, and the determination to build something that lasts.