A child with no money walks in and wants a book. Most shops have one answer to that.
This one has a different answer. Take the book. Read it. Write a report on it. Bring the report back and take another one.
That is The Book Report Project, and it is the single best idea in this entire series. It removes the financial barrier completely, and it points the incentive in exactly the right direction, because the reward for finishing a book is another book.
What is Cultured Books?
A multicultural children’s bookstore at 833 22nd Street South in St. Petersburg, inside The Well, on the stretch known as The Deuces, the historic heart of Black business in this city. The phone is 727-328-4822 and the site is culturedbooks.org.
The stock is children’s literature chosen around positive representation. Books where children of colour are the protagonists, in stories that are not about struggle. Picture books, early readers, and titles chosen for what they show a child about themselves and about other people.
The shop sells online as well, with themed lists, so the collection is reachable from anywhere.
It operates alongside the Cultured Books Literacy Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2018. The shop and the foundation share a mission, and most of what the operation is known for locally happens through the foundation’s programming.
Fifty-seven Google reviews, every one of them five stars. Read them and they do not read like bookstore reviews. They read like people describing something that mattered to their family.
Why are there no posted hours?
Because it has been a pop-up from the very start, and that is by design, not by accident.
Hollaway founded Cultured Books in 2017 as a pop-up bookstore on The Deuces, and the model stayed. Her reasoning is that the goal is to bring books to where children already are, which a fixed storefront by definition cannot do. The bookstore appears at events, at markets, at breakfast and skate nights, and at the 22nd Street location.
For a visitor the practical consequence is simple: check before you go. The site and the store’s social channels carry current information, and the phone number works. Turning up unannounced is the one way to get this wrong.
It also means that if you want to see the operation at its best, go to one of the programmes instead of the shop.
Where did it come from?
Hollaway is a St. Petersburg native, raised in south St. Pete, and a homeschooling mother of three.
She grew up with books like Ezra Jack Keats’s Peter’s Chair and Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach, and has said her love of reading grew from there. An anthropology professor later encouraged her to get inside the cultures she wanted to study, which is a piece of academic advice that turned into a bookstore.
The founding came out of a harder place. In the wake of the killings of unarmed young Black men, including the murder of Trayvon Martin, she was looking for a way to make change that felt right to her. Her phrase for what she chose was four words: “This became my activism.”
The mission in one sentence is the thing she keeps returning to. Books about Black people do not have to be about slavery or the civil rights movement, and she wants children to see that there is more to the story than struggle.
The foundation’s stated values are to cultivate curiosity, inspire impact, be dignity driven, and be community committed.
How does The Book Report Project work?
A child completes an initial survey and chooses a book to keep. They read it, write a report on it, and hand the report in for another book. The cycle repeats month to month for as long as they want it to.
Two problems get solved at once, which is what good design looks like. The money barrier disappears, because a child who has no money has something else to trade. And the reward structure fixes itself, because finishing one book buys the next.
Hollaway has described the aim as making it easy and accessible for all, and the measure of success as showing a real impact on literacy rates. That is a clearer statement of purpose than most retail managers could give about anything they do.
What else does the foundation run?
Considerably more than the bookstore, and this is where the work lives.
Breakfast. Literacy. Community, known as BLC, runs Saturday mornings on The Deuces. Skate. Literacy. Community, or SLC, has run Friday evenings at Campbell Park, putting books where children already are on a Friday night, which is a far better plan than waiting for them to come to a shop.
Read About It is a web series connecting books to real places and experiences around Tampa Bay, described in local coverage as Reading Rainbow in spirit. The Art of Literacy is a pop-up gallery of art made in response to reading, with an artist residency attached. Second Sunday on The Deuces is a pop-up market with rotating vendors and artists.
St. Pete Reads! Lit Fest is the annual one, held on the first Saturday of November, and it is the easiest single date to put in a calendar if you want to see the whole operation at once.
There has also been a Stories of Specificity podcast, inviting different Black voices to tell their own stories, and a partnership with the WORD! Initiative and Keep St. Pete Lit that produced the WORD! Book Box.
The operation was featured on Good Morning America after a Verizon small business spotlight, which for a pop-up children’s bookstore is an unusual trajectory by any standard.
Mirrors and doors
Reviewers of this shop keep reaching for the same two words, and they are the right ones.
Mirrors are characters who reflect the reader back to themselves. Doors are characters who let the reader into somewhere else. Any writer working on anything for children is making both, whether they thought about it or not, and a shelf assembled explicitly around that distinction is a genuinely useful thing to stand in front of.
The other lesson here is about distribution and it applies to anybody with something to sell. Hollaway built an audience by going where the readers already were, on a Friday night at a skate park and a Saturday morning at breakfast, instead of waiting for them to find a storefront.
Every author with a book and no plan should look hard at that. The venue is not the point. The people are.
For the practical side of getting a book stocked locally, the piece on Tampa Bay bookstores covers the approach.
Where it sits
St. Petersburg has two children’s bookstores and they complement each other instead of competing.
The Story Garden on 14th Street North is the neighbourhood shop, run by a former teacher, built around weekly story times in a converted house. Cultured Books is mission-driven, pop-up by design, rooted in south St. Pete, and paired with a nonprofit running literacy programming across the whole city.
Different models, different jobs, and a parent in this city benefits enormously from both existing.
Across the bay, Black English in Tampa Heights is the closest thing in spirit, a small shop built around a single clear editorial premise and aimed at adults.
Going
Check first. That is the whole practical instruction and it is not a complaint about the shop.
The site at culturedbooks.org carries current information. The online store is always open. The annual Lit Fest on the first Saturday in November is the surest date in the calendar, and it is the one where you will see what the whole thing is for.
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