Cultured Books, St. Petersburg: Where a Book Report Buys a Book

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’s The Book Report Project, and it’s 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.

That idea makes me smile every time I think about it. Most schemes for getting books to kids who can’t afford them come wrapped in paperwork and pity, and this one offers the child a deal between equals: you did the work, so you’ve earned the next book. If I had any say, every library in Florida would copy it.

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 color are the protagonists, in stories that aren’t 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 works 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 don’t read like bookstore reviews. They read like people describing something that mattered to their family.

Why are there no posted hours?

Because it’s been a pop-up from the very start, and that’s by design. 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 can’t 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 programs instead of the shop.

How did Cultured Books get started?

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. That’s 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: “Cultured Books became my activism.” The mission in one sentence is the thing she keeps returning to. Books about Black people don’t have to be about slavery or the civil rights movement, and she wants children to see that there’s more to the story than struggle.

I think she’s right, and it’s a point a lot of children’s publishing still misses. A kid deserves to see somebody who looks like them solving a mystery or getting into trouble at a birthday party. A shelf that offers only hardship teaches a child that hardship is the whole story, and that’s a cruel thing to hand a six-year-old. 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. That’s 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’s a clearer statement of purpose than most retail managers could give about anything they do.

I respect her choice to measure success by literacy rates. It’s a hard number to move and an easy one to ignore, and she picked it anyway.

What else does the foundation run?

Considerably more than the bookstore, and most of the work happens in the literacy programs.

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. That’s a far better plan than waiting for them to come to a shop.

Books at a skate park on a Friday night is my favorite line on this page. It’s obvious the moment somebody does it, and almost nobody does, because it means hauling boxes to where the kids are instead of waiting behind a counter for them to show up.

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’s the easiest single date to put in a calendar if you want to see the whole operation at once.

There’s 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.

What does mirrors and doors mean at Cultured Books?

Reviewers of this shop keep reaching for the same two words, and they’re 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 useful thing to stand in front of.

The other lesson here’s 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 isn’t the point. The people are. I’d put that in front of every self-published author sitting at home wondering why nobody’s buying. The dream of being discovered is a fantasy, and a woman with a pop-up table on The Deuces has done more real marketing than most of the courses that charge people to learn it.

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 neighborhood 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.

A parent in this city benefits enormously from having both. 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.

How do you visit Cultured Books?

Check first. That’s the whole practical instruction and it’s 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’s the one where you’ll see what Cultured Books is for.

Of all the shops in this series, this is the one I’d most like to see still running in twenty years. A bookstore that trades books for book reports is doing something no quarterly sales target will ever reward, and St. Petersburg is lucky to have it. Check the calendar, pick a program, and go.

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