BEM Juneteenth 2025: Claiming Space for Black Storytelling
Join us for a vibrant Juneteenth celebration as we honor Black culture and creativity—and christen BEM’s future home before we start construction to officially open our doors later this year!
For this second annual collaboration with Nicole A. Taylor, author of Watermelon and Red Birds: A Cookbook for Juneteenth and Black Celebrations, we’ll feature a menu from her seminal Juneteenth cookbook plus a conversation celebrating the release of Katie Mitchell’s Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores.
As one of the featured bookstores, we’re honored to welcome you to the place we’ll make home. Katie and Nicole will discuss the stories Black spaces tell about our histories, our politics, and our shared visions for what's to come, exploring the stores featured in Prose To The People as a point of departure.
Come ready for delicious food, refreshing red drink, and of course, books for the whole family — plus all the cookout classics and more coming through the speakers. We're looking forward to bringing the community together to toast to BEM's next chapter!
This is a family-friendly event—bring your dads, your kids, and your loved ones. All are welcome as we lift up Black history and heritage.
🎟️ Tickets:
This event is ticketed on a sliding scale to maximize accessibility and to help us continue to raise funds for our next chapter.
Minimum entry is $12, $35 helps us cover the cost of the event, and anything more brings us closer to executing the vision for BEM that you’ve helped us grow over these last few years.
Children under 12 join for free!
If you’re unable to join us in person but want to participate, select a Contributor ticket, which allows you to donate while we maintain a proper headcount for the event. Please note these donations are not tax-deductible. Your purchase helps us celebrate Juneteenth and get set up in BEM’s new space dedicated to food, literacy, and community. We thank you for your support!
More about the books
Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores is a stunning visual homage to Black bookstores around the country along with profiles and essays that celebrate the history, community, activism, and culture these spaces embody. Traversing teeming metropolises and tiny towns, Prose to the People explores these spaces, chronicling the Black bookstore’s past and present lives. Combining narrative prose, eye-catching photography, one-on-one interviews, original essays, and specially curated poetry, Prose to the People is a reader’s road trip companion to the world of Black books.
Watermelon and Red Birds: A Cookbook for Juneteenth and Black Celebrations : All-day cook-outs with artful salads, bounteous dessert spreads, and raised glasses of "red drink" are essential to Juneteenth gatherings. In Watermelon and Red Birds, Nicole puts jubilation on the main stage. As a master storyteller and cook, she bridges the traditional African-American table and 21st-century flavors in stories and recipes. Nicole synthesizes all the places we've been, all the people we have come from, all the people we have become, and all the culinary ideas we have embraced.
More about the authors
Katie Mitchell is a storyteller and bookseller. Katie lives, works, and writes in Atlanta, Georgia. Her online and pop-up Black bookstore, Good Books, has been featured in The New York Times, NBC, NPR, PBS, and many other outlets. Katie is a Dorothy Porter Wesley fellow.
Nicole A. Taylor is a James Beard Award-nominated food writer, master home cook, and producer. She has written for the New York Times, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine. Nicole is the author of The Up South Cookbook and The Last O.G. Cookbook. She is the executive producer of If We So Choose, a short documentary about the desegregation of an iconic southern fast food joint. Nicole is the cofounder of The Maroon, a marketplace and retreat house focused on radical rest for Black creatives.
More about BEM
BEM | books & more is a literary destination at the intersection of food and Blackness. Established by two sisters in January 2021 as an online bookstore, BEM is proud to serve as a home for readers, writers, cooks, and eaters passionate about Black cultures in all their diversity. Taking an expansive approach to the nexus of food, literature, and culture, BEM celebrates Black food by bringing works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry for readers of all ages into conversation with cookbooks and culinary studies to explore how what feeds us defines us.
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