Call & Response Books

We’re thrilled to share that National Book Award finalist ‘Pemi Aguda will be at Call & Response Books on Wednesday, May 20 for a discussion of her new novel, One Leg on Earth! Pemi will be joined in conversation by critically-acclaimed writer Jessamine Chan! Q&A and book signing to follow discussion! RSVP at the link in bio!! Something is haunting the pregnant women of Lagos. Across the city, they are walking into water . . . and drowning. Twenty-three-year-old Yosoye arrives in Lagos ready to start her life. Working for a slick architectural firm, she finds a city of adventure and opportunity. Her new world is one of fancy gallery openings, glamorous friends, and all the shiny potential of the future, encapsulated in projects like Omi City, the ultra-luxury development her company is building, a symbol of the dawn of a brighter Lagos. But Yosoye's idyllic vision of Lagos soon begins to seem naive, and its darker, stranger layers trouble her. Something is not right about Omi City, and as construction speeds ahead, stories of strange deaths in the city's open waters reach a fever pitch. And then, after a chance encounter, Yosoye discovers she is pregnant . . . a revelation which puts her on a collision course with an inexplicable force that is as seductive as it is deadly. A masterwork by a writer hailed as "an astonishing talent" (Lauren Groff), One Leg on Earth is an ambitious novel like no other: a coming-of-age story, an uncanny exploration of motherhood, and a chilling vision of the dark side of progress. ‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, and the Writivism Prize. Ghostroots, her debut story collection, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards in Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. #bookstore #authortalk #literaryfiction #chilovebooks #indiebookstore

[UPDATE: The matching period has been EXTENDED thru May 16!!] Independent Bookstore Week begins this Saturday! This week, when you purchase a book for someone in prison at one of our bookstore partners, the price of your purchase will be matched in cash and donated to Midwest Books to Prisoners to help us pay for postage, supplies, and highly requested books, doubling your impact! If you're joining the Chicagoland Bookstore Crawl on Saturday, make sure to swing by our bookstore partners: Pilsen Community Books (1531 W 18th St) Call & Response Books (1390 E Hyde Park Blvd) Skunk Cabbage Books (2826 N Milwaukee Ave) Jarvis Square Books (1522 W Jarvis Ave) Myopic Books (1564 N Milwaukee Ave) Tangible Books (3326 S Halsted St) Quimby’s (1854 W North Ave) First Aid Comics (1617 E 55th St- this location only!) If you can't make it in person, click the linktr.ee link in our (@midwestbooks2p ) bio to shop online using one of our wish lists. If you have any questions about how to participate, please DM us or email [email protected]. Thanks as always for your support!

On Tuesday, May 19, we’re thrilled to welcome award-winning writer Noel Quiñones in celebration of their new poetry collection, Orange! Noel will be joined in conversation with Chicago poet Tara Betts, with Q&A and book signing to follow! RSVP at the link in bio! A bold and tender portrait of family, identity, and truth in the North Bronx. Through narrative poems and innovative forms inspired by color theory and elementary school, Orange explores the ripple effects of queerness, lies, and finding yourself in a family. In this visceral new collection, however, the scope of "family" expands well beyond the nuclear unit; Noel Quiñones's poems center relationships between friends, cousins, partners, and many other family members. Painting a vivid and fraught portrait of the North Bronx, Quiñones unflinchingly confronts the contradictions at the heart of love, divorce, gender, religion, and community, unpacking the complexities of coming out, divorced parents, and generational trauma. Orange ultimately argues that truth resembles color: something real, yet elusive, and impossible to prove. Noel Quiñones is an Emmy and O. Henry award-winning Nuyorican writer, educator, and speaker from the Bronx. Their short story "This Time and the Next" will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. They have also received fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Mississippi's MFA program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word poetry organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center.

It's the final day of (extended) independent bookstore week-- all bookstore purchases are still being matched in cash! When you purchase a book for someone in prison today, you're helping us get books that prisoners regularly ask for but which are almost never donated to us, and helping us raise money to pay to ship the books to prisoners all over the country! Click the link in our bio or story to pick up someone in prison's next read, or stop by our bookstore partners in person (Pilsen Community Books, Call & Response Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, Quimby's, Jarvis Square Books, Myopic Books, First Aid Comics - Hyde Park, Tangible Books). Thanks so much to everyone who has donated already and helped support access to books in prison and independent bookstores in your Chicago community!

We're so excited to celebrate Dur e Aziz Amna's newest book exploring feminine rage, class, and aspiration in Pakistan, A Splitering, on Wednesday, June 3! Dure will be joined in conversation by author Faisal Mohyuddin, with Q&A and book signing to follow! RSVP at the link in bio! "Smart and gripping - I read it in one sitting. Tara is a glorious creation, crackling with life and aspiration and sensuality." --Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire In a village in rural Pakistan, Tara is watching and waiting. The smell of dung and dust hangs over her world. She is desperate to leave her petty life in the village and escape the iron grip of her violent, unpredictable brother. Marrying a middle-class accountant allows her to escape to the capital, but she soon finds that life as a respectable housewife is not enough. She wants what the rich mothers at her children's school have. Her desire for wealth and freedom becomes an obsession--one for which she'll push her marriage and herself to the brink. When her brother comes back into her life, dragging the specter of all she's escaped, Tara must decide if there are any lines she won't cross to live the life she deserves. Set against a hypnotic, oppressive backdrop of political violence and natural disaster, A Splintering traces the class struggle of a woman stuck between province and metropolis, between motherhood and ambition. Disquieting and utterly gripping, it is an extraordinary achievement by Dur e Aziz Amna, an exploration of a complex and unforgettable character who will risk everything to carve out a life of her own. #authortalk #literaryfiction #chilovebooks #indiebookstore

It’s been a while since we’ve posted recent releases! Here’s a glimpse of what you can find on the front table today—genre-bending fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction, memoir, mystery, and more! Stop in and find something new to read! 📚 #bookstore #chilovebooks #bibliophile #readmorebooks #bookworm

Legendary author Wesley Brown is hitting the road in celebration of his new book Looking for Frank Wills! Join us weds in Chicago to kick things off! Link in bio to rsvp.

Link in bio!!! Free with suggested donations! Let’s celebrate Black women in food with a potluck at Black woman-owned bookstore Call and Response, by cooking together from one of four cookbooks authored by Black women in food! This fundraiser will be to fund materials for Azadi Folk School’s fall African-American folk art classes, including quilting and woodworking! If you’d like to support Azadi Folk School but can’t come to the potluck, you can donate at the link in our bio! Receipts will note the donation as going to Women Unite!, our fiscal sponsor. We also want to show some love to Black-owned bookstore Call and Response Books as they navigate ongoing gentrification and a big-box bookstore opening in Hyde Park. So if you buy the book from Call and Response and email a copy of your receipt to [email protected], you’ll be entered into a raffle to win prizes! We want to see all of our community there, but know that not everyone has the time or space to cook. So if you want to attend but won’t be able to cook, choose that ticket option so the Azadi team can prepare some dishes to ensure there is enough food for everyone! Two weeks before the potluck, we will send out a shared spreadsheet to attendees detailing what everyone is cooking so choosing recipes can be simpler. Hope to see you there! Cookbook Options: “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks” by Crystal Wilkinson “Soomaaliya: Food, Memory, and Migration: A Cookbook” by Ifrah F. Ahmed “A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior” by Crystal Wahpepah “Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings from a St. Lucian Chef’s Journey” by Nina Compton

The votes are in! May’s book club pick is DOMINION by Addie E. Citchens—a store bestseller!! Discussion of Dominion will be held on Thursday, May 28 at 7 p.m.! RSVP at the link in bio—you can pick up a copy of the book from Call & Response (all book club books also receive a 10% discount at checkout) or your local library branch! See you there! **About the Book** “A razor-sharp Southern family drama.” —People Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., shepherd of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. He owns the barbershop and the radio station, and generally keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But Wonderboy, his father, and all the structures in place that keep them on top are not as righteous as they seem to be. And when Wonderboy is caught off guard by an encounter with a stranger, he finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined. His response sends shock waves through the entire community. Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, bear witness to their charms and bear the brunt of their choices. Through their eyes and their stories, Dominion offers an intricate, intimate view of how secrets control us, how shame stifles us, how silence implicates us, and how even love plays a role in the everyday violence and casual sins of the powerful. A brilliantly crafted Black Southern family drama told with the captivating force, humor, and tenderness carried in the hearts of these women, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion wrestles with the many brutal, sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy, and studies how we might yet choose to break free. #bookclub #litfic #readblackbooks #chilovebooks #chicagobookclub

[UPDATE: This event has been rescheduled slightly to 5PM on Wednesday (same day, new time)! Join us for a discussion of Wesley Brown's historical fiction novel, Looking for Frank Wills! Welsey will be joined in conversation by radio host and author Quincy McCoy. Q&A and book signing to follow discussion! RSVP at the link in bio! About the Book "Wesley Brown is looking for the truths and lies of history, and, as always, exploring the complexities of Black life in America. What he he finds has the wondrous precision and subtlety of a Thelonious Monk composition" --Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland It's 1972. Tricky Dick is in office, James Brown is on the radio, and Wayne Beasley reluctantly presides over the comings and goings of his barbers and patrons at Wayne's Clip and Trim in Augusta, South Carolina. When one of Wayne's former customers, an unassuming small-town son, is designated 4-F, unfit to serve in Vietnam, he seeks refuge in becoming the next best thing--a security guard for a downtown DC hotel. It is there on a hot summer's night, that Wayne's wayward patron interrupts a break-in that will disrupt the course of a nation's history and his own. Without Frank Wills there is no Watergate. And without Watergate the veil of secrecy and corruption that came to define the Nixon years, warping the very fabric of political discourse from that moment on, would have remained firmly in place. Wesley Brown's re-imagining of the life of Frank Wills reconciles the greatest heist of all--our place in the American story. Wesley Brown is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, a novella, and five plays. He has held visiting writer residencies in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Bennington College, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is co-editor of The Methuen Drama Anthology of American Women Playwrights: 1970–2020. A new edition of his first novel, Tragic Magic, was published, as a part of the Of the Diaspora series, by McSweeney’s in 2021. #bookstore #authortalk #blackliterature #literaryfiction #chilovebooks

Revel in the spoken and written word at our monthly open mic, hosted by Chicago poets I.S. Jones and Yazud Brito-Milan, with this month’s featured artist, Chiimeh! April’s open mic will be this upcoming Tuesday, April 28 at 7 PM! In Yorùbá, the word “kójo” means “to gather.” In Spanish, “canto” means “to sing.” In our efforts to gather community together, we hope to make something new sing. All are encouraged to bring anything they’d like to share within community, whether that be a poem, a song, a very short piece of fiction, or anything else that’s on their heart! Spectators also more than welcome! :) RSVPs (link in bio) are on a sliding scale pay-as-you-can basis, as we will be providing snacks! Suggested contribution is $5. Thank you! #openmic #poetry #spokenword #chilovebooks #indiebookstore

If you can believe it, Indie Bookstore Day, AKA the bookstore equivalent of the Super Bowl, is coming up on Saturday, April 25! ⏰We’ll be open with extended hours, 10am-7pm, to make sure everyone can get their book hauls and get their Indie Bookstore Day sheets stamped! 🍵From 10am-3pm, we’ll be joined by @butfirstmatchachi for a matcha pop up so you can stay refreshed and caffeinated on your Indie Bookstore Day trek! 🔖We’ll also be taking 10% off all books with a recommendation card, offering raffle entries to anyone who purchases 2 or more books (prizes include Call & Response merch!), and hidden discounts throughout the shop! As a reminder, if you stop at 10 or 15 bookstores during IBD, you’ll get 10% or 15% off, respectively, at all participating bookstores for the next year! Still figuring out your route for Indie Bookstore Day to hit 10 or 15 bookstores? Head to @chilovebooks and their website to get all the info on how to participate in the Chicagoland Indie Bookstore Crawl and buy tickets for a bus that will take you to at least 10 shops! #indiebookstoreday #indiebookstore #chilovebooks #blackownedbookstore #readmorebooks