‘Meant to be’: Four years later, Black Garnet Books owner is selling, to a friend
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A few weeks after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, Dionne Sims sent a tweet that would end up changing the trajectory of her life.
“Minnesota doesn’t have a Black-owned bookstore,” she wrote. “I think that’s my new dream.”
Soon after, Sims opened Black Garnet Books as a pop-up and online shop in 2020 and then as a brick-and-mortar in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood of St. Paul in late 2022. Two years later, she’s ending her reign.
Selling the store wasn’t a hard decision for Sims. When she first came up with the idea for Black Garnet Books, she understood it wouldn’t always be hers, but that didn’t matter — she wanted to create a long-lasting resource for the community.
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The decision was made even easier when she sold it to a friend, Terresa Moses.
“I’m someone that when I start to feel content, I feel like I am ready to grow in a different area,” Sims said. “Terresa was actually the first person that I reached out to because we’ve worked together so often. I was so shy about it, how can you ask someone to buy a bookstore?”
Sims sent her an email — in the most Minnesota way — asking her if she knew anyone that would be interested in buying the store, *hint hint.*
At first, Moses didn’t think about it much. She congratulated her friend and moved on. A week later she had the feeling was gnawing at her — what if she bought a bookstore? So she did.
“It really universally felt like this was meant to be,” Moses said. “It’s something that really opened up to me the idea that we can actually exchange Black wealth and that was something really strange to be physically doing.”
Sims says that Moses — a professor at the University of Minnesota, published author and co-founder of Blackbird Revolt — already understood the vision of the store, she didn’t need to buy in.
Moses plans to continue Sims’ work and looks forward to expanding and hosting more community events. She wants to have a pop-up Black Garnet location at the Blackbird Revolt studio space in Minneapolis.
“Black Garnet Books is an abolitionist bookstore that focuses and centers the narrative of Black and brown writers,” Moses said. “It’s still queer-owned, it’s still woman-owned, it’s still abolitionist, period.”
Sims plans to focus on her writing next. Graduate school may be in her future, but for now, she is going to work on her Substack. She says her future feels wide open, and she likes it that way.
“This decision has been made easier by the fact that there is someone who gets it that is taking over,” she said. “I’ve always just been someone who’s really open to change and really open to, like rearranging my life in a way that either serves the people around me or serves my dreams for the future. I’m kind of open to listening to the universe and hearing what it says I should do next.”
Black Garnet Books is located at 1319 University Ave. W. in St Paul and is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. They are closed on Mondays
