For Nanea Woods, books and community go together.
Take the locker library she ran while attending St. Mary’s Academy, the all-girls high school in downtown Portland. She set up shelves inside her locker, filled them with books, posted a signup sheet and opened the whole thing to her schoolmates.
“It got to be so big that I started a newsletter over the summer so girls could keep up with what I was reading,” Woods says, recalling that she used pink paper to distribute her book reviews.
Or take the book club for women of color that she founded three years ago, Prose Before Bros. Its newsletter has more than 400 subscribers and its monthly meetings often have to be capped at three dozen attendees, who connect with one another not only through books but also through complementary activities such as meditation and country line dancing.
“I want to carve out a space for people who look like me to feel seen and to be heard. Especially in the literary space, because we don’t often get that attention,” Woods says.
Now she’s launching her biggest effort yet to combine books and community: Portland’s first Black literary festival, the Freadom Festival, a tribute to freedom and reading that’s taking place in Peninsula Park on Saturday, June 18.
Woods deliberately timed the Freadom Festival to the weekend of Juneteenth, a celebration of emancipation from slavery. “How we obtained our freedom has a lot to do with reading and literacy,” she says, noting that reading and writing were crucial tools and weapons in ending the enslavement of Black people.
For the festival’s tagline, Woods chose the phrase “Read by any means necessary,” a reference to a 1964 speech by civil rights activist Malcolm X in which he called for achieving freedom, justice and equality “by any means necessary.”
At the Freadom Festival, events will hew to a core tenet that books and reading should be inclusive and accessible. The festival will include a book swap — bring a book or two if you can, take one home — and a book drive to collect books for the nonprofit Portland Books to Prisoners. The Multnomah County Library’s Black Cultural Library Advocates will have a booth where people can sign up for library cards and get information about programming and resources. Jelani Memory, founder of the Portland publisher A Kids Company About, will present a children’s storytime. Activities will include a zine making station.
Woods is also striving for a picnic atmosphere, with DJs spinning music and several Black-owned food carts selling ice cream, plant-based dishes, soul food and juices. “I’m encouraging people to come out, bring a book, bring a blanket, read, enjoy community and fellowship with other book lovers,” she says.
Her personal community includes Michelle Lewis, a family friend who with her husband, Charles Hannah, owns Third Eye Books in Southeast Portland. Third Eye Books, Portland’s only Black bookstore, is the official bookstore for Woods’ Prose Before Bros book club, providing a discount to club members, and now that partnership has extended to the Freadom Festival.
Third Eye Books is donating books to the festival and will have books for sale as well. Even though Lewis and Hannah already have a busy day on June 18 — they’ll be celebrating their one-year anniversary at their 33rd Avenue and Division Street location — Lewis plans to attend the festival to support “a wonderful idea.”
“Books bring people together,” Lewis says between sales on a recent afternoon. “It’s powerful, even in here, how conversations can be created, be had around a book that people are reading, what they get out of it. So we’re happy to be a part of that process.”
The festival will have two featured authors: Kesha Ajose Fisher of Portland and Kim Johnson of Eugene.
Ajose Fisher connected with Woods through Third Eye Books and its owners, whom she calls “really helpful and supportive” of her debut story collection, “No God Like the Mother,” winner of the 2020 Oregon Book Award for fiction.
“I’m so excited,” Ajose Fisher says of the festival. “For me, having that freedom to be able to share with the community what Black books and Black storytelling mean right now really was the number one reason why I wanted to be a part of it.”
Ajose Fisher plans to speak at 1:30 p.m. about what literacy means to her and how she’s used it in rearing her four children. She’ll also share some of her stories, take questions and sign copies of her book.
“Really, the best part is fellowshipping with other members of the community who are interested in Black stories,” she says.
Johnson will appear at 4 p.m. She plans to read briefly from her debut young adult novel about racism in the criminal justice system, “This is My America,” and talk about the book’s setting in Galveston, Texas, “the last location that those who were enslaved found out that they were free” on June 19, 1865. She’ll also preview her next novel, “Invisible Son,” which has similar themes but is set in Portland in 2020.
Johnson recalls growing up in Oregon and not reading a book written by a Black author about Black characters until she reached college. The Freadom Festival’s opportunity for Black book lovers of all ages to “celebrate and see themselves in a community, to see stories written by and about Black people, is really meaningful in a community that often doesn’t have an opportunity to celebrate in that way,” she says.
“I hope that people see and are drawn to (the festival) and then want to think about what can happen next year,” she says.
Woods, taking a break from festival planning one recent afternoon, says she’s been “so touched” by the overall response to her idea.
“I just love the literary community in general in Portland,” she says. “I’ve just been cold-calling pretty much everybody that I could think of and all the things that I know are book related, and just the amount of support and just people willing to do anything they can and help … I’m, like, crying every day.”
If you go
What: Freadom Festival
When: Noon-6 p.m. Saturday, June 18, Peninsula Park, 700 N. Rosa Parks Way, Portland
Admission: Free
Information/donations/volunteering: freadomfestival.com
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