People Get Ready Looks To Year Two

Williams and Anderson on opening weekend in October 2019. The physical store has been closed since March due to COVID-19. Lucy Gellman File Photo. 

People Get Ready Books started with community gathering at the forefront of its mission. A global pandemic pushed it to go online, find an environmentally friendly way to deliver books, and spread its footprint outside New Haven much sooner than it expected.

That’s how COVID-19 has affected the year-old Whalley Avenue book space, dedicated to books that spotlight social justice, representation, and both authors and readers of color. As it moves into its second year, co-owners Lauren Anderson and Delores Williams are redefining the space’s role in the community.

People Get Ready opened its doors on Indigenous Peoples Day in 2019 with the goal of creating a space where anyone could walk in, whether they purchased a book or not. The month before, Anderson introduced the bookspace at a New Haven Pride Month pop-up, selling books from a table on Center Street with her neighbor and fellow book nerd Honesty Robinson.

“We call it a book space to emphasize that you can come here even if you’re not going to buy something,” Anderson said. “You can come to the community.”

The global pandemic has made her grateful for her partnership with Williams—and vice versa. The two first met years ago through their advocacy for education. A pandemic wasn’t in their original business plan, but COVID-19 proved that the women have a strong working relationship. 

Before owning a business, Anderson worked in education for over a decade. Earlier this year, she left her job to run People Get Ready full time. She described the transition as an adjustment, but one she doesn’t regret.

“It was really hard to leave a career,” she said. “It took me a long time to do it because it felt like a big change, and it was. It has been wonderful.”

People Get Ready Photo. 

Prior to opening People Get Ready with Anderson, Williams was a real estate agent in New York; she’s also a mom and a champion of education. She said working in real estate allowed her to invest in her community, but it was hard primarily because of racism that she saw and experienced herself.

“It was really hard to avoid and it is really soul-crushing when you experience it,” she said. “It just feels really good to me, in this capacity, to work cross-culturally with someone who I’ve grown a friendship with.”

Since the pandemic began, she has been hosting Zoom calls for women of color to create a “safe space” for fellow moms. Both she and Anderson see that as part of People Get Ready’s community building work. Running the book space is labor-intensive and not something that can be done as a 50-50 split.

“Delores and I share labor on some things, but then take the lead on others,” Anderson said. “Like the safe space conversations with moms of color. That’s Delores, and not so much me. And that makes sense.”

“I’m not a woman of color or a mother,” she continued. “That’s not my wheelhouse, but we collaborate and support each other on things like that.”

“But on the other hand, people might come to Lauren more for expertise on teaching,” Williams added.

Both Williams and Anderson called books a way of healing and a therapeutic source of information. Following the murder of George Floyd and calls to racial justice this spring and summer, the two saw an increase in sales of titles such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist. That's just scratching the bookshop's surface: People Get Ready's texts span from children's books on Shirley Chisholm to hard-to-find books of poetry by Black and Indigenous authors and everything in between.   

Earlier this year, the two also piloted a near-daily reading program via Facebook live to give families at least one read-aloud story per day during COVID-19 shutdowns. In addition to shipping books around the state and the country, they deliver in New Haven by bike to make their reads as accessible as possible. 

“We both believe in books for different reasons, and we use them in our lives for different reasons,” Williams said. “We both feel like they’re something for people to have. And that should reflect the demographic within that community.”

A book spread for Trans Awareness Week earlier this month. People Get Ready Photo.

The two said they are relieved to have each other in a community with such diversity. They said working together is easy because they have such an honest, supportive relationship. Their partnership has allowed them to collaborate with other lovers of books and community, like Elm City Lit Fest creator IfeMichelle Gardin.

In the lead up to her creation of the festival, which celebrates Black artists and launched this year, Gardin created a book club that primarily serves the Whalley Avenue-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB) section of the city. After it started in a police substation, it migrated to the bookspace. Anderson, who is a member of the book club, said she felt People Get Ready was the perfect place to hold meetings.

COVID has forced the book club to meet virtually, but members still get their books through the partnership with the store. Gardin said that it has been a pleasure to work beside Anderson and Williams.

“I have been doing a virtual book club and it’s been working,” Gardin said. “Actually, COVID has been a plus because I have been able to reach a broader audience.”

During COVID-19, Wiliams and Anderson have also focused on the health and safety of the community. While state guidelines would allow the Whalley Avenue storefront to reopen with limited capacity, they have kept the physical location closed. They currently offer curbside pickup and delivery options.

“We’re trying to make decisions not based upon our own profit, but making decisions based on safety,” Williams said.

“We don’t want to promote anything and then pull it back,” Anderson added. “I think our hope is that we could have appointment-based browsing. People could sign up to come for half an hour chunks to be in the store. We would love it if it felt safe to do that around say December, but we’re not sure.”

This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the Fall 2020 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. This year, YAJI has gone virtual. Read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag.