ARTS & CULTURE

copies of them on hand,” Mullen explains. “So the mess that was created looked like, ‘Oh, it’s taking three weeks to get my order,’ when the reason why it’s taking three to six weeks to get your order is because this book doesn’t currently exist in its physical form anywhere, because they’ve all been purchased. Bookstores have absolutely no issue fulfilling orders, so long as the book exists.”

Mullen curates author events to what’s of interest to her customers, including moderators, who she scouts for by perusing the #bookstagrammers hashtag on Instagram. “We can’t just do like the popular book and the popular author because it’s likely not that popular with the Black community.” When Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments came out, she remembers people lining up at other booksellers, but at Semicolon, it didn’t sell. “It’s a little more e ort that’s put into things instead of just picking an author of a popular book and having them come sign.”

Mullen is the third Black woman to own a bookstore in Chicago, after Desiree Sanders and Toneal M. Jackson, and currently is the only one. A year into owning Semicolon, Mullen has realized that being a Black bookseller has more pressure and responsibility attached than she originally anticipated. “Black booksellers are a lot different—they have what seems to be a different kind of focus. I think naturally Black booksellers are going to be more focused on the community than the dollars and cents. I also recognize that Black bookselling is a di erent beast. We’re just making our own way,” she says. “When I started it was kind of, of course I’m going to do community work if anybody comes in, but otherwise, I just want to have a good time. As we’ve been open, I’m recognizing how necessary it is that we are here, and the responsibility that we have to our community, and to the families and the kids who need us to stay here.”

In the future, Mullen hopes to expand Semicolon to other cities with strong graffiti art scenes, like Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. She also hopes to retain the new customers that they’ve gained in the past few months. Her customers before were 80 percent Black. Now, her customers are split 50/50 between Black and non-Black. Mullen says, “I think when people hear about a Black-owned space naturally non-Black people are kind of timid about coming. And once non-Black people come into the space, they feel surprisingly comfortable and I’m like, ‘Yeah! Just come in.’”

@rimaparikh12

A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. This week’s poem is curated by poet Tara Betts. Tara Betts is the author of two poetry collections, Break the Habit, Arc & Hue, and the forthcoming Refuse to Disapp Disappear. She also co-edited The Beiging of America and edited a critical edition of Philippa Duke Schuyler's Adventures in Black and White. In addition to her work as a teaching artist and mentor for young poets, she's taught at prisons and several universities, including Rutgers University and Uni and University of Illinois-Chicago. In 2019, Tara published a poem celebrating Illinois' bicentennial with Candor Arts. Tara is the Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and the Lit Editor at Newcity. Betts is currently hard at work to establish The Whirlwind Center on Chi Chicago's South Side.