The idea for the Black Men Reading Series came about in 2018, after I reached out to Reginald Bailey, a black man who is a bookstagrammer (an Instagram user who focuses on books and bookish content). I wanted to ask him about his participation in a social media culture that no one associates with black men. Our exchange was energetic, informative, and eye-opening, developing into a two-part blog post that readers were hungry to read.
From that initial exchange, I determined to reach out to a range of black men in order to learn and hear stories about how they came to reading, why they read, what they read, what literacy means to them, and what paradigms they hope to be instrumental in changing. The Black Men Reading Series is a platform for hearing from a not-so-visible demographic.
