How one mother’s love of reading became Third Ward’s most vital cultural gathering place
Terri Hamm is the kind of person who reads to breathe. The Howard University graduate, former teacher, and longtime Houston resident opened Kindred Stories, a Black-owned bookstore in the city’s Third Ward, in 2021, and it has quietly grown into one of the city’s most visited independent bookstores.
What inspired you to open Kindred Stories?
My mother was a reader, and I grew up watching her devour book after book in her free time. When I became a mother, reading became my escape. It became like a healing balm to just the constant stress and the pulling at your mind, your body.
When my daughter was maybe around 11, she was getting sick and tired of me choosing books for her. We lived abroad in Asia, and we didn’t have a bookstore where she could really go and explore books that she was genuinely interested in.
When we got back to Houston, I felt like we needed a bookstore space that speaks to the whole family and what the whole family is trying to read, and that was actively bringing authors to Houston and building community around bookish activities.
In 2021, I decided to open a bookstore. I am very risk-averse, so we started out with pop-ups. The number one question we would get was, where is your physical space? Throughout those first 6 months, we learned that people were desperate for a space they could rely on. That was something that was missing specifically for Black readers in the city, and Kindred Stories is one of the bookstores that decided to fill that void.
Why did you choose to center Black authors and marginalized voices?
When we got back to the States, she was really connecting with stories about Black girls. Black girls that not only came from where she came from in America, but Black girls throughout the diaspora.
I felt like there wasn’t a physical place in Houston where she could really dig deep and explore the huge, deep breath of works that Black authors are writing, and I also realized that that space didn’t exist for me in the city, either. Not in a way that was super accessible and consistent.
What does a typical day or event at Kindred Stories look like?
We are so busy. We host maybe 30 events a month across author talks and book clubs. Kindred Stories has also become a place where the people working there every day use it as a place to dream.
We host an adult spelling bee that has just blown out of this world. About 200 people come every year, and about 30 of those folks compete. We have some cocktails, it’s a lot of fun.
A day as a bookseller is very intense. There’s a lot of logistics and planning. We are constantly ordering books, receiving books, talking to customers, trying to build community in a genuine way. Every day as a bookseller is very different. It’s a small business, so we’re all wearing many hats.
You donate culturally relevant books to Houston schools even with book bans happening. Why do you still keep showing up?
The whole book banning situation in Texas makes us quite angry, and it’s more than just book banning. At all times, there has always been a resource void when it comes to books in Black and Brown neighborhoods.
My family lives in a neighborhood called The Heights, where schools have libraries and great librarians that are really activating the library space. Whereas in Third Ward, where the bookstore is located, some of these schools have never had an author visit their school, ever.
As we see the state takeover of HISD, most of the schools that need libraries, those libraries have been taken away. There’s no librarian. Books are just not being accessed and activated in the way that we know would change lives.
We work with the Houston Public Library, the ACLU of Texas, and other companies outside Texas that have donated funds so that whenever we bring an author to a school, every student gets to walk home with a book. A parent doesn’t need to pay any money. We just want to make books and author experiences as accessible as possible.
What’s happening now is like the haves versus the have-nots. The haves find a way to continue to make it happen, and the have-nots sometimes don’t have access to these things, and I think it’s detrimental. If you’re [reading this] and you want to donate some books to schools in Houston, hit us up!
Can you tell us about Houston’s Independent Bookstore Crawl?
The Houston Bookstore Crawl was created by another Black-owned bookstore called CLASS Bookstore, which is also in Third Ward. Dara Landry came by the store one day and said, “what if we did a bookstore crawl?” She said, “let’s make it a month-long crawl, and we were in.”
It’s an opportunity for folks in Houston, readers and some who are not readers, to get out and explore all of the bookstores that exist in Houston. I think we started with maybe 12 stores, and now there are 31. It’s been really cool watching the Houston community get excited about books and bookstore spaces.
It lasts for a whole month, right?
Yeah, all of April. Typically crawls happen for one day or over a weekend, but the whole month gives everybody more than enough time to visit everyone. We’ve got stores participating in Galveston, about 45 minutes outside of Houston, stores in the Woodlands and in Baytown.
There’s this misconception that people don’t read. Anytime I tell somebody I own a bookstore, they’re like, people are still reading? There are so many people that read, and they deserve bookstores. They deserve more than Amazon could ever offer.
Where can we find the participating bookstores?
There is a great Instagram page, @htxbookcrawl, that has all the information. It’s going to tell you what stores are participating, and there is a really beautiful map that they’ve created. Everybody who participates gets a bingo card, and the point is to get stamps from each store and be entered to win prizes. Houston is a big place, so you’ve got to be strategic.
Where can we find Kindred Stories?
You can learn more on our website, kindredstorieshtx.com. We’re also on Instagram @kindredstorieshtx, and our brick and mortar is located in Third Ward in the historic Eldorado Ballroom building at 2310 Elgin Street, unit number 2 on the first floor. The zip code is 77004.
