Call & Response is a Black woman-owned neighborhood bookstore in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago focused on fostering a love of reading, community, human connections, and the sharing of ideas across cultures and backgrounds. We place voices of the global majority at the center of our work in an effort to deepen understanding and strengthen solidarity pathways, and to provide a space for the many people who, for so long, have fought for the dignity of being valued in literary spaces.

Our Name

Our store is named in honor of African diasporic traditions of music and storytelling, in which the storyteller and/or musician and listener are engaged in an ongoing dialogue, the listeners continually assuring the artist of both their attention and their digestion of the words being uttered. Just as call and response is a tradition that engages and encourages active listening, we hope to encourage a love of immersive and transformative community engagement through storytelling.