Why do you want to live?
Because you know you have to live.
After Donald Trump was elected, I realized that I had been remiss in not having been
more regularly politically active.
And so I was thinking, you know, how can I make political activity part of my routine?
And I found that getting together with other people is the best way for me to do that.
People call me an activist because of what I do, but I've never considered myself an activist until recently.
I always cared, but I didn't know what to do.
We've sort of created this neighborhood hub where people will come in, share their stuff,
you know, share flyers, share just information, give us their books,
that otherwise I would never, ever, ever in my life would ever have seen.
It's so good that we get together for the literary issue because literature doesn't have
language, it doesn't have gas, it doesn't have color.
Word Up is also more than a bookstore, it's a space for the community.
A lot of that is a space for arts events, but then also a space for other kinds of events,
including various kinds of political and activist events.
We also host open mics, so people who need space to try stuff out, they can come in here.
There's story time for kids, it's bilingual, sometimes trilingual, English, Spanish, and Italian.
We have writing workshops for adults, we've done a couple of co-sponsored events
with the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights.
Our queer and trans youth event, which is coming out of a young volunteer saying
we should have this, so if we should have this, let's do it.
Almost six years ago, Veronica Liu had an idea of, hey, there's an empty store front
at 176th and Broadway, I've got some books, let's throw together a pop-up shop.
The night that we opened in June 2011, people were saying right from that first night
that they wanted the place to stay forever, something that happened, Occupy started.
So in the early history of Word Up, I see a lot of connection between this great number of volunteers
that was riding this wave with this feeling, that spirit that was in the air.
After hundreds of people had come through and thousands more had really tried to
either engage with the place in some way, or tangibly or spiritually left their imprint on,
whatever we were doing, or just helped fund the place.
I really felt like opening up this location wasn't just me.
It really felt like a community effort.
It's a great thing to feel a real tie to the community.
We've got a lot of volunteers here who were born and raised within a few blocks of this space,
and that's definitely a different kind of relationship to the community than I've got.
By cupping out here, I feel glad that I'm doing my part to build this community.
We want everybody to be welcome here, no matter what.
We want everybody to feel safe and comfortable here,
and to be able to express themselves in a way that doesn't step on anybody else's toes.
We want people to enjoy the space and to enjoy the books and to be able to get the most out of the space as they can.
