‘A Space for Everyone I Love’: This Summer Brings the Hudson Valley’s First Black Trans-Owned Bookstore

Born and raised in the Hudson Valley, Awa-Moon Barnett is a community organizer and educator who is opening the region’s first Black trans-owned bookstore this summer. Over the past year, Barnett has been fundraising for “home home,” a mobile bookshop and political education center grounded in Black and trans liberation while serving communities throughout the Hudson Valley.

“I want to create a project for everyone I love — for queer people, trans people, melanated people, folks who are less abled, folks who are COVID-conscious folks who read braille, folks who have more complex needs who are neurodivergent,” Barnett said. “I was like ‘How do I create something that supports them while doing everything I love?’”

Alongside her dream to build a space specifically dedicated to Black, trans and queer voices, Barnett said that home home came out of her commitment to literacy as a critical site for organizing. In New York, around 3.9 million people are currently illiterate, reading below a fifth grade level.

From 2017 to 2021, she worked as an educator for the Kingston nonprofit AJ Williams-Myers African Roots Center, which aims to use books written by and for those of the African diaspora to promote literacy and teach a social justice-focused curriculum. From there, she then went on a two-year, 30,000 mile motorcycle trip across the United States, where she said Black bookstores served as touchpoints throughout her journey for Black history, culture and community.

“I know my focus in the revolution is through education,” Barnett explained. “Reading has made me more confident in my life, and we live in a time in the United States when the average American reads at a sixth grade reading level. There’s this huge gap that’s forever widening based off of resources and technology.”

Despite exploring the entire country, Barnett knew she wanted to keep the bookstore in the Hudson Valley. From challenging the historical erasure of Black and Indigenous peoples in the region, to fostering pride in people’s cultural and political identities, she sees significant opportunity in the region for what home home aims to do as a political education center driven by radical politics. Beyond just a bookstore, she plans to host mutual aid fundraisers, writing workshops, film screenings and protest preparation.

“There’s 72 bookshops in the Hudson Valley — none of them are owned by Black people, and very few of them actually have a decent children’s book section,” Barnett said. “It frustrates me because it’s like Black people have been in the Hudson Valley since 1624 on those first ships, and we have yet to have the representation or the equality or the resources. We have such beautiful stories.There’s such beautiful narratives happening in the world right now, written in so many languages, and our needs aren’t being met collectively and individually.”

The total fundraising goal on the GoFundMe is $50,000, but she has already raised the $31,000 needed towards buying the bookmobile by the end of April. Barnett herself is from a small, 500-person town in Ulster County, and a major focus for the bookstore was making it mobile, allowing it to traverse throughout the region to meet people where they are, rather than vice versa.

“We live in a time when even the smallest towns, like [those] I grew up in with 500 people, are being faced with gentrification. They’re being faced with wealth inequality. They’re being faced with environmental injustice,” Barnett explained. “Part of the mobile book center is we can build wherever you are — whether that’s in a trailer park or whether that’s in a private estate. I believe that a mobile bookmobile allows us to build where we are, build with the communities where they’re at socially, politically, environmentally and financially.”

Disclosing her identity in the process of promoting the bookstore was an intentional choice — and a difficult one at that amid ongoing attacks against trans communities and communities of color in the United States. In 2026 alone, 762 anti-trans bills were introduced across the country, alongside major drawbacks to gender-affirming care for trans youth.

However, Barnett said she’s also received significant support from the community since launching the idea of home home. During the time fundraising for the bookmobile, the bookstore has been holding popups in collaboration with existing organizations, including African Roots Center as well as Hudson Catskill Housing. Last fall, home home also partnered with Common Table New York in Kingston to host a queer soup night and fundraiser for the bookstore.

“We’ve had young mothers whose children are queer and trans who are like, ‘Finally, books that represent my child’s experience,” Barnett said. “Doing it in a way that’s community centered also holds me accountable. All of these people are offering up their funds in an era of when everything is more expensive and more costly and more dangerous than it’s ever been, and you believe in something like that. And for that, I’m forever grateful.”

home home’s official launch date remains tentative, but is expected to debut sometime this summer.

Image: home home bookshop founder Awa-Moon Barnett stands with her pop up at the AJ Williams-Myers African Roots Center’s summer fundraiser in Kingston, NY on June 28, 2025. (Photo credit: @homehomebookshop)