Gladys Books and Wine, located at 306 Malcolm X Boulevard in Bed Stuy, set the stage for a powerful evening as it hosted a free community reading of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange. The event was part of Afrionics: A Black Play Reading Series curated by the Griot Gyals, founded by Alexandra Maurice and Shaunette Renée Wilson.
The program began at 7, but by 6:30, though the February sunset had already disappeared, the interior of Gladys Books and Wine was vibrantly lit. To the right, a lineup of portraits by Black women writers greeted guests, including larger framed photographs of Audre Lorde and June Jordan, often regarded as ‘twin pillars’ of Black queer feminist thought in the twentieth century.
Both daughters of West Indian immigrants, both shaped by New York City, Lorde in Harlem and Jordan in Brooklyn, and both educators in CUNY’s SEEK program during the late 1960s, where they helped reimagine how literature was taught to Black and Puerto Rican students.
As you moved further inside, couches and chairs filled with black and brown skin in conversation, hands wrapped around chosen beverages. Above them on the wooden wall plastered the name Gladys, honoring the late Gladys Louise Dockery, whose house once served as a gathering place for her family.
Food, spades, bid whist, louder love, and good trash talking shaped that home. Tiffany Dockery, founder of Gladys Books and Wine, carries that inheritance forward. She describes the spirit as fierce love, open doors, deep roots, always a seat at the table. Since opening on September 6, 2025, Gladys Books and Wine has quickly become a space the community recognizes as its own.
By 7:15, the multifunctional event space was packed with family, friends, artists, and passersby. The lineup featured Chalia La Tour as Lady in Orange, Stacey Sargeant reprising her Broadway role as Lady in Blue, Adrienne Wells as Lady in Yellow, Jasmine Mans as Lady in Green, Marinda Anderson as Lady in Red, Lauren F. Walker as Lady in Brown, and Cloteal L. Horne as Lady in Purple. Behind strobe LED lighting that gave the room the texture of theater, each performer embodying her color with precision and emotional clarity.
To understand the weight of that evening is to understand the history of Shange’s ‘choreopoem’. First performed in 1974 in women’s bars and jazz clubs in California, the work emerged from Shange’s own survival, written after multiple suicide attempts and shaped by what she described as the triple disenfranchisement of being “Black, female, and unheard”.
She renamed herself Ntozake Shange, ‘she who comes with her own things’, she who walks with lions, as an act of self reclamation. When the choreopoem reached Broadway in 1976, it became only the second play by a Black woman to do so. It broke silence around domestic violence, abortion, and interior pain within Black communities. Rooted in African oral tradition, the characters are colors rather than names, a collective testimony.
By the end of the reading, the audience gathered in the common area, overlooked by a carefully curated wall of books centering Black queer femme culture, Black lesbian feminism, and expansive Black womanhood.
Sections dedicated to Lesbian Stories, Black Queer Futures in science fiction, Resistance Reads, and Black Love as Political Resistance sat alongside foundational voices such as Lorde, Baldwin, Morrison, and Jordan. The selection stretches across genres, from poetry and romance to fantasy, comics, and children’s literature.
For Black History Month, Gladys Books and Wine assembled a full calendar of programming that extends this commitment. A Special Edition Bookclub with Well Read Sistas will discuss Arc of the Universe by Nikki Alexander. Glo in the City Live will bring a Black History Month themed queer comedy show hosted by Glo Butler with music by DJ mare.
A children’s storytime centered on Freedom Braids by Monique Duncan, a city wide $50 Bookstore Crawl stop, political chats, Queer Cinema Haus screenings, and continued Afrionics readings round out the month. This year marks 100 years of Black History Month, and Gladys Books and Wine is honoring it by foregrounding Black Love as Political Resistance.
Tiffany often attributes the mission of the store to her grandmother’s understanding that “Black love is Black wealth”. On this night, through Shange’s words, through color, through chorus, through community, that wealth was tangible.
