Library Run: Black Women & The Harlem Renaissance in Storage

Library storage exists because libraries run out of space. More often than not, it is where books go to die. Unless your research and the catalog lead you to Akasha Hull’s work or Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s diary, it is rare that you will encounter these texts on a curated table or a featured shelf.

Today, as I requested two books from Brooklyn Public Library’s central storage, I asked the librarian, “Is there a reason books end up in storage beyond lack of space?”

She answered plainly, “Yeah. Because they’re old.”

Outside of university libraries, librarians are often forced to make room for new titles. This is necessary, but it makes me think about which books lose space first. The ones without living or prolific authors. The ones no longer generating reviews or headlines. The books that professors quietly move in and out of syllabi as trends and theories shift.

I have been deep in a research rabbit hole of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black women writers. That path led me to Akasha Gloria Hull, a historian whose work centers on these women with care, detail, texture, and humor. Every page opens into another list of names, texts, and lives I was never taught to seek.

Hull’s work made something clear to me. Keeping these texts alive cannot rest solely on librarians or catalogers. It requires readers, teachers, and researchers who deliberately pull them back into circulation.

Library storage is not neutral. It reflects what we choose to remember and what we allow to fade. Requesting these books felt like a small intervention, a refusal to let them disappear quietly.

Library Run is how I move through research in public. It will begin with a question, a title, or a name that will not leave me alone. It usually requires walking, and often it leads me to books that are not on display, not on feature tables, not immediately visible. Books that live in storage. Books you have to ask the librarians for.

This series documents those moments: the act of pulling a book back into the light and asking why it was ever placed out of reach. This is how I trace Black creators' intellectual histories through space, access, and absence. It is how I notice what survives, what circulates, and what must be deliberately retrieved.

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This first run began while I was reading The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad. In it, she reflects on how other diarists can guide our own writing practices. She names Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

-record scratch-

Alice Dunbar-Nelson published a diary?

Within minutes, I was on my way to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library. The catalog showed the diary was in storage.

I had requested materials from archives before, but this was my first time pulling a book from Brooklyn Public Library’s central storage. When the book arrived at the desk, it felt newly visible.

Reading Dunbar-Nelson’s diary introduced me, more fully, to Akasha Gloria Hull, formerly Gloria T. Hull. Hull was able to conduct much of her research through Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s niece, who preserved papers and personal belongings that might otherwise have disappeared.

Hull is also the author of Color, Sex, and Poetry, a study of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. That book, too, was in storage.

Today, I pulled two more titles from storage. Time’s Unfading Garden, Anne Spencer’s collected work, and Bronze by Georgia Douglas Johnson. Both books arrived quietly, their spines marked by time and handling, evidence of how often their presence has been deferred rather than denied.

What struck me most was how many doors opened in Hull’s work. In the preface alone, she gestures toward Regina Anderson, Ethel Ray Nance, Anne Spencer, Helene Johnson, and others whose names invite pursuit.

She writes about Anderson and Nance’s apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue, a gathering place for Renaissance-era writers. Zora Neale Hurston slept on their couch. Anderson brought home Black writers’ works each night to read closely and place into the library circulation.

While recent articles have resurfaced many of these stories, much of the scholarship that preserves their texture remains in storage.

Each time I request one of these books, or share it with a friend, or place it briefly into public view, it feels less like retrieval and more like release.

Like letting a bird back into the sky.

Texts Referenced in This Library Run

• Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, edited by Akasha Gloria Hull

• Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, by Akasha Gloria Hull

• Time’s Unfading Garden, writings of Anne Spencer

• Bronze, by Georgia Douglas Johnson

• The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, by Suleika Jaouad