On a rainy Wednesday night, Redbud Books on West Kirkwood still glows. Music hums through the space. Cozy lamps shine over reading nooks. The bright green floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are packed full, each section sporting hand-written labels with names including “queer studies” and “Black thought.”
Open for just over a year in March, Redbud Books is a nonprofit, volunteer-run bookstore managed by a collective of twelve community members. The store is a project of The Center for Sustainable Living, a Bloomington organization centered around sustainability-focused community projects. Next door sits Middle Earth, a project of Bloomington Cooperative Living.
For Renae Lesser, a School of Education doctoral student and Redbud collective member, this communal focus is what makes Redbud special.
“This is a space where people can do organizing. This is a space where people can have meetings that relate to community issues. And I think that you can see that people are very hungry for this,” Lesser said. “It's not like you have to be a collective member or a volunteer in order to use this space as a community space. So that's one of the things that sort of makes it a third space. And so that’s, for me, what makes it most vital right now.”
Third spaces are places outside of the home and workplace where members of a community to gather, converse and share ideas. Cole Nelson, a fellow collective member and an IU graduate student in cinema and media studies, was similarly attracted to the project because of its mission to create a curated third space.
“I think there's a lot of focus that's given to IU,” Nelson said. “And while that's great, I think it's also important to be having those conversations and to be offering a resource for community members around Bloomington to sustain intellectual conversations, to sustain creative activities in communities beyond what is available at the university. So, to my mind, a bookstore seemed like a ready fit for that sort of thing.”
The Redbud Books sign is pictured March 5, 2025, at 408 W. Kirkwood Ave. in Bloomington. Redbud Books opened in March 2024.
Inside the store, the lime green bookshelves are packed full of material — but not just published books. Board games, puzzles, tarot cards, notebooks and other curiosities are up for sale around the space. By the front door, a shelf is dedicated to free community-curated documents like zines and flyers.
Redbud also acts as a gathering space for various events, like film screenings, lectures and play readings — one took place March 7, when the bookstore hosted several actors and audience members to hear IU assistant playwriting professor Ana Candida Carneiro’s “Plastic Doll.”
Carneiro originally wrote the play in 2010 to explore gender relations and Western concepts of beauty through the avatars of Barbie and Ken. The play will premiere at the Fringe Festival in Curitiba, Brazil, on March 27.
Redbud is an important space for Carneiro to share her work.
“I really believe in community relations, and we've been trying to build relationships with the community,” Carneiro said. “Theater makes sense if it's made with and for communities.”
Along with readings like Carneiro’s, Redbud platforms local artists through its curation. Nelson said in the current political climate, Redbud attempts to foreground banned books and minority authors.
“We also try to focus literature by authors who get little attention elsewhere, including local authors,” Nelson said. “We as much as possible try to encourage the entire Bloomington community to participate in what makes Redbud unique.”
And this focus on often-controversial voices may have a bigger impact than just filling the shelves. Over the last year, IU administration has faced criticism surrounding their handling of free speech. IU cancelled Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s exhibition at the Eskenazi Museum of Art in December 2024, after planning the exhibit for three years, citing security concerns — the cancellation drew condemnation from the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art Watch. Tenured professor and Palestine Solidarity Committee adviser Abdulkader Sinno was suspended after IU denied a room reservation for one of the group’s events and the PSC hosted it anyways, prompting faculty pushback. IU trustees approved a new expressive activity policy in July 2024 that restricts some forms of expression without prior approval from the university and outside specific times of day — it followed the arrest of 57 protesters, primarily IU students and faculty, during a pro-Palestine encampment in Dunn Meadow last spring.
These incidents surrounding free speech at IU, Nelson said, are why a space like Redbud is needed to allow freedom of expression in Bloomington.
“Redbud attempts to be something of a third space, something of a refuge from the attacks that higher education is seeing,” Nelson said. “So in that way, we try to be inclusive of that which is getting pushed out of the university with each passing day.”
Nelson said the most important aspect of Redbud, beyond its green shelves stuffed full of books and lively events, is its ability to bring people together.
“It puts me in community with a whole range of folks who are doing interesting and incredible work around town,” Nelson said. “I've been able to meet countless, countless people through the process of being involved in Redbud.”
Redbud Books is located at 408 W. Kirkwood Ave. The store is open daily from noon to 7 p.m. Books can also be ordered through its virtual storefront. Events are announced through its event calendar, Instagram, Facebook and X.
