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Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Making Space for JoyClifford Prince King
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How does anyone make art in this dizzying moment? In our Now issue, Bazaar speaks to 10 creative people—dancers, comedians, pop singers, writers—about what fuels their work in 2026.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is one of the few living writers who can say they wrote a book that changed the world. The 1619 Project, originally a work of reporting she complied for The New York Times, became an instant bestseller when it was released in 2021. The book restarted conversations in America around Blackness, memory, and the true wages of history. Since then, she has continued her scholarship while regularly speaking across the country and teaching journalism at Howard University, where she founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy. This spring, she will embark on a long-anticipated new project—a bookstore, café, and community gathering place called North Star Books + Bar, in the heart of her adopted home of Brooklyn, NY.
Outside of my regular writing and being a college professor, two big projects I’m working on right now are trying to get North Star Books + Bar open, and I also founded a nonprofit called Iola’s Lyceum that’s going to operate out of there and do all the programing. I’ve been thinking about this thing for 10 years now, working on it earnestly for almost six. When I started thinking about this 10 years ago, Bed-Stuy didn’t have any bookstores at all, and I just couldn’t believe that a vibrant Black neighborhood like this didn’t have a bookstore.
I wanted to create something that would be like a literary salon, a place that would feed your mind and your soul. I knew what it was like to be a writer trying to find your people. And I was mentoring a lot of younger writers. I wanted a space where I could bring young writers together with their heroes to have organic conversations. I was also just deeply inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. And I’m like, “I’m in New York. What more New York thing could you do than invite a bunch of writers to a space and say, ‘Let’s do readings’?”
I’ve been holding these salons in my house for almost 15 years. When you’re invited into someone’s house and they feed you and there’s just a bunch of creative folks in there, I think there’s a natural intimacy. The first one, you had to know me. I’ve served fried chicken since that first salon. We just eat regular-people food, and at the end of the night we dance and drink. Initially, I asked people to bring things that they were working through. For the first one, Ta-Nehisi Coates read from a draft of Between the World and Me from his cell phone. There has to be the willingness of established writers to humbly interact with writers who are just trying to get their footing, and there also has to be joy and music and food.
It has outgrown my house. It keeps getting bigger, and honestly, it’s kind of lost something. It’s less intimate, there’s less time, less ability to do the readings, and it’s now more about the party and the outfits, and that’s not really what I created it to be. It’s turned into this hot ticket in a way that’s cool, but it’s not really why I started it. In the new space, I’m excited to make it more democratic. You don’t have to know me or know someone who knows me to come. I hope we can turn inward and artists can do what artists are supposed to do in a time like this.
What I find most challenging about creating right now is not succumbing to just a complete sense of loss. It’s hard to not feel completely overwhelmed by sadness and wonder what’s superficial and what’s not. Is it okay to just do things because they bring you joy? Do you always have to be focused on how bad things are? What sustains me now is not feeling completely powerless and saying, “All these things are out of my control, but this thing that I’m doing is in my control.”
When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I go to my building, where the bookstore will be. I think it gives me sustenance to see this vision finally coming to reality in an actual physical structure. I got a video yesterday of the elevator that we’re putting in. It’s now working. I think having small victories on things, seeing some small progress with something that I hope will be a creative space, also opens up creativity for me.
Clifford Prince King
This story appears in the April issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
Hair and makeup: Cassandra Normil
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