Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse

Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse Red Emma's is a worker-owned radical bookstore, vegan/vegetarian restaurant, and bar in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Red Emma's is a radical bookstore and a vegetarian restaurant and a coffee roaster and a space for public events. Red Emma's is a worker cooperative and family of projects dedicated to autonomy, sustainability, participatory democracy, and solidarity. Since 2004, our space has been a grassroots answer to the collapse of civic infrastructure, a radical gathering place and experiment in self-organiz

ed education, all made possible by a horizontally organized collective of folks who own the underlying business cooperatively. We also serve some amazing ethically sourced food and a fine cup of transparently traded coffee.

Starting to look like a Book Fest over here ….. Baltimore Book Festival September 19/20 (plus preview events September 1...
08/15/2026

Starting to look like a Book Fest over here ….. Baltimore Book Festival September 19/20 (plus preview events September 12/13). Full schedule across all eight stages coming SOON 📚📚📚

The latest updates 👻
08/15/2026

The latest updates 👻

Exhibitor applications for the 2026 Baltimore Book Festival close FRIDAY! There are still a few spots left for 10x10 ven...
08/13/2026

Exhibitor applications for the 2026 Baltimore Book Festival close FRIDAY! There are still a few spots left for 10x10 vendor spots, AND there a $25 spots available for non-profit literary orgs & community/activist groups. Sign up! There’s nothing like spending two days outside talking stories with your best book buds 💕 Come & join us! QR code below or visit www.baltimorecity.gov/baltimore-book-fest

Congrats to our badass bookseller Megan Berkobien, whose co-translation from Catalan of Montserrat Roig’s epic feminist ...
08/12/2026

Congrats to our badass bookseller Megan Berkobien, whose co-translation from Catalan of Montserrat Roig’s epic feminist novel is coming out in a few weeks in a Modern Library edition, and getting a lot of buzz on summer reading lists. Preorder it now on our site, and stay tuned for an event this fall!

So many amazing opportunities to connect with community and get plugged in this week! Everything from study groups to co...
08/11/2026

So many amazing opportunities to connect with community and get plugged in this week! Everything from study groups to coffee hours, to educators gatherings, to writing groups, and chess meet-ups! Don’t see what you are looking for? Get in touch, there’s probably a meetup for it! Plus don’t miss Virginia Eubanks on Wednesday for her new book “A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving,” in conversation with Marion Winik.

Congrats to Maryland LGBTQ+ History Zines and More on best zine! 💖
08/08/2026

Congrats to Maryland LGBTQ+ History Zines and More on best zine! 💖

Tonight! 6PM, secret solidarity cinema returns with another free mystery movie night! Come out for drinks, snacks, and a...
08/07/2026

Tonight! 6PM, secret solidarity cinema returns with another free mystery movie night! Come out for drinks, snacks, and another of our favorite movement movies.

For Black women, mass incarceration did not begin with the War on Drugs, but with slavery.Cotton, not crack, was the pri...
08/06/2026

For Black women, mass incarceration did not begin with the War on Drugs, but with slavery.

Cotton, not crack, was the primary driver of mass incarceration in its earliest years. And slave jails, not prisons, were its first for-profit institutions.

Hundreds of thousands were held in slave jails as part of the domestic slave trade, a system that trafficked enslaved individuals throughout the Southern United States.

Thousands more were detained in city jails for escaping from enslavement or for failing to prove they were legally free.

The institution of slavery might not have survived without a system of mass jailing to safeguard it.

Even after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Black women continued to endure mass incarceration within the carceral system.

Exploiting Black women’s free labor on chain gangs, on plantations, and in private households payments became a standard practice in post–Thirteenth Amendment America.

Slavery’s legacy of mass incarceration continues to shape our carceral system today.

The auction block was once the primary site of family separation. It has been replaced by the Adoption and Safe Families Act, with public jails and prisons emerging as key facilitators.

ust as chattel slavery could not be improved, mass incarceration cannot be fixed. Until this system is abolished, slavery will persist.

***

Talitha L. LeFlouria presents “Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block” in conversation w/Khalilah M. Harris Khalilah M. Harris

Tuesday, August 18th 2026
7:00 pm
Red Emma’s
3128 Greenmount Avenue

“Talitha L. LeFlouria delivers a paradigm-shifting account of American incarceration, tracing its roots to the domestic slave trade and the long history of racialized confinement that has shaped Black women’s lives for centuries. With extraordinary archival rigor and narrative power, she reveals mass incarceration not as a modern aberration but as a central throughline of our nation’s history. This book ought to change forever how the history of mass incarceration is told.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

Tonight! It’s craft night! Bring yourself, your favorite non-messy craft supplies, and maybe a friend too! We have $20 b...
08/05/2026

Tonight! It’s craft night! Bring yourself, your favorite non-messy craft supplies, and maybe a friend too! We have $20 beer & burger specials for you, plus we have fried mushrooms now!! Come by 🧶🧶🧶 5PM until close

Who cares?Often, it’s not someone who has chosen to do so. Care—the kind where someone’s life is at stake or in question...
08/04/2026

Who cares?

Often, it’s not someone who has chosen to do so. Care—the kind where someone’s life is at stake or in question—can be an imposition, arriving unexpectedly or inexorably when it is demanded by or for someone we love. The selflessness of care can be beautiful—in theory—but it can also be difficult and messy, delivered with no guarantee of reward, resolution, or reciprocity. Caring can be sacrifice. It can be damaging. And none of that makes it less necessary.

This is the difficult waters that Virginia Eubanks dives into her incredible new memoir A Guide to Openwater Lifesaving. We first had the chance to meet Virginia back in 2011, when we hosted her for her first book Digital Dead End, on the way people in poverty experience technologies designed without and sometimes against them.

Between then and now, however, Virginia’s life was turned upside down. Her partner was brutally attacked, and she became, unexpectedly, his primary caregiver. A Guide to Openwater Lifesaving is Virginia’s record of what happened next, told with heartbreaking clarity, reflecting on how we survive trauma, and the harm that care can bring to those who deliver it, through the unlikely prism of open water rescue and other extreme outdoor survival scenarios. Virginia is here to launch this book in conversation with Marion Winik next week, on Wednesday August 12th—and we really hope you can join us, and help spread the word to the people in your life navigating their own relationships to care.

Address

3128 Greenmount Avenue
Baltimore, MD
21218

Opening Hours

Tuesday 9am - 8pm
Wednesday 9am - 8pm
Thursday 9am - 8pm
Friday 9am - 8pm
Saturday 9am - 8pm
Sunday 10am - 4pm

Telephone

+14106013072

Website

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