Nomadic Bookshop Opens in Oakland's Uptown District

Nomadic Bookshop opened its doors in Oakland’s Uptown district on January 17, and if the launch event was any indication, the community has been waiting for something exactly like this.

Nearly 400 people packed the store for the three-hour official opening, where founders J.K. Fowler and Uriel Landa had assembled 10 writers, 10 poets, and DJ Nickie Sol for a celebration that Fowler described as feeling like a family reunion. Poet Tongo Eisen-Martin traveled from Detroit to read. Books flew off the shelves. “We had the good problem of filling the shelves back up,” Fowler said.

The husband-and-husband team brings serious literary infrastructure to this project. Fowler founded Nomadic Press, an independent publisher that put out more than 100 titles over a decade before closing in 2023. With the bookshop, he’s reviving the publishing operation at a smaller scale, aiming to release roughly four books annually by local writers and poets. He also serves in his third term as executive director of the Bay Area Book Festival. Landa, meanwhile, runs the store’s sprawling events calendar.

That division of labor is deliberate. Fowler handles curation and book selection. Landa manages events. Fowler says running events under the traditional model, where the store handles everything, is exhausting work. The community-led alternative suits him better. People submit event proposals through the store’s website, Fowler and Landa respond, and programming emerges from that back-and-forth. So far the calendar has included open-mic community conversations, a workshop on processing grief through creative work, and poetry-writing classes. Most events are free or pay-what-you-can.

The store’s location in Uptown feeds the model. Fowler points to the surrounding ecosystem: Malibu Burgers nearby, Creative Growth and the YMCA around the corner, the Hive, a park at Broadway and 23rd. “It’s a healthy neighborhood with lots of foot traffic and excitement,” he said. “People like knowing each other and having businesses that are third, safe, accessible spaces where they can gather.”

The book selection reflects a clear editorial perspective. Many titles address state oppression, over-policing, and authoritarianism, alongside work that imagines alternatives to the current order. Fowler is direct about what the store represents but pushes back against the idea that it’s a reaction to the current political moment. “It’s reimagining what’s possible,” he said. He acknowledged that Oakland has so far been somewhat insulated from federal immigration enforcement actions, while not counting on that to continue. “The fears are real,” he said.

Those fears carry personal weight for Landa, who is a Mexican national with a green card. The couple is aware that his immigration status could be affected by the current federal climate, though the source material does not detail the specifics of their legal situation. Running a bookstore that explicitly centers radical expression and amplifies voices from the margins carries different stakes when one of the founders navigates those systems directly.

What Fowler and Landa have built is harder to categorize than a conventional independent bookstore. It functions as a publisher, a community programming hub, and a gathering space, with books at the center but not always the main event. The community-powered events model distributes the creative labor outward, which keeps the calendar active without burning out the founders. The pay-what-you-can structure removes financial barriers that typically gate cultural participation.

Oakland has lost bookstores over the past decade, as it has lost other independent businesses to rising costs and shifting foot traffic. Nomadic Bookshop plants a flag against that trend in a neighborhood that appears, at least for now, to be generating enough energy to sustain it. Four hundred people showing up on opening night is a meaningful data point. So is the empty shelf.