#firestormcoop — Public Fediverse posts

OMG Firestorm is turning 18?! Lift a glass (or maybe a bottle 😉) to the end of our youth. We're celebrating the milestone with a limited edition shirt from one of our favorite seditious artists—KRIME.

Starting today you can preorder one of these gorgeous gorgon shirts on our website for $36. They'll be printed by the good folks at Black Moon Ink on a 100% combed cotton tee from AS Colour, a company focused on high-quality, longer-lasting apparel. These shirts are tough enough to wear reading critical theory, but cozy enough for a fantasy novella!

Place your preorder before Sunday, May 3rd at https://firestorm.coop/products/24878-firestorm-birthday-t-shirt-preorder.html 📦

#FeministBookstore #TurnCopsToStone #Gorgon #FeministMythology #FirestormCoop (- L)

Preorder Promo ⌛💥 Order "The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice" before June 3rd and your copy will include an exclusive bookplate signed by the author! https://firestorm.coop/products/22746-the-immortal-choir-holds-every-voice-danielle-cain-3.html

We're just a little more than a month away from the release of @margaret 's next book and maybe like us, you've been waiting patiently for the last seven years to read this third title in the Danielle Cain series—or maybe you're a fan of Margaret's podcast but haven't yet gone in for the deep cuts. Either way, this book is for you! (We recommend going back to read the other two books in the series, but you can jump in anywhere.)

Trolls, lost comrades, murder faeries, small town punks, riot queers, and some fancy magic to boot, "The Immortal Choir" packs three intense short stories into a hundred pages. And in true Margaret Killjoy fashion, it blends dark fantasy, wry humor, and earnest reflections on friendship, self-discovery, and trying to change the world.

#Boosktagram #QueerFantasy #QueerSouth #QueerAppalachia #MargaretKilljoy #FeministBookstore #DanielleCain #FirestormCoop (- L)

At the end of last year, while reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell," many of us encountered the idea of "post-traumatic growth"—a sort of inverse PTSD, where individuals experience increased resilience, strengthened relationships, and personal empowerment as a result of a traumatic event. Excited by this phenomenon (and our own brush with it), a member of our reading group has worked with a friend in clinical psychology to facilitate a presentation and deeper conversation about the power of community in uncertain times.

Please join us on Tuesday at 6:30pm for an in-person discussion and workshop that draws on academic research and our own experiences as disaster survivors to explore the idea of post-traumatic growth!

More information can be found at https://firestorm.coop/events/3381-together-we-rise.html

#PostTraumaticGrowth #PTSD #HurricaneHelene #MutualAid #MutualAidDisasterRelief #WeKeepUsSafe #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)

Happy Birthday Firestorm! 16 never felt so sweet 🥳🧁

While it might seem like a blink of an eye to an Ageless Immortal Being like Julius here, 16 years is a ripe old age for a radical bookstore! We've watched many incredible community fixtures come and go in Asheville over the years. We know it is thanks to the ongoing support of our readers (not to mention blood, sweat, and tears from the determined workers of Firestorm past) that we still stand to tell tales of the olden days. Did you know someone used to have to haul a bag of ice from the gas station at the beginning of every shift to keep the drinks cold? Woof!

They walked (up a hill, literally and figuratively) so we could run and Julius could tippy tap around this beautiful renovated fill station turned neighborhood bookstore. I wonder what the founding members would have said if they knew that in 16 years Firestorm would own our own building and have the infrastructure to attempt wildly ambitious projects like distributing thousands of free banned books across state lines?

In this spirit of wonderment and celebration, we'll be adding a festive flare to our banned books packaging party tomorrow! Enjoy a gluten-free (or a gluten-full) vegan cupcake from Short Street Cakes and share a favorite memory you have of Firestorm. Did you have a go-to menu item from Firestorm's cafe? Was Firestorm the venue of your first date with your sweetie? We want to know!

https://firestorm.coop/events/3214-banned-books-back-packaging-party.html

We feel proud, we feel grateful, and we feel a tad unsettled by the way our toothless collective-mate is gumming their pupcake with such gusto. Heck, if a sweet 16 party isn't a good reason for a little dietary indiscretion, we don't know what is!

#BannedBooksBack #BannedBooks #FeministBookstore #QueerBookstore #FirestormCoop (-Esme)

Trash Fascism, Not Books! 🗑️

This benefit sticker supports our Banned Books Back! campaign to return books banned by Duval County Public Schools to kids! All proceeds go to cover postage, packaging materials, printing, and related campaign costs.

Printed by Off Color Decals on high-quality vinyl with eco-solvent inks, this kiss-cut sticker features an adorable antifascist possum illustration by Des. The removable 3" sticker is waterproof and safe for outdoor use. It is also scratch and UV fade resistant for up to 5 years of extreme cuteification of your car, laptop, or water bottle!

We’re almost 80% funded! Help us get all the way by heading to https://firestorm.coop/products/21029-banned-books-back-benefit-sticker.html

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (-Esmé).

Join our first Banned Books Back! packaging party and help us send books removed from Florida public schools back to kids in Florida! On Sunday, January 28th from 11am - 2pm ET we'll be packaging free picture books and chapter books along with zines and stickers. No experience is necessary, we'll show you how it's done! 🫡

For the past few weeks we've been collecting requests from kids and their advocates in Florida and at we've got a backlog of hundreds of orders to fulfill! Do you read the news about the rise in book-banning in our region and want to do something about it? Now is your chance!

Invite your friends of all ages! https://firestorm.coop/events/3139-banned-books-back-packaging-party.html

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (Esme)

We just passed the halfway point of our fundraising goal for Banned Books Back! Moms for Liberty, eat your hearts out! 😏

To recap, our collective received a serendipitous donation of children's books that had been removed from Florida schools as part of an ongoing effort to censor titles depicting queer joy, civil rights history, immigrant stories, and more. Right now, our collective is harboring dozens of boxes of these "dangerous" titles — but not for long. Later this month, we'll be calling on our local community to help package bundles and send these Banned Books... Back!

Thank you so much to the folks who have boosted this effort, including but not limited to Autostraddle, The Washington Post, LGBTQ Nation, so many rad bookseller buddies, and the 270+ folks who've donated. 💓

You can still help by contributing to the crowdfunding campaign (https://givebutter.com/bannedbooksback), or request a book package directly if you're a kid or for a kiddo in your life through https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/XYzGVoEYnT+hkblrTJy2D8aYzHb295vmVgyJc0NTz+0

Keep reading dangerously, kids! If it didn't matter, they wouldn't try so hard to stop you 👀

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (Esme)

#FirestormCoop #FirestormBooks
#BannedBooksBack!
https://givebutter.com/bannedbooksback

#books #childrensbooks

A project in 2024 to get books into the hands of kids.

Firestorm needs our help.

We've been sitting on something exciting... and we're finally ready to share! In 2023, our focus was on building a new home for Firestorm. Well, our next big project will launch in January, reaching far beyond our local community: with your support, we're going to send thousands of books pulled from schools and classrooms in Duval County, Florida, back to the kids they were intended for!

It's kind of a wild story! Last winter our co-op was unexpectedly entrusted with 22,500 books for grades K-5 that would otherwise have been destroyed. More than half feature queer characters or history, and many revolve around Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Asian protagonists. That's 11,000 pounds of titles that right-wing politicians and small-minded school administrators conspired to keep out of the hands of young folks in one of Florida's most racially diverse counties.

We love giving away free books, but this project is a little complex because we're committed to getting as many of the books as possible to kids in Florida, and Duval County in particular. Packaging and delivering thousands of titles across state lines will take serious resources, so today we're launching a crowdfunding campaign to support the effort. Will you help us?

Visit https://givebutter.com/bannedbooksback to learn more, make a donation, and share our call to action!

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop