This post was updated April 30 at 7:42 p.m.

MiJa Books is changing the landscape of children’s literature, one story at a time.

The online bookstore, founded by alumnus Stephanie Reed and her husband Muammar Reed, houses a variety of children’s books that spotlight the adventures and challenges of characters of color, LGBTQ+ protagonists and disabled individuals. Stephanie Reed said the goal in developing this collection is to help kids better identify themselves in the books they read so they grow to be more curious and confident in adulthood.

“Our mission is to amplify stories by people of color for children of color,” Stephanie Reed said. “We’re all about representation … and highlighting a lot of marginalized communities.”

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Stephanie Reed said she was inspired to start the business in 2020 when they were building their daughter’s home library to reflect her mixed heritage. However, tracking down diverse books through mainstream retailers proved to be difficult, and the couple decided to solve this problem faced by so many other underrepresented families, she said. MiJa Books has taken on many different iterations during its existence, Stephanie Reed said, from e-commerce to a brick-and-mortar establishment. She said the store currently operates both through its online platform and as a host for school book fairs.

Muammar Reed said it is important for children of underrepresented backgrounds to see themselves represented in literature, especially during a time when federal book bans are making this more and more difficult to accomplish. He added that such access will help children like his daughter grow up with a greater sense of belonging in historically white-dominated spaces.

“We need to stop having such a Eurocentric viewpoint on everything,” Muammar Reed said. “Why are we always looking at things from the lens of ‘How are they going to think about us?’ versus ‘How do we think about ourselves?’”

However, Muammar Reed said the significance of MiJa’s mission is not acknowledged by everyone, adding that people have criticized their presence at book fairs for not offering more books written by white authors. He said many people don’t understand the difficulty of finding books that feature children of underrepresented backgrounds. In the United States, conglomerates such as Amazon and Target typically shelve Eurocentric books, leaving books portraying people of color out of mainstream focus, he said.

Rafael Pérez-Torres, professor of Chicana/o literature and culture at UCLA, said the reason for such disparities in available books derives from the American publishing industry’s priority of sales over wide selection. He said this has forcibly categorized readings by and based on minority communities as less commercially appealing to the general public.

“Their evident market is a market that isn’t geared toward addressing issues of racial identity, … so the focus on identity politics within literature is often viewed as a kind of political statement more than an aesthetic or artistic statement,” Pérez-Torres said. “I think that serves to mark literature that identifies with or tries to articulate a kind of racialized perspective as being political and being less literary.”

Muammar Reed added that much of the diverse literature that is featured in mainstream retailers specifically documents the struggles of people of color. He and Stephanie Reed want to show readers that it is just as important to portray underrepresented communities in their daily lives and celebrations as it is to publish their stories of adversity, he said.

“We have dreams, and we want to go on adventures and just play soccer and discover fantasy worlds and do magic and things like that, too,” Muammar Reed said. “We don’t want to just read about civil rights every single time we pick up a Black book.”

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Muammar Reed said MiJa Books is working to spread their mission further through in-house publications and its continued presence at book fairs, including the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Stephanie Reed said the hope is for all individuals to recognize the importance of diverse literature, not just as a tool for representation, but to facilitate empathy and shared humanity.

“I think that where a lot of our problems in this country start is in those people … that don’t have those types of books for their kids growing up and don’t talk about race and the realities of what’s going on around us,” Stephanie Reed said. “I think if that were to happen, we wouldn’t have as many problems as we have today.”