Meet Our Spring 2026 Partner Bookstore! WordsWorth Books in Little Rock, Arkansas
Loving people is wanting to really know them, and that means saying, "I want to know your story"
WordsWorth Books is, at thirty-eight, the oldest independent bookshop in Little Rock, Arkansas. When Kandi West, whose children were just leaving home as she was emerging from a demanding spell caring for elderly parents, began to work there part-time in 2020, it was humming along, but she saw, as an avid reader and experienced businessperson, that there was room for more—more growth, more activity, more readers. She became a co-owner and manager in 2022. In the last ten years independent bookstores have opened in Fayetteville, Bentonville, Fort Smith, and Rogers, to name just a few from a recent feature on independent bookselling in The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, as well as across town in Pettaway Square. Kandi West saw in her neighborhood the latent possibilities of bookselling for community-building and also a pent-up wish for social gathering after the pandemic. She felt the parents she knew from the surrounding blocks were buying a few books a year from Amazon when they could be supporting local business and book culture right there in Little Rock. She’s built up author events and activities for children; the store hosts periodic Wine and Words evenings, with book and wine pairings, and a sold-out puzzle competition. It collaborates with the Central Arkansas Library System on an annual Six Bridges Book Festival and provides books for library events throughout the year (we’ve written about library/bookseller collaborations as a way to cross-pollinate reading communities). Kandi West herself reads hundreds of books a year and is a dedicated library patron; her bookstore community, she notes, shares with the library community a commitment to making reading a part of more people’s lives and the fabric of the city.
In 2023 the Arkansas passed State Senate Bill 81 (later Act 372) establishing that anyone could “challenge the appropriateness” of a book in a public library and that “furnishing a harmful item to a minor” was a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. The first iteration of the law allowed any such challenge to remove a book from library shelves, but it was amended to create a review process that could end, on appeal, in a unilateral decision by city or county elected officials. Book Riot’s Kelly Jensen, who tracks bookstore and library censorship, noted that Act 372 was one of a number of bills nationally proposing to place criminal penalties on librarians. By June, WordsWorth and Fayetteville’s Pearl’s Books joined Arkansas libraries and advocacy organizations in a lawsuit against the act, and two of its provisions were enjoined a month later. (Legislators also introduced a bill, HB1028, that would overturn Act 372 and provide protections for librarians and funding for libraries that embrace freedom-to-read policies; our Editor’s Note of March 19 mentions other states pursuing such legislation). Finally in December of 2024 U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found the two provisions unconstitutional: Section 1 was too vague in defining what it means to “furnish a harmful item,” allowing a librarian to be charged for being present in a library where, say, Ulysses or paperback romances were available somewhere to adults, and Section 5 left censorship decisions to public officials “with discretion to decide whether a book is ‘appropriate’ without the benefit of procedural requirements or standards. They don’t even have to read the books first”—a process providing too much latitude for officials to limit access to books on viewpoint grounds. Kelly Jensen wrote of Judge Brooks’ decision, “this victory is a big one for libraries and the First Amendment” and “the ruling on this case … will likely lay the groundwork for similar cases across the country.”
Back in the bookstore, Kandi West found that customers were asking about book censorship legislation and court cases and looking for targeted books in the store. She began a Banned Books Book Club, which she leads herself, initially made up of readers who were inquiring, but it was enthusiastically received and now has a mailing list of over two hundred people. She says said she spent a lot of time explaining how library content restrictions and their different legal structures work. “Understanding challenges and other ways that people and organizations try to limit access to literature they find objectionable is helpful in knowing how to stop it,” she told The Arkansas Democrat and Gazette.
A book is targeted because there is some reason someone wants to silence someone’s story being told in that book. My pastor recently spoke about the topic of book banning. One of the things he said that really meant a lot to me is that part of loving people is wanting to really know them, and that means saying, ‘I want to know your story.’
She goes on, “banned books often authentically reflect the hard things that are topical and timely. Many people fear facing those things; however, fear-based reading (or fear-based anything) is never the answer.” In the club they “ask such questions as ‘What fears does this book cause for those that would like to challenge or ban it?’ and ‘How could we alleviate those fears?’” She says that the book club members are often baffled at how the books have come to be seen as so objectionable. Recently, they shifted focus a little and changed the name of the club to “All Voices Club” because they found they had read most of the books that show up routinely on removal lists and wanted to explore other views that may not be capturing so much public attention. The passions of WordsWorth readers have a lot to say about the interwoven communities in which these disputes play out, and the place that shared institutions like bookstores can have in fostering conversation.
Then early this year the Arkansas Department of Corrections attempted to institute a ban on all outside books, magazines and newspapers entering prisons in the state, which has the third largest incarceration rate in the country (after Mississippi and Louisiana), affecting seventeen thousand people in twenty facilities. The Washington Post called it “the strictest ban in the country” and Kelly Jensen, who has declared prison censorship “the biggest First Amendment violation in America,” identified it as “one of the cruelest policies passed in this era of rampant book censorship.” Implementation was paused as lawmakers and advocates demanded public review.
The stated rationale for such a blanket exclusion is curtailing contraband, drugs smuggled into prisons sprayed on or saturated into books’ pages. (In August Arkansas officials prohibited physical mail, requiring letters to be scanned and the purchase of electronic “stamps” to send them out.) The Washington Post reviewed records provided by the Department of Corrections and found twenty-five documented incidents in which books, newspapers, or magazines tested positive for drugs between 2022 and 2025; prison officials argued the actual incidence was higher. Prison advocate Moira Marquis told the Post that, in the event of a lawsuit against the policy, routine testing of books for drugs would not constitute an undue “administrative burden” in the face of the policy’s harms. Prison advocates also argue that most contraband enters prisons through guards and other human conduits, siting a measure to allow only scanned mail into Pennsylvania prisons that reputedly failed to curtail substance abuse. Moira Marquis says “it’s astounding that this argument continues to have sway in the public, and I think it’s because it makes sense very speciously.”
People in prison of course do not have access to the open internet. They live in a world in which printed matter is one of the only sources of information. Some interviewed by the Arkansas Times emphasized how many have had their educations interrupted, and books offer their only opportunity to better themselves and prepare to return to the work force. Aljay Spencer of Little Rock, who spent seven and a half years in prison, told the Arkansas Times that “reading allows you to slow down and process information and to think before you react.” Arkansas prison advocate Kaleem Nazeem, who was incarcerated for twenty-eight years, said “if individuals are not able to get books, we’re basically saying that we don’t want individuals to become better.” Sunshine Harris, whose husband has been incarcerated for twenty-eight years, told the Arkansas Times that “either way, contraband is going to come in. It seems like their goal and objectives are to keep people in prison and to keep making money.”
The Arkansas Department of Corrections is looking to renew an expiring $720,000 contract to provide digital services to the prison, including tablets for reading. The tablets are faulted for limited availability (they are taken away at night, and in solitary confinement), surveillance concerns, unreliable technology, and exorbitant costs, even for reading books in the public domain (a growing number of states are requiring free telephone calls for those in prison, responding to charges of exploitation by the prison telecom industry). Advocates argue that the tablets have an extremely limited catalogue of books. The Arkansas Times found that the prisons’ e-book catalogue was “overwhelmingly stocked with obscure nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts from the public domain that are unrecognizable to modern readers, like the Book of Old Ballads, Volume 1-4, or the 1921 parenting guide, Say, Fellows: Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life’s Big Issues.” Korelli Loyalty Woods, said of the limited palette on the prison-issued tablet: “It’s almost like they had a ban on all educational books or getting any type of knowledge.” Readers are understandably skeptical of a bibliography selected for them by the Department of Corrections. The books prisoners requested or were given by friends and family, and shared among themselves, spoke more directly to their circumstances.
Prison libraries, for their part, are understaffed and thinly resourced. Interviewees told the Arkansas Times that they largely contain “genre fiction and esoteric donations from charities and religious organizations,” and access in frequently denied as a punishment. Moira Marquis says
Everything is a punishment in prison from the food, to the lack of medical care to the regulation of movement. In my experience, carceral authorities are highly suspicious of education. This is reflected in the amount of effort that goes into censoring literature. It’s staggering to me that prisons spend more effort preventing people from having access to books than they do in offering education.
Meanwhile even without an outright ban current practice in Arkansas allows individual prisons to set their own content restrictions, with mailroom staff often returning books they deem sexual, violent, or incendiary. (See our Notebook on prison censorship.) Many book shipments are rejected because mailroom staff decide their packaging is suspicious. Current Arkansas regulations, like those of many states, require that books be sent into prisons through approved vendors to elude contraband. Throughout the country a number of volunteer organizations, many of them based in bookstores1, collect books and send them into prisons—for libraries, for individuals, and in response to requests. Moira Marquis says of such programs, “it’s a great way for quiet, bookish people to get involved in service.”
In Little Rock a retired English teacher named Tandy Cobb set up Free Read at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church as a memorial to her mother. She was moved partly by reading in The Autobiography of Malcolm X that reading had changed the course of his life. (Moira Marquis mentioned that dictionaries are the most requested items in prison, because of the many who, like Malcolm X, teach themselves to read using a dictionary. “Learning to read from the dictionary is a time-honored tradition in US prisons.” She laments a Texas decision to ban an edition of Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary because of an image of a weapon. “The ban on visual dictionaries is especially cruel,” she says, “given they are designed to help people with basic or no literacy learn to read.”) Free Read fulfills requests from its library of donated “gently read” paperbacks and buys high-demand books like dictionaries and study guides with donated funds and proceeds from book sales. They also collects publishers’ advance copies from WordsWorth and direct people wishing to send new books to incarcerated people to order them through WordsWorth. Reverand Barkley Thompson, rector of St. Mark’s, says Free Read is “one of the church’s most important ministries”: “In Matthew 25, Jesus commends his followers to care for those in greatest need, specifically including those in prison. Jesus says when we minister to the prisoner, we are ministering to Jesus himself.”
Booksellers on the front lines say they have seen how fraught a situation it is. Books disappear into the system without ever reaching their addressees. Occasionally a carton of books is “returned” to the store that has been artfully disguised to appear to have originated there. Booksellers turn them over to the police. Once again, booksellers are there on the front lines, navigating America’s reading at its most contentious, the social tensions that seem increasingly to surround the act of learning.
This week WordsWorth is closing the store for a long-planned renovation, to make it possible to squeeze in more people for events (special discount applies!). Kandi West is determined to be finished in time for Independent Bookstore Day, her favorite day of the year, when the whole city seems to pass through the store as it moves along Little Rock’s “Rock City Book Crawl,” making local bookselling an occasion for much deserved public celebration.
For example: Lucy Parsons Bookstore in Quincy, Massachusetts; Freebird Books and Greenlight Books in Brooklyn; Urban Reads in Baltimore; Left Bank Books in Seattle; the Burdock Book Collective in Birmingham; a consortium of Chicago booksellers; Open Books in Pensacola; the Claremont Forum in Claremont, CA; A Room of One’s Own in Madison; Downtown Books & News in Asheville; Groundwork Books in La Jolla; a consortium of DC booksellers; and Bound Together Books in San Francisco. You can find full lists of volunteer opportunities with programs sending books to prisons here and here.
Recently in Book Post: Ange Mlinko on the Book of Psalms; Barry Yourgrau on Virgilio Piñera; Laurie Hertzel on the awakening reading life; and weekly Editor’s Notes from Ann on news from the world of books.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read her Notebooks on books and the reading life here.
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WordsWorth Books in Little Rock, Arkansas, is Book Post’s Spring 2026 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
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When you're up for sainthood, Ann, I'll be the first to speak to the pope!