Brown Book Collection

Our Mission

Brown Book Collection is a nonprofit organization committed to distributing culturally relevant children's books to schools that predominantly serve Black students. We strive to promote literacy, representation, and educational equity by ensuring every child has access to stories that reflect their identity and community.

Our Vision

We envision a world where every child, regardless of background, sees themselves in the books they read. By nurturing a love for reading and amplifying diverse voices, we aim to inspire lifelong learners, young authors, and future leaders.

Our Story

Brown Book Collection was started to make reading exciting, relatable, and rooted in Black excellence, especially for students who often feel unseen in literature.

It all started with Road to Excellence: A Journey Through HBCUs with Young Dreamers, inspired by our middle son. He became the model for the main character, who experienced an opportunity of a lifetime by exploring Historically Black Colleges and Universities while learning about identity and excellence.

That book sparked something bigger. Our youngest daughter, Camille, noticed her brother had a book about him and let’s just say she wasn’t too thrilled to be left out. She asked her mom if one could be written where she was the main character, but, Mom had a different idea. Camille would have to earn it. She’d need to research, and learn about Black history and powerful Black millionaires and billionaires and come up with a parts of the story. They worked on it together!

Just like the first two, the next set of books didn’t just tell stories. Each book teaches something deeper, whether it is empathy, compassion, or the power of words and literary elements like onomatopoeia, similes, or homophones. We strive to write in a way that connects with real kids, in real classrooms.

We strive to connect with kids who look like ours which is also why we include the names our children know and love. Names like Aiden, Auro’Ra, Avery,Brayden, Braylen, Cameron,, Damoni, Demond, Elise, Eugene, Hendrix, Jada, Madison, Maya, Mia, Malaya, Mason, Mya, Opral, Paelyn, Sanaia, Sevyn, Shamar, Zyn, Mr. Blackshear, Dr. Brown, Quan, Auntie Mae and Nurse Lou...names that feel familiar, names that are unique, and names of our friends and family who we love. We strive to include names that aren’t always seen in books, but deserve to be. It works because the look on their friends' faces when they see their names in print is priceless, because when kids feel seen, they believe they belong! And when they believe they belong, they want to become authors.

That goes hand in hand with our mission—to empower young people not just to read books, but to write them, publish them, and proudly tell their own stories. You can’t ban our books, because they’re ours. They come from our lives, our families, our culture—and they’re here to stay.