During the pandemic, Stephanie Moran Reed and her husband, Muammar, were putting together a home library for their daughter. They sought out books that would reflect their daughter’s identity: Mexican American and Black, bilingual, and growing up in Los Angeles. They had a hard time finding them.
“It was really, really challenging to find anything that was representative or authentic,” Moran Reed says.
That search became MiJa Books. The name comes from the first two letters of their daughter’s first and middle names, and it’s also the informal Spanish word for “my daughter.” It started in 2020 as a website of book reviews and became an online shop that October. After that came pop-up markets, cultural festivals, and a thriving online business.
Today MiJa Books is a bilingual book fair provider for elementary schools across Southern California. Moran Reed describes it as “the Scholastic alternative for schools that are looking to center BIPOC authors and BIPOC stories.” It works as a bookseller with accounts at the major publishing houses. Moran Reed also seeks out independent authors and small presses whose books need to exist, even when traditional publishers are slow to take them on. She curates every collection herself and makes sure it is authentic and community-driven.
Moran Reed has extensive experience serving the bookends of life. Prior to the pandemic, the gerontology major ran a business serving seniors, but when COVID-19 shut retirement communities to protect residents, her clients were suddenly out of reach.
“I knew I had to do something else, so the impetus of MiJa was a necessity that grew into real passion,” she says.
That journey is why the entrepreneur belongs at AVANCE Global, a gathering built on the idea that Latino prosperity is American prosperity. Moran Reed is a Latina founder who turned a gap she saw in her own home into a company serving schools where many Latino and Black students have rarely seen themselves in what they read.
“We’ve seen firsthand the power of seeing yourself in the pages that you read,” Moran Reed says. “We’re just trying to help literacy rates in schools across the country, one book at a time.”
