Bio

Porter Square Books, is an independent, employee-owned bookstore in Cambridge, MA, named Best Bookstore 2020 by Publishers Weekly, with a second location that opened in October 2021 in the Seaport district of Boston proper. We are open to hosting both virtually and in-person, including hybrid format, going forward; we use Crowdcast as our virtual host platform. All events are promoted on our website, in a print calendar, through in-store displays, with event listings at several regional media outlets including the Boston Globe, by email to more than 16,000 subscribers, and across the store's robust social media accounts (22K Twitter following, 10.2k Instagram following). We host a range of events, from poetry readings to standing-room in-store events (Elizabeth McCracken, Richard Russo, Celeste Ng, David Sedaris) to large ticketed offsites for authors including Neil Gaiman, Abby Wambach, and Stephen King, among others.

We have ongoing partnerships with other organizations (e.g., NPR stations WBUR and WGBH, MIT, Lesley University, Emerson, Wilbur Theater, HubFest, Cambridge Public Library, Grub Street, Milk Street and many others) as potential official event cosponsors.

PSB is deeply involved in the community, and was named Boston Magazine's 2017 "Best of Boston" in the bookstore category. The store works closely with local schools and public libraries, and is a sponsor of WBUR, one of Boston's public radio stations. Our charitable foundation, The Porter Square Books Foundation, partners with local schools to provide author visits with the goal that every child leaves with a signed book, and has donated thousands of books to date.

PSB also hosts a monthly program called “Be the Change”, fostering civic engagement and activism, that addresses a different topic each month (immigration, transgender rights, voter registration, incarceration) in partnership with a local non-profit focused on that issue, with a portion of the day’s book sales donated to a relevant charity working in that field.