The idea of Aerial Books began as a dream in the 90s when Deanna Glaze founded an arts collaborative, Mosaic, in Boston, MA. Mosaic was a group of New England artists, writers, and musicians who performed around Boston at various galleries and art-friendly spaces.
Deanna, an artist herself, never lost the drive to create community through art. Even before Mosaic, she’d longed to open a bookstore and art gallery but it wasn’t until she worked for Amazon Books that she began to see that her dream could become a reality. At Amazon, Deanna worked with publishers to manage their titles in the Amazon store and learned a great deal about the publishing industry.
In 2019, she decided to get serious about her dream and began her bookstore/gallery journey. She initially considered opening a bookstore in Portsmouth, Ohio, a small Appalachian town on the Ohio River where she has family. She found a building owned by an interesting couple who had been in aerial arts and used the building to teach aerial arts to kids. Deanna was so inspired by their story and how they helped at-risk kids that the bookstore name was born: Aerial Books.
In the end, the Ohio bookstore wasn’t meant to be but the name stuck. Now in Providence, RI, Aerial Books is looking for a physical home in the East Side of Providence. We hope to open a store by the end of 2022.
