Donya Craddock, who runs Dock Bookshop in Fort Worth, called Janet Webster Jones the queen from a stage at Winter Institute 2025. The room agreed. So did Publishers Weekly, which named her Detroit shop the 2025 Bookstore of the Year, the trade's top honor and the first time a Black-and-woman-owned shop has won it.
Jones is 88. She grew up on Detroit's old west side, daughter of two parents who left the South for Detroit as part of the Great Migration. When she read Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, she recognized her own family's story. She spent 40 years teaching in Detroit Public Schools before bookselling became a second career. The bookselling started after she taught a class about an Egyptian study tour she'd taken; an attendee suggested she sell her books at a church Christmas bazaar. That was 1989. She did vendor tables at bazaars and conferences for over a decade before she ever signed a lease, selling titles on ancient African history, beadwork, anything a curious person at a folding table might pick up.
Source Booksellers in its current form opened in 2002 inside the Spiral Collective on Cass Avenue at Willis Street, sharing space with three other Black women-owned businesses. The shop sells nonfiction with a pull toward history, culture, health, metaphysics, women's literature, and books about Detroit. It also stocks a deep Detroit shelf, because, as Jones puts it, she's selling to the people who live here, work here, pass through, and remember it.
Her daughter Alyson Jones Turner co-owns the store now. They share the floor with a small staff and a customer base that treats the place like a living room. Hanif Abdurraqib, when he passes through Detroit, brings flowers and has called Source a beacon of warmth and a community-centered bookstore.
Sandra Law, the Abraham Associates rep who nominated Source for the PW honor, wrote that Jones has dedicated her life to literacy, education, and history, and that few independents match Source's spirit of community engagement. Source has built a particular kind of culture for a small store: author talks, conversations about current subjects, tai chi, yoga, qi gong, and belly dancing classes when the calendar permits. Jones has a phrase she returns to: literacy takes many forms. Audiobooks count. Reading on a phone counts. Short books count. Everybody reads.
The award itself ratifies what regulars already knew. The unusual thing is that Jones doesn't seem to need ratification. Asked at Winter Institute about her pop-up years, she said she didn't have any experience in books when she started. By the time the brick-and-mortar opened, she'd been doing it 13 years.
In February 2026, she'll keynote Winter Institute 2026 with LeVar Burton on a panel called Reading Is Power. She's still doing it.
Source Booksellers, 4240 Cass Avenue at Willis Street, inside the Spiral Collective, Midtown.
