This profile is in active compilation — some details are awaiting a cited source.

Turnsol Books is Kansas City’s first worker-owned bookstore — a collectively run literary space, coffee shop, maker studio, and art venue tucked into the Crossroads Arts District on Broadway Boulevard.

Description

Turnsol Books occupies a storefront at 1664 Broadway Boulevard in the Crossroads Arts District, next door to the Stray Cat Film Center. The shop describes itself as a worker-owned bookstore, coffee shop, maker space, and art space — a genuinely hybrid community hub where bookselling, café culture, and creative production share the same floor. The book selection skews eclectic and literary: folklore, poetry, literature in translation, philosophy, and film writing anchor the shelves, alongside titles from LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and other BIPOC authors and international fiction that independent chains rarely stock. The store also carries Turnsol Editions publications — an in-house imprint with roots in poetry, visual art, music scores, and prose that predates the physical storefront.

The worker-cooperative model is central to Turnsol’s identity. All worker-owners hold equal ownership stakes and equal decision-making authority; governance runs by vote and committee. Turnsol is co-located with Cauldron Collective, a worker-owned vegan food operation that launched in 2021 and partnered with Turnsol to build out the shared permanent space. The combination of radical ownership structure, literary curation, and neighborhood arts anchoring makes the shop a natural gathering point for the Crossroads creative community.

Turnsol also operates a Writers’ Studio program and hosts events (listed via Eventbrite), with an online storefront through Bookshop.org for remote orders.

Ownership and history

Turnsol’s roots are in publishing. Before the storefront existed, Turnsol Editions operated as an independent imprint focused on poetry, visual art, music scores, and prose. The four founding worker-owners — Promise Clutter, Cooper Dighton, Dani Cooper, and Tim Harte — had worked together previously at another Kansas City record and bookstore. When that chapter closed, they chose to build something they fully controlled: a democratically run bookstore where every worker is an equal owner.

The group partnered with Olive Cooke and the Cauldron Collective — a vegan food worker collective that had been running pop-ups since January 2021 — to share the permanent space at 1664 Broadway. The soft opening ran October 20–22, 2023, with the café kitchen set to follow by year’s end. A GoFundMe campaign launched September 2023 to support the opening buildout.

As of February 2026, Yelp records the business active with current hours posted, and the official website maintains updated listings — confirming continuous operation through at least early 2026.

Sources

Disputes

None at this time.

See also

  • Registry
  • Owner-And-History-Research-Toolchain
Categories
  • Kansas City–owned
  • Crossroads