If Lawrencians are going to confuse the Ecumenical Campus Ministries for a church, executive director Jessie Duke at least wants it to seem like a wild one. That’s why she opened a punk, anarchist bookstore in the building.

“Because it presents as a church, often people are afraid to come here,” Duke said. “There’s a lot of people that feel isolated from that, or have trauma around being in religious spaces.”

Duke said that doesn’t rule out religious groups from hosting events in the ECM’s community building on KU’s campus, if the community so wishes. But she doesn’t want the diversity of onsite initiatives to get overlooked: Food Not Bombs, mutual aid projects, underground punk shows, free veggie lunches each week and the list goes on.

The new bookstore may serve as bait to lure in the unsuspecting passerby, but Duke said they’re she’s not aiming to proselytize. Instead, the space serves as a brick and mortar storefront for Duke’s punk, anarchist publishing press called Bread & Roses, which she founded in 2020.

The name comes from the classic socialist and labor movement slogan, which emphasizes the dual need for necessities (the bread) but also beauty and richness in life (the roses). In addition to publishing their own titles, Bread & Roses distributes books from like-minded small presses throughout the nation. A melange of those titles are currently on display at the ECM.

“I don’t imagine there’s going to be a whole lot of traffic for customers coming in to just buy things, but I hope that it gets people in the door, and then they walk down the hall and are like, ‘What is this place?’” Duke said. “… And then they start, like, coming into the mix.”

As Duke casts a wider net, she hopes to also capture the attention of folks outside the KU bubble, like general Lawrence residents and people affiliated with Haskell Indian Nations University. She said that the ECM regularly hosts groups on different sides of political issues, and the center can serve as a safe landing space and fertile ground for dialogue.

“I just want to solve problems and make people in Lawrence feel safe,” Duke said.

The ECM is not a traditional community center, but Bread & Roses bookstore isn’t your typical literary retailer. It’s nested in an old chapel space, which retains its elaborate glass art even if it hasn’t served as a place of worship for years. Duke and the Bread & Roses team wanted to transform their private offices into a public space, so they weren’t hoarding the beauty.

The bookstore and offices live together in two rooms. Shelves with used books for sale abut backstock of titles, which will be wrapped in independent newspapers, tied with handwritten notes and mailed to customers of the press’s online shop.

Duke’s model likely sounds like a nightmare to a business owner worried about the bottom line. When she pitched the store in a press release, she wrote, “This shop will fail.”

“Right now, this is what feels right, and we need it, and so we’re just going to do it anyway,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if this lasts six months and then we have to, like, pack the books back up.”

Most of the titles available at Bread & Roses can also be checked out from the Solidarity Library, just around the corner in the ECM. Duke said she’s also been selling books at Wonder Fair for years and intends to keep it up.

Adam Gnade, one of the press’s bestselling authors, manned the register Thursday night following Monday’s hard launch of the store. Gnade writes autobiographical fiction that hits the beats of daily life, from the bread of work to the roses of love. 

He said that wanderers are often surprised to find books that are out of print or tricky to locate, as well as small press titles and limited editions.

“A lot of the titles that are being carried here are books that will at some point probably be banned during this time that we’re in, and it’s going to be harder and harder for people to find certain titles, especially books on anti-fascism,” he said. “So having something physical, I think, is important.”

Duke sees the store as a way for curious folks to learn about the realities of social movements and activism. She said she never got too jazzed about reading anarchist theory. Instead, she’s more interested in publishing DIYs, biographies and how-to’s that translate political thought into practical action. That might look like a book on growing your own garden to progress food sovereignty or a memoir from an animal rights activist.

Duke thinks there’s no better headquarters for these titles than the ECM.

“As long as I am publishing and living in Lawrence, we will have a bookshop here at the ECM,” she said. “Even if we were wildly successful, I would not look for a larger space and we move closer to downtown, because at a community level, I feel like it’s more important for it to be here.”

Bread & Roses is open from noon to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays at the ECM, 1204 Oread Ave. The store’s door is located on the south side of the building, right off of the parking lot.

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

Nathan Kramer (he/him), a multimedia student journalist for The Lawrence Times since August 2024, is a senior at Free State High School. He is also a news photo editor for Free State’s student publication, where he works as a videographer, photographer and motion designer. See more of his work for the Times here.

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