“Our community can count on us to provide a space where they can explore, learn, be curious, and gather. ”
There’s a street in St. Pete called Poetry Alley. It’s not a metaphor. It runs along the side of 2153 1st Avenue South, and if you come in from there — through the shaded courtyard, past the “Love Your Neighborhood” mural, with the smell of Black Crow Coffee trailing behind you — you’ll already understand what Tombolo Books is before you open the door.
The name comes from coastal geography. A tombolo is a sandbar that connects an island to the mainland — a land bridge between two things that would otherwise be alone. Alsace Walentine and her wife Candice Anderson chose it deliberately, and it turns out to be exactly right. This is a store that believes a bookshelf can close the distance between a reader and a part of themselves they hadn’t met yet.
Walentine spent sixteen years at Malaprop’s Bookstore & Café in Asheville — one of the most admired independent bookstores in the South — before moving to St. Pete in 2015. She and Anderson saw a city with a serious arts identity and no independent bookstore to match it. So they started one, running as a pop-up for three years at outdoor festivals, galleries, schools, and lecture halls before opening their brick-and-mortar home in December 2019.
The timing was almost catastrophic. A few months after they opened, everything shut down. The response from Walentine and her team: they biked books to customers. That quality — scrappy, unshakeable — has carried through to everything Tombolo does. It’s now been voted Best Bookstore in the Tampa Bay Area four years running.
Inside, the 1,550-square-foot shop holds over 7,000 titles, with new stock arriving every Tuesday. The selection skews toward fiction and literary nonfiction, but there’s also poetry, Florida history, children’s books curated around the principle that every kid who walks through should see themselves on the shelves, banned books displayed plainly, books in translation, and work from independent presses most stores don’t carry. Staff recommendation cards are posted throughout — handwritten, specific, and almost always right.
The events calendar runs two to three nights a week: author talks, poetry readings, book launches, kids’ storytimes on Thursday mornings. Most are free, with the implied request being that you buy the book being celebrated. There are twelve active book clubs, covering everything from romance and horror to queer comics and anti-racism. Tombolo has hosted events inside Tropicana Field, at the Woodson African American Museum, and across the city in partnership with the African American Heritage Association and the Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg.
What makes the store worth the trip, though, isn’t any single event or title. It’s the booksellers. They carry advanced degrees in literature and creative writing, but they wear them lightly. Ask for a recommendation and you’ll get one calibrated to you — not to what’s selling. That kind of service is what used to make a town feel like a town.
On your way out, walk back through the courtyard. Black Crow Coffee is right there. So is Rabbit Rabbit, if you want a smoothie. Pinellas Ale Works is a few blocks down. The SunRunner stops in front of the store. St. Pete has been very deliberate about building a neighborhood worth living in on this stretch of 1st Avenue, and Tombolo is the part of it that remembers why.
