Nikkya Hargrove Interview and Video

By David Chess, Executive Director of Stratford Forward

Interview Summary – Please view the complete interview by clicking on the link.

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Nikkya Hargrove is the owner of Obodo Serendipity Books, an independent bookstore in Paradise Green. She is also the author of Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found, a memoir published last fall by Algonquin Books.

Nikkya received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Human Rights & Multi-Ethnic Studies from Bard College in 2005, and currently serves as a member of their Board of Governors. She received her Master of Science in Counseling degree from Mercy College in 2011. Her professional career has been in the nonprofit sector.

Nikkya’s book began in 2005 at Bard with her thesis about the effect of incarceration on family. While she still doesn’t know her whole birth story, she is committed to an honest telling of what she does know. Her parents were teens when she was born three months early, weighing one pound and 10 ounces. She was not expected to live. Her father left and joined the military, and her mother went to the streets where she became a drug addict and a drug dealer, spending time in and out of jail. Nikkya lived with her maternal grandparents, Nanny and Poppy.

Over the course of Nikkya’s younger years, her mother had two other children. Two years after Nikkya graduated college her mother was pregnant again, and also in bad health. Nikkya began the arduous process of adopting her infant biological half-brother, while also mourning the death of her mother. She says hope, love and community are necessary in building a family. She worked hard to create the family she wanted, and has today.

Her son Jonathan knows his birth story, and now, at 18, is in his first year of a musical theatre program and dreams of Broadway. She believes with the talents he’s been given and the family love to support him, his dreams just might come true. 

Nikkya and her wife Dinushka, a hospital chaplain, also have young twins, who are close with their older brother. When they wanted to buy a home, Nikkya spent a great deal of time looking in Stratford, getting the feel of the town and falling in love with it. They have been here for twelve years, and all three children have been in the public school system.

She had long wanted to open a bookstore in Stratford, and following her book being published last fall, she did just that. She created a place where people of all backgrounds and beliefs can feel a sense of community and feel at home. She wanted the store filled with books that would introduce new stories and new perspectives to people of all ages. To that end, she also provides author talks, community suppers and book clubs.

The name for the store came to her during the pandemic. Nikkya began searching her ancestry and discovered that she is part Nigerian. The word Obodo means community in Igbo, a Nigerian language. Community is clearly an important aspect of Nikkya’s life, and she wanted that reflected in the name of her store. Sri Lanka was formerly called Serendip and Dinushka is Sri Lankan, so together the words reflect their combined heritage. 

Nikkya says she feels blessed in her life. She knows how it all could have been very different.