Opening the City’s First Independent Bookstore
Scott Seeley and Drew Cohen — married, both writers, both from New York — moved to Las Vegas in 2014 and discovered something hard to believe about a metro area of two million people: it did not have a single independent bookstore. Seeley had previously co-founded and served as executive director of 826NYC, the Brooklyn arm of Dave Eggers’s national network of literary nonprofits that pair free writing instruction with imaginative retail storefronts. That experience gave him a blueprint — part bookstore, part workshop, part community anchor — and Las Vegas gave him a city-sized gap to fill.
Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project, the $350 million urban revitalization initiative centered on Fremont East, provided early funding. The Writer’s Block opened its first storefront downtown with a dual mission: sell books and give children a place to write. The free creative-writing workshops serve young people ages five through eighteen and run year-round, staffed by volunteers and visiting authors. The store also houses an artificial bird sanctuary — a deliberate oddity inherited from the 826 model, where each storefront operates a fictional retail concept alongside its literary programming. At The Writer’s Block, the birds are the conceit. The books are the product. The writing classes are the point.
20,000 Books at The Lucy
In 2019, The Writer’s Block relocated to The Lucy, a dedicated arts and culture center operated by the Beverly Rogers Foundation at 519 South 6th Street. The move gave the store significantly more space — room for over 20,000 titles, an expanded workshop area, and gallery space for community exhibitions. The Lucy houses several cultural tenants, and The Writer’s Block serves as its most public-facing occupant, drawing foot traffic from both book buyers and families bringing their children to Saturday workshops.
Seeley and Cohen have built The Writer’s Block as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means the bookstore operates under a fundamentally different financial model than a traditional retailer. Book sales sustain the storefront; grants, donations, and event revenue fund the educational programs. The structure allows The Writer’s Block to prioritize programming that a for-profit bookstore could not justify — week-long writing camps, publishing projects that turn students’ work into printed chapbooks, and partnerships with Clark County School District teachers who use the workshops as supplemental instruction.
The Writer’s Block in the Las Vegas Valley
Las Vegas has a well-documented reputation for spectacle, and independent bookstores are not spectacle. That gap is precisely what makes The Writer’s Block significant. The store occupies a role in the downtown cultural ecosystem that no other institution fills — it is simultaneously a retail space, a youth education provider, and a gathering point for the valley’s literary community. Its location at The Lucy on 6th Street places it within the broader Fremont East corridor that has absorbed most of downtown’s independent cultural investment over the past decade, a stretch that now includes galleries, performance venues, and the kind of foot-traffic-dependent small businesses that simply didn’t exist in the area before 2012.
- Founders
- Scott Seeley, Drew Cohen
- Founded
- 2014
- Location
- The Lucy, 519 S 6th St, Las Vegas
- Phone
- (702) 550-6399
- Website
- thewritersblock.org