Why a Publisher Built a Literary Table for Women: The Story Behind She Takes Her Seat
PUBLISHING
Latoya Belfon
7/7/20262 min read
At Labworks Publishing, we spend our days getting books into the world. But there is a question every publisher eventually has to answer honestly: what happens to a book after someone reads it?
Because here is what I have learned across a career as an author and publisher — a book read alone informs a woman. A book discussed in the right room transforms her. It sharpens thinking, reorders priorities, and gives her language for things she has been carrying without words. The book is the beginning. The conversation is where the growth happens.
That belief is why I founded She Takes Her Seat.
Five years in the making
The idea has a lineage. In 2021, I founded Winning Women, an initiative built on a simple conviction: women entrepreneurs grow faster when successful women hand their knowledge directly to them. Through a video interview series, I brought the strategies and hard-won wisdom of accomplished women to the women building behind them.
Winning Women taught me that knowledge moves differently between women. It lands deeper. It multiplies. But over the years, I kept feeling that the format was smaller than the vision. A video can inform you. It cannot sit across from you.
Meanwhile, my work at Labworks kept showing me the missing piece. Publishing is not only production — covers, editing, launches. Publishing is what a book does to the person holding it. And I kept asking: what if we built the room where that happens on purpose?
Three loves, one table
She Takes Her Seat is where the threads of my work finally converge. My commitment to empowering women entrepreneurs with real resources to grow. My publisher's conviction that a powerful book is the most underestimated business tool a woman can own. And a love for the fancy things: a beautifully curated event, luxury, class — a setting worthy of the calibre of intelligent women in the room.
Not a networking event. Not a book club. A salon, in the oldest and best sense of the word — the tradition where literature and conversation built movements. A long table. A powerful book at its centre. A room of incredible, knowledgeable women growing in mindset together.
The book that made it real
Fittingly, the final push came from a book: Emma Grede's Start With Yourself. Reading about how much women sacrifice — as mothers, as builders, as the quiet infrastructure of everyone else's ambition — I felt a tug I could not ignore. Women give so much of themselves away that the seat at their own table is often the last one they claim.
As a publisher, I know exactly what a book like that can do to a room of women. So I built the room.
The first room
On June 19th, 2026, the inaugural She Takes Her Seat gathering took place in Montréal — one book, one long table, an evening of literature, reflection, and intentional connection. Watching women work through Grede's ideas together, I saw everything Labworks stands for happening live: a book doing its fullest work.
It was the first room. It will not be the last.
Where publishing meets the table
For Labworks, She Takes Her Seat is more than a sister venture — it is proof of mission. We publish because books change how women think, lead, live, and grow. The table is where we watch it happen.
If you are a woman ready to take your seat, visit shetakesherseat.com to request one, and follow @shetakesherseat for the next book selection and invitation details. And if you are a woman with a book inside her — the kind that could one day sit at the centre of a table like this — Labworks Publishing is where that conversation starts.
Latoya Belfon-John is a four-time best-selling Grenadian-Canadian author, founder of Labworks Publishing, and founder of She Takes Her Seat, a curated literary gathering for women in Montréal.
