About

• Who we are •

The portal to the Multiverse was opened by Gralin Hughes, Jr. and Sara Zia Ebrahimi Hughes in 2023. The married couple had been working on the idea over the last six years, and in 2022 a moment in space and time lined up with the perfect storefront location and other logistics falling into place.

Between the two of them, Gralin and Sara bring a well-rounded set of skills and experiences. Gralin’s background is in design, media arts and education. He led the design of the store layout and aesthetics, and was the main liaison for the construction and build out of the store with Bowman Properties. He also brings years of experience working in retail and managing inventory. Sara, who also has a media arts background, brings decades of experience from the nonprofit sector handling organizations’ fundraising and operations and led the financial and operational back end aspects of opening the store.

But most importantly: both are huge fans of comics, science fiction, fantasy and horror (speculative fiction). As people with multi-hyphenate identities (Gralin is Black, Korean and Japanese descent and second generation Philadelphian who grew up in Germantown, and Sara is an immigrant from Iran who grew up in central Florida), both credit speculative fiction fandom in their youth as a vital part of building a sense of belonging to something bigger.

Yet, at the same time those fandom spaces were not always welcoming. Growing up as Black and Brown folks in the 80s and 90s, there were few spaces for either to feel welcomed and engage in fandom without the added layers of race and gender intersecting with the experiences. There was no Internet to easily find other nerds carving out BIPOC centered spaces for fandom. Without those reflections, it was hard as young people to not feel like a historical aberration or an outlier. Multiverse has been a dream--many years in the making--to create a space that truly welcomes fans and connects writers and artists with audiences to help them thrive.