Montréal is a city of parallel universes, often most at ease ignoring each other. Across linguistic, cultural, and generational orbits, it’s also a city that’s shown tremendous appetite for German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s work, in great part due to De Stiil, an anglophone bookstore in the heart of francophone neighborhood Le Plateau. Owner Aude Le Dubé’s carefully curated shop features literary fiction and books translated into English—and it serves as a kind of headquarters for what Le Dubé affectionately calls “the cult” of Erpenbeck fans.

Erpenbeck’s six books—five of fiction, and a memoir in essays—are as interdisciplinary as reality itself: economy, archeology, architecture, political history, musicology, psychology, sociology, mythology. Or a more contemporary articulation of academic inquiry: Trauma Studies. From the immeasurable devastation of the Third Reich to the enduring reverberations of Red Army soldiers’ desecration, from the upheaval that awaits within a numbered Stasi file to a modern Berlin accounting of what’s untaxed and undeclared in an inheritance, Erpenbeck’s writing defies appraisal. Her work resists summary, just as her most injured characters, with intractable agency, resist straightforward victimhood. Is her most recent novel, Kairos, about an increasingly destructive affair between married 58-year-old Hans and 19-year-old Katharina, or is it a reimagining of the control, betrayal, and collapse of a state? Both, of course, and then some.

A few weeks before my conversation with the Berlin-based author, I sit down with Le Dubé beside one of De Stiil’s huge windows to get a better sense of this Erpenbeck cult.

Originally from Brittany’s Lorient, a seaport town once occupied by the Germans, Le Dubé situates Montrealers’ fervor for Erpenbeck, an East Berliner who was twenty-two when the wall came down, within the Quebec context: “She speaks to our beliefs: socialist principles, sharing, and that building a better society includes immigrants and refugees.” The pre- and post-Wall Germany of Erpenbeck’s work offers helpful analogues for the complexities and clashes of Montreal’s adjacent universes, each building from distinct cultural-political models, yet supposedly the same people.

Beyond historical and metaphorical walls, though, Le Dubé, who prefers to read in English, emphasizes the moral urgency of the Erpenbeck oeuvre. At the time of reunification of Germany, Le Dubé describes, “All of a sudden the future was dead. Everything they’d been taught to fight for was gone. When everything is collapsing, how do you build a fair society?” Climate catastrophes, xenophobia, pandemics, occupations, wars, not to mention the proto-fascist policies of Quebec’s current premier—the concerns are unyielding, for any person who enters De Stiil. “I think it’s important for people to read her. While we don’t sell her to everybody, we always mention her work.” For the uninitiated, she first recommends Go, Went, Gone. “They buy that book, but they always come back for the rest.”

When New Directions published the English translation of Kairos earlier this year, Le Dubé contacted their Canada publicist to see if Erpenbeck, who some say is on her way to a Nobel Prize, might have travel plans to North America. Once on the continent, Montreal’s not that far, right? An agent got looped in, then Montreal’s Goethe Institute, then the Consulate General, then the Ottawa Embassy. At each stage of escalating bureaucracy, though, was a champion of Erpenbeck’s work. In the early evening of October 26, the outside of De Stiil resembles a night club more than a literary writer meet-and-greet. Dozens and dozens of readers, lined around the block, await their entry. In advance of the event, I sit down in a quieter corner of the bookstore to speak with Erpenbeck.

*

Ellen Adams: In re-reading your work, I was struck by how often infidelity comes up. Across your books, what new discoveries have you made about betrayal, whether in intimacy, or infidelity of values or the state?

Jenny Erpenbeck: When I first started to write, I didn’t know what my subject would as a long-term author. But, as it turned out, you are right. Betrayal and lying are at the center of my work, as are the layers of truth: how the same thing can be revealed again and again, or looked at from other perspectives, without being a lie, but rather a different kind of truth. If you look at Book of Words, her childhood is made up to be a good, easygoing childhood, then all of the sudden you can see that there’s something underground, not told to her, and eventually her father’s true profession is revealed. Even in The Old Child, my first main character, she’s lying to her classmates, to everyone, about her age. There’s a lot of hiding in my books. It’s always interested me. Hiding gives a certain kind of freedom because you can try something on without telling anyone, an experiment you undertake. And there’s always the question of what is the truth? In The Old Child, the truth is not revealed at all, not even in the end, so you don’t know where this lie comes from. And of course in Kairos, lying in the very middle of everything, as is the question: Who’s lying to whom, and in which way? Sometimes it’s shocking, with how little we can be content because we expect a certain truth. And if this is given to us, we are content. If someone believes a lie, it’s also sad, because it tells us that he or she is lacking the instruments to even doubt. But perhaps if you are young, it’s a blessed state of mind, to be so trusting.

EA: It makes me think of that initial rendezvous with Hans in Kairos, where Katharina thinks, “How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything?” The self-deception, the self-erasure that allows for their connection to exist.

JE: I think almost everyone has had this experience once in life, that of betrayal. If we were to see all the complexity all the time, it would drive us mad. And there’s always the question behind it: How could I take a half-life for a whole life? Was I content with so little that I couldn’t even see there was something missing, there was something hidden from me? In Kairos, all the things that are hidden, earlier or later, are revealed in the course of the book, earlier or later. What also interests me about hiding and revealing secrets is—in The End of Days, for instance—is if someone dies, a different kind of talk can happen, real, serious talks when someone perhaps reveals what’s been kept secret. Or in sorting the household of someone who’s died, a character might run into a secret by chance. This is also interesting to me, that there are some moments when you can speak about what has been hidden, after years in which it was not the right moment to speak about the secret.

In Kairos, you also have to—well, you don’t have to, and you don’t need to, but it’s nice if you manage to enable someone to tell the truth without being punished. And of course, we are cowards.

(Erpenbeck cracks up.)

If you ask your lover to tell the truth, but in the very moment when he or she does, you start arguing or punishing or playing some bad games with him or her, he or she will learn the lesson that if “I tell the truth, I get punished.” Kairos is a slow process of how something meant as a kind of truth actually transforms into a relationship with lying at its center. As it was in the political history of the GDR. Ideas were received enthusiastically in the beginning, a new start after fascist times. Slowly, a certain vocabulary was forbidden, a certain exchange of opinions not allowed. People started to deliver ready-made sentences—how to bring it into good English?

EA: Catch phrases, party lines?

JE: Yes. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but sometimes I have the feeling that we are coming to a similar time now, because there are certain sentences that you are supposed to deliver and others sentences that you are not supposed to deliver anymore. It’s a core question to art, because we are also responsible for the ugly children among the sentences. We should love all sentences, the ugly ones as well as the beautiful ones.

EA: And to let them be heard.

JE: Yes. Because if you want to describe reality, you cannot make a detour. Reality is reality is reality, and that’s it. So if you want to describe a bad experience, perhaps you need to use bad words to bring it to life, to let the readers feel something about it. If it’s not ugly enough, it doesn’t work. If Richard III is a nice character, you might as well throw the play away.

EA: (pointing to Go, Went, Gone) Or Richard the—

JE: Or Hans the Third!

EA: The first time I read Kairos, I found myself shouting on my couch, “What an asshole!” “Piece of shit!”

(Jenny laughs.)

I wrote it sometimes, too, in the margins: How awful!!! And yet, it was very liberating to see—in such amazing sentences—experiences that many of us have had behind closed doors.

JE: The women were much less shocked than the men. The women somehow experienced similar things. Some had periods in life when they were obsessed with such a Hans character. The men were really shocked! The nice readers, you know, the nice men. “Does such a person exist? I got so angry about him!” They hadn’t faced such a thing before, as it seemed.

EA: And yet there’s so much complicity between some of the male colleagues in your books, whether it’s a Richard’s colleague who’s dating a 20-year-old—

JE: This is not what I’m judging. The age difference is not the point. The point is the character. Even if Katharina could have met a version of Hans when he was 20 years younger, he would have been the same character. The character is what matters—if someone is manipulating, or hiding a big part of his life. An older man looks at a young woman with a certain kind of pleasure? This is normal. You admire beauty. You are happy to look at some young person, man or woman, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a crime. Only if you use your experience to manipulate someone, like Hans does with Katharina.

EA: I’m curious about the idea of using sensuality or romance to lure someone as an agent of the state—for example, the “John” essay in Bits and Pieces. Or Richard looking up his own Stasi file to find that his state-declared “areas of weakness include habitual arrogance and documented marital infidelity.” And of course, Hans uses his sexual influence to surveille.

JE: To spy for the Stasi—that’s bad!

EA: Mixing spying and romance and the state—which returns us to the idea of infidelity.

JE: It seems this kind of surveillance spying is a specialty of dictatorship systems! After partition, people worked for the Stasi for a variety of reasons, and not all of them were bad. Especially in the first years of the GDR, people entered the Stasi in order to find fascists who were hiding under false identities. Or people freed from the concentration camps entered to find those who had treated them so badly.  Later on, it became more complex, to put it briefly. People were trying to gain power over others by stepping out of the system and looking in on it. This is the core of spying: you position yourself outside to look in. You look at your community, a group of friends, your family, or your colleagues, all from outside, from the very moment when you start reporting on them. (Even in Western structures where there is no Stasi, there are still people who would like to surveil. The bad characters still exist. They just aren’t given the chance to do so!) Again, it’s a question of character, as is lying. You know, Katharina is also lying. Perhaps not that badly, but she’s lying, too.

EA: And her diaries become this archive of lying—or not.

JE: We all lie to ourselves. We manipulate with what phrases we leave behind. If I make a diary entry, I might write one thing on one day, and the next day I might describe the same scenery in a different way. Is this a lie? Or if you are afraid that someone will find your diary, so you leave some things out. So it’s not all about the bad Other. It’s also about us. And of course, Katharina is not true to herself. This is the main mistake she’s making. Otherwise, she would just go away with this young guy and be happy, you know? Why is this obsession with Hans is so much stronger? And I have no answer! If any reader does, give me an answer, please!

EA: Yet there is a logic to it! In Kairos, as in other works, the logic and inner worlds of your characters feel full, flush with associations and fleshed-out subconscious. In your process of developing a book, does that ecosystem of meaning arrive to you from the onset, or do you write your way into it and then trim back?

JE: Normally, I start from the beginning, and I just write my way to the end. I have a center for every scene or chapter. I put all the material that I collected, all the thoughts that I had on it, and then I try to put it in connection to the chapter’s center. Some things about your characters will just happen in the writing process. When I had already written half of Kairos, for example, I did some research on the guy on whom Hans is based. I got this Stasi file. It became a major problem for the structure of the book, one I didn’t expect! When I studied opera directing, a famous director—one of the most famous opera directors in Germany at this time—she always said, “If you are facing a problem, don’t make a detour. Go right through the middle of it.” I think this is a basic law for all art. Even if something is destroying your initial idea or plan, you have to deal with it.

EA: Which reminds me of what you mentioned at the beginning, of not making a detour around the truth. Instead, really looking at it—while also exploring characters who are lying to themselves, or having to shed lies that they’ve told themselves.

JE: I think we are all trying to produce ourselves as like—Wait.

 (Jenny goes to the back of her bookstore to fetch her smartphone, then searches the word Heil.)

We want to produce a sound picture of ourselves, a picture that makes sense. A whole that works well with our idea of what we want to be. We want to have not only smooth outsides, but also smooth insides. And this doesn’t work, of course. We have dark corners.

EA: Speaking of which—I’m curious about Eros in your writing. Obviously in Kairos, it’s a powerful force, but it’s present in many of your books. Eros and violence, or Eros and control. Eros and compliance. What draws you to look at sensuality through those lenses?

JE: You might be right. The erotic scenes in my books are not the happy ones. I don’t know where it comes from. Of course, it has a lot to do with power. When I think of the Red Army soldier in Visitation, I thought it would be interesting to put it differently than how it is normally put, so that you cannot clearly see who is the one with the power and who is the victim. It switches many times during this erotic scene. You cannot say this is a Red Army soldier raping a German woman. It could also be a German woman raping a very young Red Army soldier. It’s not clear. The erotic in Kairos is also a deeply disturbed. When Hans is first tying Katharina to the bed, she’s thinking about how she forgot to buy onions. This is not erotic. I would say it’s the opposite of erotic. Perhaps only women can see that. A man would perhaps rather say that Katharina’s obsessed with him and she cannot leave him because she’s so obsessed with his sexual potency. But a woman reader, I think, can clearly see that Katharina’s not interested in him sexually. There’s one passage where he asks her, “Are you looking for a father?” She says, “No.” But in the end, she herself says she would have liked to have someone without all this sex, just as a good companion. If Hans had offered her friendship, perhaps she could have accepted to leave him. But he didn’t offer friendship, because he wanted to use her, abuse her. Ahh, I don’t know where it comes from. I’m not an American author. I don’t have a psychotherapist! I would say I had a lucky youth, and everything was okay. But in a way, it took me a long time to find men in my life who are not—freaks. I don’t know why.

EA: There’s an element of chance, and also an element of tolerance.

JE: Yes, and sometimes you are drawn to the freaks without knowing it. When you’re young, things happen. Now it’s been a long time that I’ve been very happy, you know?

EA: I certainly related to the onions moment. Been there! Which leads me to humor in your work. Humor appears in such subtle ways, or more head-on, like the Go, Went, Gone scene with the barrister, that owl-man lawyer. I was just cracking up. So theatrical, almost like it could have been a cartoon. Yet he’s the person who’s invested in reviewing these folks’ asylum files. Does humor come to you on intuition, or do you find yourself going back to the heart of a chapter and saying, “Maybe I should add some in?”

JE: I really have so much fun, actually, but very rarely do people see the humor. Perhaps it’s not so obvious. Of course my books are about serious issues, so it’s not much fun in general. But I do think I have a kind of humor, and I enjoy it. Sometimes it just takes me away!

EA: In Go, Went Gone, women are really on the periphery. I know that writing this book included experiential research, not to mention years-long friendships, with many men arriving initially through Italy as refugees. In the novel itself, we see and hear children. In the hellish waiting room of asylum claims, however, the women are spatially and narratively on the outskirts. One is up a tree at Oranienplatz, and the others appear via a second-hand account of sex work along a rural Italian road. What was your intention in writing these women only at the periphery?

JE: The journey from an African home country to Europe is really hard. Not so many women make it to Europe. Of course, some women do, and during my research, I met several, but then I thought: the absence of women is a screaming one. This is a story I want to tell. A connecting bond between Richard and the refugees is that all these men are missing women. It’s not just about sex, of course. It’s also about family, children, to have someone you feel close to, in a different way than a friend. This is what Richard is missing, after his wife passed away, and it’s also what these young men are missing. So the finale of the book is the men speaking about the women who they knew, who they are missing. The loneliness. It’s a major aspect of the problem. They are missing children so desperately! Many of them told me they had never slept in a room all alone. Many of them are used to sleeping in a room with their family, children, grown-ups, sisters, brothers, cousins, etc. They adore children. And then you put them into such isolating houses where they cannot meet women and they cannot have children. You forbid them to work, so you don’t let them learn the language. What would come out of it? This is a desperate situation, and it can only end badly. And if it doesn’t end badly, they are heroes for withstanding all this. These young men should be given a chance to move forward, to move, to get out, to find his own life, to find his family, to get a job. The absence of women means much more than just having sex. For most of these men, it means that life is starting. And their lives are not starting.

EA: That line—“It means that life is starting”—interests me in the context of Go, Went, Gone, given the abortion revealed at the end, from a time when young couple Richard and Christel’s life would be starting. The couple’s life comes to a halt thereafter.

JE: I am absolutely for the right for abortion. But in this case, Richard made a mistake, and it couldn’t be taken back. I thought for Christel, it would have been the right moment. For Richard, because of his career, he says no. For their marriage, that proves sad and irreversible. To come back to your earlier question, how I make the characters. In the beginning of Go, Went, Gone, I mentioned that Christel drank too much. After I wrote the whole book, I thought, “Hmm, there is one question waiting for me. Why did she drink?” Only in the very end, I had to answer that for myself. It’s a strange thing, because, of course, I’m the one inventing the story. On the other hand, my subconscious put something in the beginning that I didn’t want to go back to for a long time. I could see that she was physically and mentally wounded by the whole thing, in part due to abortion being illegal at this time. I know women who almost died—put on some kitchen table in a private apartment of someone who may or may not have even been capable of performing the medical procedure. As a friend of mine says, if you don’t allow abortions, it doesn’t mean that abortions don’t take place. It only means that abortions are made illegally and put the woman in danger.

EA: Pregnancy, abortion, and paternity are weaponized elsewhere in your writing. In Kairos, Katharina wonders which patriarchal affiliation allowed her access to the West. Her grandfather, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War? Her older male employer, who takes a bit too much pleasure in sitting next to her? Her father’s status as a professor? Paternity, and paternalism, is the go-to rubric to vouch for Katharina’s mobility. Yet in other gorgeous pages, we learn about matrilineal Tuareg traditions where kids “belong” to the mom. I’m curious to hear your thoughts: Who does a child, who does a life belong to?

JE: Hmm. It’s an interesting question. I think I will write another novel about it.

EA: Let me know if you need a reader. I’ll start studying German ASAP!

JE: You are a tough questioner! Of course I already told everything, but nobody sees it so clearly! It’s always interested me, how much you inherit by your genes versus how you’re brought up socially. In The Book of Words, the young woman ends up on the wrong side, if you look at her true parents. She’s on the enemy’s side, the one who killed them. Often, you define yourself by feeling either like a natural part of, or in opposition to, your family. You always feel you have power over who you are and why you are that way. If there’s a sudden revelation, like the sad truth about the young woman in The Book of Words, it’s like that power is taken from you. You become a victim, perhaps of your parents’ mistakes, or all the things they went through so that they couldn’t bring you up themselves. Likewise, I’ve always been interested in people who are looking for their biological parents—what exactly they are they looking for.

EA: One last question. I love that Richard has to come up with a slogan to get the protest permit.

JE: Ahh, yes! That’s one of my funny scenes!

EA: If you had to come up with a slogan for your work, what would it be?

JE: Oh God!

(She laughs.)

A slogan is a difficult thing.

EA: Maybe even the opposite of what you’re doing. Your work seems like an anti-slogan.

JE: The shorter the text that someone wants from you, the more difficult it is to write. Whenever I’m asked for a blurb for a book, I work two weeks on it! I keep looking for how to get to the very essence. Hmm. The essence.

 (She taps the table, then looks up.)

Keep being curious. Everything depends on the point of view. And the truth is never just one thing. It is a complex, living entity, moving, growing, shifting around. But these are not good mottos, because a motto should be clear about what truth is, and I am not.

EA: Maybe that is the truth, that it’s not clear?

JE: Clearly. Okay, one more slogan: Everybody should be given the chance to live.

__________________________________

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from the German by Michael Hofmann) is available from New Directions.

It isn’t often that libraries, those citadels of quiet refinement, play a role in capturing a serial killer. Yet that is what happens in the movie Se7en. William Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, is a veteran detective charged with training a newcomer, David Mills, played by Brad Pitt. Their first case: a pair of murders inspired by two of the Seven Deadly Sins, gluttony and greed. After the third killing (sloth), the duo is nowhere close to solving the case. They don’t even have a suspect.

Then Somerset gets an idea. “What would [the killer] study,” he muses, “to do the things he’s done?” For an answer, he turns to a FBI friend, who uses an unnamed database to run a report of public library users who have borrowed books like Paradise Lost, The Inferno, Helter Skelter, Murderers and Madmen, Dictionary of Catholicism—anything that could account for their killer’s skill set. “How is this legal?” asks Mills, to which Somerset replies dismissively, “Legal, illegal….These terms don’t apply.”

Several hours later, report in hand, Mills and Somerset end up at the apartment of John Doe (Kevin Spacey), who fires a gun at them and flees. Later, covered in blood, he turns himself in. Somerset’s trick worked! (Small comfort, as—spoiler alert—the blood on his clothes had belonged to Mills’s wife.)

For years, I thought this sequence was fantasy. I was certain the FBI didn’t have some mysterious database of all U.S. libraries that could spit out the borrower record of any one user. Besides, why would the government care what people read?
My skepticism, it turns out, was unfounded.

*

Privacy has been a part of ALA’s Library Bill of Rights since that document’s original adoption in 1939. All fifty states have either laws or attorney general opinions protecting the confidentiality of library records. Courts have repeatedly upheld the rights of citizens not to have their personal records searched, ruling as the Supreme Court did in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995): “Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation–and their ideas from suppression–at the hand of an intolerant society.”

The tussle has existed as long as libraries and governments have shared breathable air, but it kicked into high gear on June 14, 1953, when President Eisenhower had this advice for a group of Dartmouth College graduates: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t be afraid to go to your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency.”

It was one of the first challenges to McCarthyism, the communist-obsessed fever dream of Senator Joseph McCarthy that serves as a stain on the otherwise idyllic 1950s. Inspired by these words, the American Library Association created one of its seminal documents, the Freedom to Read Statement, which exhorts libraries to circulate “the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.”

In the 1960s came the Vietnam War, which many librarians opposed. (One letter published in Library Journal urged staff members to “protest, if they must, as private citizens exercising citizens’ rights, but not as librarians.”) In 1971, the so-called Media Papers–leaked FBI documents–described the Bureau’s ubiquity on college campuses and its cultivation of “educators and administrators who are established sources.”

A year earlier, U.S. Treasury Secretary David Kennedy responded to a congressional inquiry about Treasury officials “engaged in systematic checking of library lending lists to learn what books are being read by American citizens.” Kennedy responded that it was not “systematic” but three or four isolated investigations regarding individuals who may have borrowed books on bomb-making. (In 1970, the Treasury and not the Department of Justice housed the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.)

At the apex of these investigations sat the Library Awareness Program. No one knows when it officially began, or how far the program reached; it involved FBI agents approaching employees in public or academic libraries and asking for names and other details of people who had used the library to locate, say, engineering journals, scientific texts, government publications—anything that might be considered the slightest bit sensitive. Most were university libraries, though public libraries in New York and Broward County, Fla., were also targets.

The FBI was especially interested in users with “foreign-sounding names” or who came from countries “hostile to the United States.” At the University of Wisconsin, for instance, agents watched a Soviet national reading the Russian newspaper Pravda and asked a librarian if that copy “had been marked up.”

The public was largely ignorant of these encounters until the case of Gennady Zakharov, a Russian-born United Nations aide who was indicted in 1986 for trying to transmit “unclassified information about [American] robotics and computer technology” to the Soviets. His source turned out to be a Guyanese college student who stole publicly available microfiche from several New York-area libraries and sold it to Zakharov.

The next year, the New York Times reported for the first time on the existence of the Library Awareness Program, calling it part of a national counterintelligence effort. Unlike the efforts of the 60s and 70s, however, this one targeted librarians, trying to turn them into “government informers.” The American Library Association spoke out, as did journalists and civil rights organizations.

Finally, Congress took note. In June and July of 1988, a House subcommittee on civil rights held a pair of hearings to suss out what the FBI was doing. Subcommittee chairman Don Edwards (D-Calif.) opened the first hearing by observing that libraries “are intended to be havens for scholarly work and quiet relaxation” and that their records “should not be available to intelligence agencies just for the asking.” Not long after that, they weren’t. The program ended not with a bang or a whimper, but with the stroke of a pen.

Almost as if it had never existed.

*

The Library Awareness Program exposed a vulnerability that librarians have safeguarded for decades: patron privacy. Privacy is considered a constitutional issue, yet unlike, say, freedom of speech or a fair trial, the word itself doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution. Rather, it is an unenumerated right. Such rights, like the right to travel, the right to vote, the right to marry, and, until 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, the right to an abortion, have been inferred (some would say “made up”) by the courts, whose authority for doing so is the little-cited Ninth Amendment, which states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The right to privacy, or “to be let alone,” was first articulated in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, and it’s been a Supreme Court mainstay ever since.

Library privacy hit the news again on October 26, 2001, forty-five days after the 9/11 attacks, when Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, which gave the FBI unprecedented powers to gather intelligence on American citizens. One of those powers came from Section 215 of the Act, and it allowed the FBI to “make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” In other words, the Bureau could force bookstores and libraries to turn over patron records, which, under most state laws, had always been confidential.

This went on sub rosa until 2005, when a pair of FBI agents showed up at the Windsor, Connecticut office of Library Connection, a twenty-seven-member library cooperative, to serve the nonprofit with an NSL, or National Security Letter. The letter requested “any and all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person or entity related to” a certain computer IP address. In other words, the FBI wanted to know who had been using the Library Connection network.

The NSL, like others issued during this era, contained a gag order, meaning nobody at Library Connection was supposed to talk about it. Despite this, George Christian, the director, called the other three members of the executive committee: Barbara Bailey, Peter Chase, and Janet Nocek. The four met the next day to decide how to respond. The easiest thing would have been to let the FBI have the damn logs. The patrons would never know, and besides, the request was for Internet searches, not circulation records. What did it matter if the government saw how many people had been on Craigslist?

Complying, however, meant condoning the practice of FBI snooping. Chase, who was chairman of the Connecticut Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, couldn’t do that. “I work the reference desk all the time,” he later said. “I have the trust of my patrons.” This request felt like a breach of that trust. So he and his colleagues fought the NSL. A year of litigation ensued, culminating in the March 9, 2006 reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act, which made a significant change: it exempted most libraries from NSLs. Three months later, the government dropped the case altogether.

L’affaire FBI made George Christian and his colleagues famous. Nicknamed the “Connecticut Four,” they were honored by the American Library Association with the Paul Howard Award for Courage. They also received the Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty from the ACLU.

There was regular demand for them as speakers, especially at librarian gatherings, and many articles and essays detailed their story. For defying the FBI, for standing up to The Man, for throwing off their spectacles and sensible shoes and becoming freedom fighters, they were, as Marilyn Johnson wrote in This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, “the most celebrated incognito heroes since Deep Throat.”

*

In spite of this seemingly settled area of law, threats to privacy are on the rise in 2023. Like the Library Awareness Program and the Connecticut Four case, these battles involve criminal liability, though they are being initiated not by law enforcement but state legislatures as part of the new fetishization of helicopter parenting.

For example, a new law in North Carolina called the Parents’ Bill of Rights permits parents to “review all available records of materials their child has borrowed from a school library.” Other states have passed similar legislation, including Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. The Texas State Board of Education rejected the ALA’s stance toward privacy and ethics in rewriting its school librarian guidelines because that association “has a long history of circumventing parental rights to fill local and school library shelves with pornographic, racist, and leftist propaganda” and also “prides itself on bypassing state laws that protect students from indoctrination and grooming.”

If censorship is a library Deadly Sin, then privacy violations may seem more like a peccadillo. Who would vote to divert funds from the former to fight the latter? Yet this tiered approach only works when certain types of books aren’t being outlawed, and as everyone who has followed the news at all the past few years knows, that is no longer the case.

In 2021, ALA tracked more than 700 book challenges, the most in 2 decades. In 2022, that number nearly doubled. Each day, it seems, brings news of another school or library facing a book ban. Inexplicably, the notion of book burning still comes up on occasion.

Censorship and privacy are not opposites; they are fruits of the same knotty vine. Both represent government intrusion. Government overreach. Government infantilization. Conservatives claim to dislike too much government, insisting that, for example, citizens can be trusted to handle guns responsibly, or to avoid transmitting COVID-19 while not wearing a mask.

Books, I guess, are too high a hurdle for personal accountability. Bottom line: for over half a century, the right to privacy has been eroded. Today, it’s being done “for the children.” Tomorrow? You might pull books off a shelf and see a high speed lens staring back at you.

It was not as long of a walk as people presume from my days as a public defender to founding a community-based literary arts organization. After years of working in the chasm between judgment and the individual accused, I understood that the stone courtroom repelled the vulnerability of trust. I witnessed the system’s foundational skepticism, of the messy multitudes of our lived experiences, close paths to collective restoration. I wondered then: what, instead, would an ecosystem with a core of trust look like? This question brought me back to books—my space of possibility—and to the community who can nurture a story from mind to bookshelf, a process toward adding more space for shared sight.

A deep-dive into community literary supports that existed at that time, in 2016, revealed clear breakages in the interconnected continuum of writer, publisher, bookseller, and reader, especially when considering BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ communities, and communities with disability and neurodiversity. With the notable exception of We Need Diverse Books’ then mostly writer-focused programming, those supports proved thin to a point of non-existence when it came to intersectional community-led work. From this space, we began The Word, A Storytelling Sanctuary, an organization seeking collective abundance through the seed of storytelling.

Our first program was born from the truth that our communities know how to care for ourselves. The work had to be rooted in collective sharing and listening. The Word’s Editor-Writer Mentorship pairs up-and-coming writers from across intersectional identities with editors experienced in acquisition. The program filled a gap at a time when mentorship offerings focused almost exclusively on writer-to-writer connections while community members identified a need to better understand the publisher side. To date, mentees from this program have signed 14 traditional book publishing contracts, and have published a total of 29 works across additional book formats and anthologies.

The direct impact on opening publication paths through a program of which the main request was education and community building recalls another key aspect of The Word’s work: honestly trusting in that wisdom that is shared from within our community. My dear friend Angela Maria Spring, founder of Duende District Bookstore, summed it up perfectly: we can create shapes we haven’t seen before. We often have an instinct to deny that lines will meet if we can’t yet see where they do. This work requires a commitment to slowness, a valuing of less defined journeys from safe spaces to expansive writing and publishing outcomes.

From this trust sprang the “Community” track of The Word’s [margins.] Literary Conference: distinct from writing and publishing sessions, this track’s focus is allowing participants to air questions that are misunderstood in other spaces. Even without direct answers, writers have shared that they feel the release of these questions like the release of a creative fog. This trust led to our #MarginsBookselling author pre-publication events. The first session was a small virtual room of booksellers learning from Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her vision for The Man Who Could Move Clouds. In that quiet space, the author and booksellers found an oft elusive connection, and the booksellers formed fuller vision for supporting the book, which would go on to a Pulitzer-finalist recognition.  It is in this trust that we continually braid together writers, editors, agents, and booksellers who previously felt unseen, through workshops, planning committees, and informal gatherings, and witness the resulting collective that unites in ways we could not have imagined.

At The Word, we’re honored to play a role in expanding models for our publishing ecosystem through our slow, intimate forms. We work in tandem with a vast literary community that has imagined so many ways of moving. As an offering to all of our radical imaginations, I share this small collection of work from among our literary compatriots and collaborators whose great many shapes are a marvel in themselves:

More about The Word, A Storytelling Sanctuary

Visit www.thewordfordiversity.org for more information on our Editor-Writer Mentorship, #MarginsBookselling, the BIPOC Bookseller Award, publishing and writing workshops, our literary resource database and more.

There is still time to join us for the 2023 virtual [margins.] Literary Conference Sept. 8-9, register here; and save the date for our full biennial [margins.] Literary Conference + Book Festival live in-person and virtual hybrid in September 2024.

Contact us via info@thewordfordiversity.org

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Cave Canem

As described by the organization: Cave Canem was founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996 to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in the literary landscape. Cave Canem Fellowships have supported more than 500 poets, many of whom have gone on to distinguished literary careers, including winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, and Poets Laureate.

Cave Canem offers a suite of core programs that consists of  Fellowships, Regional Workshops, Prizes, and a Legacy Series, as well as readings and other presentations that highlight the poetry of our Fellows and that of the African diaspora. Programs are open to the general public, offering Black poets exposure to new audiences and new audiences exposure to Black poetry. Our programs and publications enlarge the American literary canon; democratize archives; and expand the notion of what is possible and valuable in a poem for students, aspiring poets, and readers.

“Cave Canem offers a series of programs reinforcing the importance of Black poetry and poets to the overall cultural landscape. The influence of its community continues to grow, with Cave Canem poets and Fellows participating in interdisciplinary programs with institutions throughout the country. We invite the public to participate in one of our programs and to experience the power of Black literary voices for themselves.” – Lisa Willis, Executive Director of Cave Canem.

Website: www.cavecanempoets.org

Emerging Diné Writers Institute

As described by the organization: The Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute (EDWI) is a creative writing program that supports Diné writers in all aspects of their writing journeys. In addition to acclaimed Diné writers and visiting faculty, we invite regional hataałii (traditional healers) and cultural knowledge holders to share ancestral stories and storytelling practices. At the heart of our community are the ancestral stories and knowledges that continue to fortify our people. Through workshops, craft talks, hands-on cultural activities, lectures, cultural site visits, Diné language sessions, faculty readings, and community-centered discussions, Diné writers expand their creative writing approach to emphasize Diné foundational knowledges and to situate the production of knowledge from within our communities on the Diné nation.

“We hope that all Diné writers grow in the EDWI. It is imperative that we continue our storytelling traditions, and that more Diné writers continue to honor and work from within our own literary traditions that predate colonial institutions and ways of knowing. Through k’é (kinship) and hane’ ‘ílíinii dóó bee dziilii (impactful stories of compassion and strength), we can continue adding to the storytelling legacy of our relatives from the past, present, and into the future.” – Dr. Manny Loley, Director of the Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute

For more information about the EDWI, please visit edwi.navajotech.edu. Dr. Loley can be reached via email at manny.loley@du.edu.

Kundiman

As described by the organization: Founded in 2004, Kundiman is a national nonprofit dedicated to nurturing writers and readers of Asian American literature. We see the arts as a tool of empowerment, liberation, and solidarity. We host an Asian American Creating Writing Retreat annually, the only one of its kind, and offer online craft classes and workshops, as well as in-person and virtual readings, salons, and panels through regional groups across the country. We also present free publishing panels to demystify the publication process. This series is archived on our YouTube channel.

We believe strongly in developing deep community bonds and recognize no artist or organization does its work alone. Kundiman was mentored into being by Cave Canem: A Home for Black Poetry, which provided support, encouragement, and a model for running our signature Retreat. We hope to continue to foster solidarity across groups that serve writers of color, including CantoMundo, Cave Canem, InNaPo (Indigenous Nations Poets), and RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers), so that together, we can empower the many identities and experiences seeking a voice in literature. As we look toward our 20th Anniversary, we look forward to strengthening relationships with other organizations that serve writers of color. Kundiman organizes together with others as a founding partner of the Asian American Literature Festival, a core member of the Poetry Coalition, and a co-organizer of the annual Asian American caucus.

Nearly 300 writers have attended the Kundiman Retreat. Retreat Fellows report first-time publication in national literary journals, finalist distinction in literary awards, and a greater sense of confidence in their pursuit of a life centered around literature. Kundiman Retreat fellows have published work in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times and have sold over a million copies of writing collectively.

Website: http://www.kundiman.org/

Instagram: @kundimanforever

Twitter: @kundimanforever

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kundimanforever

Kweli

As described on the organization website: Kweli’s mission is to nurture emerging writers of color and create opportunities for their voices to be recognized and valued. By creating a community of Black, Indigenous and POC artists and programming based on artistic excellence and rigor, Kweli empowers writers to share stories that engage and impact our communities. Our vision is for a world where the narratives being told reflect the truth of our histories and the possibilities for our future.

Learn more about the Kweli Journal: https://www.kwelijournal.org/currentissue

Learn more about the Kweli Color of Children’s Literature Festival & Kweli International Literary Festival: https://www.kwelijournal.org/annual-events-conference-and-festival

Latinx KidLit Festival

As described by the organization: The Latinx Kidlit Book Festival is a FREE virtual celebration of Latinx children’s book authors, illustrators for all students, educators and readers around the globe. The Festival offers a combination of educational materials and virtual literary content in the form of craft sessions and illustrator draw-offs with best-selling and award-winning Latinx authors and illustrators of picture books, middle grade, young adult, graphic novels, comic books and poetry. The sessions are geared toward all schools, educators, students and book lovers, not just those identifying as Latinx. Everyone is welcome!

The mission of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival, Inc is to foster a love of story and literacy as well as increase empathy and conversation among educators, students, and book lovers while uplifting the voices of Latinx kidlit book creators. The festival would not be possible without the dedication and support of staff and volunteers. They have worked long hours to create an event that celebrates Latinx voices and inspires kids of all backgrounds through the power of story. We are equally grateful for the contributions of our many sponsors, community partners and donors, who have invested their resources to amplify Latinx creators.

Website: latinxkidlitbookfestival.com

Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc.

As described on the organization’s website: Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc.: A Literary Arts Revolution for Us.  Roots. Wounds. Words. is for Us Black. Us Latinx. Us Indigenous. Us Brown. Us POC. Us felons. Us formerly incarcerated. Us currently incarcerated. Us living under Community Supervision and Control. It’s for Us queer. Us trans. Us gender nonconforming. Us LGBTQIA+. Us poverty-born. Us trauma survivors. Us marginalized. Us brazen. Us revolutionaries. Us.

Through visionary educational workshops, performance showcases, publication opportunities, and an annual writers’ retreat, Roots. Wounds. Words. centers and celebrates the storytelling traditions of Us marginalized writers. Roots. Wounds. Words. primary goals are to provide our storytellers with exceptional education, a plethora of opportunity and a robust tribe. Roots. Wounds. Words. seeks to propel our storytellers into the larger literary community, ultimately diversifying canon and what is currently a non-inclusive arts industry.

Website: www.rootswoundswords.org

Split This Rock

As described by the organization: Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes change. With a focus on both Literary Arts Programs and Youth Programs, the organization offers writing workshops, an archive of poetry by socially-engaged poets that expands weekly, roundtable discussions, and more. Split This Rock’s three full-time directors share executive-level responsibilities within a consensus-based leadership structure.

Split This Rock is home to The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, a searchable collection of over 600 poems by a diverse array of contemporary poets that has been viewed over one million times since its launch in 2015. The Quarry includes poems from the Poem of the Week Series, which is distributed via email and social media channels every Friday.

This year, the organization launched its Poetry Writing Capsule Series through its YouTube channel. Each 10-15 minute video in the series features one poet presenting a topic, discussing poems, and sharing writing prompts. ASL interpretation, precise captioning, visual descriptions, and access documents are included with each video. Poetry Writing Capsules are intended to be timeless and self-paced explorations that can be used by individuals, classrooms, writing groups, and through other collective engagement.

With disability justice as a core value, Split This Rock strives to provide programs, materials, and communications that increase access for people within the disability community. As the organization returns to some in-person programming, Covid precautions are carefully considered and will be clearly messaged. Split This Rock is also determined to be inclusive of those whose socioeconomic realities may otherwise present barriers to access. Currently, all virtual programs and youth programs are provided at no cost to participants.

Learn more about Split This Rock at www.splitthisrock.org.

Zooeglossia

As described on the organization’s website: Zoeglossia is a new literary organization seeking to pioneer a new, inclusive space for poets with disabilities. Much like its forbearers Canto Mundo, Kundiman, Cave Canem, and Lambda Literary, Zoeglossia strives to create an open and supportive community that welcomes and fosters creativity. Through the creation of an annual retreat, poets from all backgrounds will have the opportunity to learn and develop from prominent, established writers, who also have disabilities. These retreats, which individuals will attend over a period of three years, will promote professional development among this shared creative community.

Our vision for the retreat centers around emerging writers coming to campus for three days of intensive work. The three-day retreat will admit approximately eight poets, who will be mentored by two prominent poets with disabilities. A third writer will be responsible for delivering a keynote lecture and panel participation. All attendees—teachers and students—will present their literary writing at a series of readings open to the public. Teachers and returning poets will provide panel discussions on professional and literary issues, as well as one-on-one conferences with the emerging writers.

Website: https://www.zoeglossia.org/

In 1958, the young Indian poet Purushottama (P.) Lal was living in Calcutta, writing in English, and looking for a publisher. Unable to find one, he gathered a small group of college friends who were also convinced that English was a legitimate Indian language for creative writing, including Anita Desai, and started an independent press, known still as Writers Workshop. During what became their legendary Sunday morning adda—a Bengali word often translated as a “chat,” but that actually invokes a much more spirited and sustained way of life—Lal, Desai, and others swapped feedback, wrote prefaces for what became one another’s first books, and adopted a “constitution,” outlining their mission to “define” and “sustain” the role of Indian writing in English.

That Sunday morning adda continued every week for forty years. The press, which now almost exclusively focuses on poetry, is currently in its sixth decade, having published more than 2,500 titles, including early work by luminaries such as Vikram Seth, Agha Shahid Ali, Asif Currimbhoy, Meena Alexander, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, among others who would become globally celebrated. At the same time, Writers Workshop has been equally visionary in their support of authors who are not only writers, such as with the powerfully tender 2013 poetry collection Own Me, Srinagar, by the Odishan police officer Basant Rath, who was posted to Kashmir.

Across the subcontinent, the linguistic landscape has always been—and remains—richly complex. For P. Lal himself, a Punjabi living in Calcutta and married to a Bengali, English was the only common language. For a country with twenty-two constitutionally recognized national languages, including English, at least 100 other “major” languages, and thousands of dialects, the question of which language belongs to whom—or vice-versa—has never had clear or consistent answers.

In the late 1950s, India was also a newly independent country, and many saw the use of English, in any form, as a betrayal to the authenticity of one’s mother tongue and motherland, especially in Calcutta, which had been the heart of anti-colonial fervor for centuries. As a result, the early years of Writers Workshop were plagued by what Ananda Lal, P. Lal’s son, recently described as “vitriolic attacks.” Chief among those was by Bengali writer and academic Buddhadeva Bose, who denounced the claim that English was ever an Indian language. Although Bose recognized the historic value of Indian-English verse, he saw its merit as a relic of the 19th century. As for the future of Indian poetry in English, Bose deemed it a “blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere.”

Such sentiment was not only an academic argument, but palpable in the atmosphere, and the founding members of Writers Workshop “felt quite isolated in their own country,” as Ananda put it, under the ceiling fan and over fresh Sandesh, in a magnificent room with red walls, high ceilings, and rows and rows of bookcases at his family home in South Kolkata, which has also served as the Writers Workshop office since both the house was built and the press formally founded in 1959. Born in 1955, Ananda grew up alongside Writers Workshop, sitting in on the Sunday morning adda and observing the group’s struggles as well as their resilience. “They carried on regardless,” he said, “because English is an Indian language.”

Rather than be deterred, P. Lal took Bose’s public condemnation, which appeared in a 1963 encyclopedia of English and American Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, and repurposed Bose’s language and logic as a questionnaire, which he then sent, by post, to dozens of Indian poets: “Mr. Bose suggests that Indian writing in English was ‘the outcome of an anglomania which seized some upper-class Indians in the early years of British rule,’” P. Lal established before asking his writers point blank, “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English Language?” There were seven questions in total, including whether the writers considered English an Indian language, and the varied replies, alongside accompanying poems, became the 1969 Writers Workshop classic Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo, edited by P. Lal.

The nuance and intimacy of the responses endure as poignantly now as they did sixty years ago. “We spoke a Punjabi dialect,” journalist and poet O.P. Bhagat wrote of his upbringing in what became a small town in Pakistan. Though, he said, “it was not written—unless one deliberately used the Persian or Devanagari script.” At his school, Bhagat explained, the boys were taught Urdu and the girls Hindi, further complicating the already multifaceted variables of linguistic heritage. Bhagat also agreed with Bose that English was not an Indian language. “But” he reasoned, “it has, through historical circumstances, become the cultural and literary language to many Indians.”

In his response to the questionnaire, South Indian writer M.P. Bhaskaran, whose poetry collection The Dancer and the Ring was published by Writers Workshop in 1962, articulates a perspective that still resonates with many South Indians today, “The Hindi imperialists fear that English, unless it is rooted out, may not allow Hindi to dominate India.”

“Language,” Kamala Das said of her writing in English, “does not observe the rigid rules of narrow patriotism. It serves anybody who chooses to serve it.” Beyond this explicit rejection of Bose’s argument, Das’ poetry also directly engages with questions of the vernacular, notably in ways that read as inextricable from her feminism, such as in the final line of her poem, “An Introduction:” I too call myself I.

P. Lal died in 2010, Ananda took over the press, which has remained at once steadfast and innovative in upholding its original mission. “It’s not a different medium,” Ananda said of Indian writing in English, “but it is a distinct medium,” the literary and creative evolution of which dates back more than 200 years. “Longer,” he asserted, “than the history of modern literature in several Indian languages.”

According to Ananda, Shankar Mokashi Punekar, whose Kannada-language novel Avadeshwari won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1988, began integrating “Indian words” into his English language poetry in the late 1960s. This was remarkable at the time, he emphasized, because “the English then,” what his father and other poets were using, was “the Queen’s English.” Prior to that, the “great trinity” of Indian novelists from the 1930s—Mulk Raj Anand, a Punjabi, and R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao, both South Indians—also all used regional idiomatic expressions in their English. But even before that, as Lal used to argue in his classes at Jadavpur University, where he taught for many years, early 19^th century Bengali writers, including the radical prodigy Henry Derozio and Toru Dutt, a remarkable woman writer and translator, who was the first Indian to publish a novel in French, were among the original pioneers of creative writing in English. And even they came a generation after Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who, in the 1790s, mastered many languages, including Sanskrit and Persian, but understood that English, for better or worse, would reach the widest audience.

Far more recently, writers including Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie have strengthened the entire world’s admiration of English as an Indian language—precisely for the acutely Indian contexts which they’ve illuminated. As Anupama Mohan, Associate Professor of English at IIT Jodhpur, whose 2008 poetry collection was published by Writers Workshop, described, “If colonialism took English from provincial to global, then these writers took English from global to local.”

Since its inception, Writers Workshop has also been expanding who or what constitutes an “Indian voice” by ensuring broad geographic diversity. While this has always included representation of South Indian writers, over the last several decades, Writers Workshop has consistently published writers from the Northeast, too. East of Bangladesh and West of Myanmar, India’s North East refers to eight states that are culturally, geographically, and linguistically different from much of the rest of the subcontinent. Marginalized since British rule with dispossession exacerbated by Partition, the Northeast remains especially vulnerable under the current Hindu Nationalist government, which has threatened the citizenship, land rights, and the religious identity of people throughout the Northeast, including Christians, Muslims, and Adivasis.

This year, Writers Workshop re-released the 2004 collection River Poems by Arunachal Pradesh-based poet, journalist, and Sahitya Akademi-award winning novelist Mamang Dai. Temsula Ao, who died in 2022, was born in present-day Assam in 1945 and became a celebrated voice of the Naga people. Her 1988 collection Songs That Tell was one of the first two books of poetry by Northeastern writers that Writers Workshop published. Her poem “My Hills” invokes a past and a present in which brutality has become the new familiar: I no longer know my hills, / The birdsong is gone, / Replaced by staccato / Of sophisticated weaponry.

Writers Workshop books have come to reflect an India in which English is no longer synonymous with an urban upbringing. “Up until the 1980s,” Ananda noted, “all our writers were based in metropolitan areas or had gone abroad.” That’s no longer the case, he underscored, and the manuscripts he now receives—and publishes—reflect this shift. “I’m getting more unheard voices from elsewhere.”

Despite these advances, the linguistic terrain remains fraught. Writing for The New York Times in 2015, Aatish Taseer notoriously proclaimed that English “ruined” Indian literature and that English continues to “re-enact the colonial relationship.” Beyond the provocative title, however, the piece soberly crystallizes the extent to which English in India registers as “class” as much as, if not more than, a language; the implications of status are undeniable given that an English medium education is seen as necessary to a financially viable future. And yet, current efforts by the ruling Hindu nationalists to promote Hindi and to shun English also threaten to silence, if not erase, other voices and experiences all together.

For Goa-based poet Gauri Gharpure, who has published two collections with Writers Workshop, the focus on English can feel like a distraction. “I wish it were seen with a more generic lens,” she said, rather than something to condemn or to glamorize. Ultimately, Gharpure considers English the means by which “different narratives of our culture, ancient as well as current, are portrayed in varied ways.” To this end, she’d also like to see far more work in translation. “That would be something worth glorifying,” she said.

Piercing through these infinite, thorny questions of history, nationalism, and the collective impact of individual expression are the gorgeous books themselves, each one still stitched and pressed in handloom sari cloth the color of jewels. Although Tulamiah Mohiuddin Khan, who began binding Writers Workshop books by hand in the early 1960s, passed away several decades ago, his youngest son continues the work today. The loving attentiveness to the beauty and craft of each book remains emblematic of the loving attentiveness given to the precision of each writer’s words—in the perfect, imperfect language of English that, like the fabric on the books, stretches into its own form, bright and durable and human.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who was born and raised in Calcutta, was living in the U.S. when P. Lal published her first book in 1987, a poetry collection entitled Dark Like the River. “Publishing in English was crucial for me,” Divakaruni recently explained over email. “I am fluent in daily-use Bangla and read it at a high level, but English is the language I studied in school, and the only language in which I was capable of writing anything literary or complex. Writers Workshop made that possible,” she emphasized, which she believes also deepened her bond with her Indian readers. “Prof. Lal had a prophetic vision. He saw English in India, as used by Indian writers, as a unique entity…Now, decades later, we (and the world!) are seeing the truth of this.”

Now screening on the Criterion Channel—and perhaps at an arthouse cinema near you—is a new 4k restoration of Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s debut film, Party Girl (1995), starring indie queen Parker Posey. Party Girl has become a cult classic for its heroine’s wardrobe of 90s couture and its documentation of Manhattan nightlife during that liminal period between the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the sanitizing project of Rudy Giuliani’s mayorship. But sometimes, the film ceases to be a deliciously camp time machine and becomes a drolly realist harbinger of the future. In an early scene, when Posey’s Mary visits her godmother Judy at work to thank her for bail money, Judy laments, “we are reeling from budget cuts.”

There are many fields where one could expect a manager to deliver this line, but Judy’s profession will be especially unsurprising to anyone with ties to New York City: she’s a librarian for the New York Public Library. Though NYPL staff and city councilors recently pressured Mayor Eric Adams to exclude the city’s library systems from a budget reduction of four percent, another proposed cut of $36 million remains in place today.

In fact, cuts to the NYPL sets Party Girl’s entire narrative in motion. Judy’s line comes during a conversation in which she exhorts her goddaughter to get a job, only to be interrupted by a patron complaining about every Hannah Arendt book being out of sequence. Unable to retain clerks because she can’t “pay them a competitive wage,” Judy briefly raises and then dismisses the possibility that her cash-strapped goddaughter could be the solution to her staffing issues. Mary’s pride compels her to prove that she could excel in the role, and so begins a journey in which a young woman most known for her voguing skills must learn how to diligently reshelve, politely assist patrons, and master the Dewey Decimal System.

The film’s portrayal of properly reshelving books as a Sisyphean task—to reference one of its key allusions—is laugh-out-loud funny. But as a former library worker and passionate library patron, I see Mary’s introduction to library work while wearing designer stilettos as more than a source of comedy. Against the backdrop of a culture that deems libraries as expendable during periods of economic downturn, Party Girl launches a defense of librarianship as indispensable to women’s self-actualization and a society’s collective knowledge.

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Party Girl, as its director and star often point out, is a modern screwball comedy, a genre whose enduring appeal can be attributed to its women-driven narratives. As critic Molly Haskell famously explained in From Reverence to Rape (1974), the enforcement of the puritanical Production Code had a paradoxically feminist effect on 30s and 40s Hollywood filmmaking. In place of the oversexed party girls of those late silent and pre-Code comedies starring Clara Bow and Mae West, screwball comedies made heroines out of clever working girls who used their verbal wit, rather than their bodies, to wage the battle of the sexes. But the intelligence of these working girls is not always immediately recognized. In a classic of the genre, Billy Wilder’s Ball of Fire, the Brooklyn-born Barbara Stanwyck plays a burlesque dancer who initially attracts a group of stuffy male professors because of her shapely legs but later integrates herself into their household through her adroit use of language.

Posey herself has spoken of her affinity for Stanwyck, and in Party Girl, she proves herself at ease in the “fish out of water” trope which structured Stanwyck’s best comedies. The film’s cinematography draws a stark contrast between Mary’s preexisting habitat, the hazy nightclub and her dimly lit Soho loft, and the starkly fluorescent NYPL branch where she spends her daytime hours. In lieu of the house music and R&B that pulsates through her nocturnal life, the stamping of due dates is the only soundtrack Mary experiences behind the library desk. And like a true screwball heroine, Mary reacts to feeling out of place with cutting wit. After Judy chastises her for incorrectly coding Freud’s Dora, thus failing to meet the standard set by the trained monkeys who reportedly mastered Dewey’s classification system, Mary retorts in a fantasy monologue, “It is dismaying that your expectations are based on the performance of a lesser primate, and also revelatory of a managerial style which is sadly lacking. Is it any wonder then, that I have chosen not to learn the intricacies of an antiquated and idiotic system? I think not.”

By calling the Dewey Decimal System “antiquated and idiotic,” a blisteringly apt descriptor for us Library of Congress partisans, Mary forces the viewer to recognize that she is much smarter than she is given credit for. As the film continues, von Scherler Mayer makes it clear that not only can streetwise heroines be booksmart, too, but that being a rave queen can actually prepare you to succeed as an apprentice librarian. In Party Girl’s most memorable sequence, Mary sneaks into the library at night to give herself an independent tutorial on Dewey’s “idiotic system.” The sequence cross-cuts between the library and the nightclub, where close-ups and pans over dancing hips alternate with shots of Mary’s friend Leo working his first shift as a deejay. But here, the stark contrast between the nightclub and the library breaks down. Leo’s discs continue to play as Mary studies the library, and cuts between shots of different aisle markers and card catalogue drawers occur in sync with the music’s syncopated beat. The library becomes Mary’s dancefloor as she turns a table into a catwalk on which she balletically reshelves books and perches herself on a desk to close card catalogue drawers with her designer boots.

The sequence is fun to watch, but the analogy it draws between dancing and shelving also reveals something important about library work. When I was a circulation assistant at my college library, my working conditions were not dissimilar to Mary’s in this moment. Because no one studied in the basement level where the art and music books were held, I had the floor to myself. Using a carefully selected soundtrack on my iPod Nano as my guide, I turned the music’s structure into a unique itinerary for weaving through the stacks and altered my pace according to my soundtrack’s tempo and the needs of the books. Shelving reference works was brisk; shelving monographs about individual composers in the dense ML 410s took more time. Even with an entry-level task like shelving, I had to enact a complex system defined as much by its variations as by its repetitions.

Mary’s knack for devising such complex systems allows her to finally answer the questions that obsess her: What am I good at? What kind of work would I enjoy? The film thus teases out the drama of self-actualization implicit in screwball comedies and explicit in another Stanwyck-centric genre, melodrama. Screwballs often validate their heroine’s intelligence by culminating in an unlikely match, such as an awkward English professor and seductive stripper, but in Party Girl, the match is between a heroine and her career. Instead of a kiss, the film climaxes with Mary’s announcements “I’m serious about graduate school!” and “I want to be a librarian!” Initially skeptical of the goddaughter she thinks “just like” her aimless mother, Judy gives Mary her wholehearted support. Like the striving heroines of melodramas such as Baby Face and Now, Voyager, Mary casts off her family’s perception of her and finds a way to assert her own worth.

Mary’s journey to self-actualization through the library stacks is, in practice, one most often taken by women. Women continue to dominate the field of library science, with AFL-CIO’s Department of Professional Employees reporting that 82 percent of librarians are women. Why? Because Melvil Dewey, Judy explains in the film’s centerpiece monologue, “hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn’t require any intelligence. It was a woman’s job! That means it’s underpaid and undervalued.” Judy’s impromptu history lesson is largely accurate, for the man who helped found the American Library Association did indeed advocate for allowing women into library school because of their social intelligence and manual dexterity. Party Girl corrects Dewey’s undervaluing in part by showing how this “woman’s job” can be a meaningful path for women to acquire financial independence as well as intellectual validation.

But if the world outside the film does not value this work, then it will remain “underpaid.” It could even become subject to prophecies of obsolescence.

*

Party Girl sharply diagnoses the problems that libraries still face, but the 90s nostalgia the film now incites isn’t entirely irrelevant to its portrayal of Mary’s new profession. Nothing makes it clearer that Party Girl depicts a world without widespread access to computers than those scenes at the NYPL. In a scene where Mary scolds one patron for reshelving a book, the other patrons look up from their books, not from their screens. The only computer in this scene—and the entire film—can be spotted behind Mary, but only if you pay close attention. Out of focus and in the background, it languishes unpowered, unattended, and with no chair for a potential user.

Judy, for all her pessimism, thrills at the potential impact that computers could (and indeed will) have on library science. At one point, she tells another clerk, “I wish I were in school now—the new technology, it’s so exciting.” Her optimism is not unwarranted. As a former library assistant, I cannot fathom having had to learn a call number system through a reference book, as Mary does; instead, I completed a computer tutorial that took all of 20 minutes. As a researcher, I do not have to flip through drawers of a card catalog to learn what books my library has on a subject; I can simply plug a couple words into the online catalog’s search bar. I dare not even imagine what planning archival research was like in the pre-internet age.

Yet a world before computers is not without its allure. I watched Party Girl after a semester of witnessing colleagues catastrophize that the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI tools signals the end of higher education as we know it. Parallel conversations, my friends in the library world tell me, are also happening in their own field. Of particular concern is not the self-interested question of whether universities will still invest in libraries but the threat to information literacy. In a culture where students already turn to the unvetted world of Google to complete research papers, ChatGPT allows students to bypass the cumbersome tasks of trying different search terms and actually reading sources. Yet because such tools are designed to simply generate plausible language rather than to process and evaluate information, their output is often surreally inaccurate, and the citations they provide completely made up.

In other words, what we lose in an era of AI tools is what Ellen Sexton, chief librarian at John Jay College, calls the “traditional gatekeeping function of libraries.” Gatekeepers tend to be cast as opponents to social justice, but Party Girl cleverly dramatizes the social good which library staff generate. To help her Lebanese-born boyfriend return to the teaching profession, as she explains in her final monologue, Mary carefully built a body of knowledge that is both foundational and up to date: by first consulting national reference volumes, then refining the search by checking the latest bulletin for New York State teaching requirements, and, finally, verifying the details by using the early internet to look up any recent amendments to state law. As Mary’s process makes clear, what reference services provide aren’t a series of words that superficially resemble “facts.” Rather, what Mary does is order, evaluate, and synthesize knowledge.

And to do this work most thoroughly, Party Girl implies, librarians and their trainees must be stewards of physical repositories instead of disembodied chatbots on the library webpage which collate licensed e-books and citations from article databases. My favorite illustration of this comes when the newly confident Mary whips around on her swivel chair to retrieve a pile of books she’s culled for a patron. Within the broad field of twin studies (“There’s a lot of studies on twins”), she has selected a few pertinent to the patron’s specific line of inquiry (“these focus solely on the made-up languages”), and has even added a book of twin-composed songs (“just for fun”).

We don’t see Mary weaving through the stacks in pursuit of this reference request, but it’s not hard to imagine. As anyone who has ever reshelved library books can tell you, often, the best way to master a field isn’t to go to the catalog; it’s to go to the stacks and look at the books surrounding a single relevant title, such as one on “the made-up languages.” And when Mary adds the song book, likely shelved far away from the psychology titles, I can imagine that this is a volume Mary only thought to add because she had encountered it during a reshelving shift. It’s an unexpected addition that reminds me of those times I’ve showed up to a reading room and the special collections librarian has added an uncatalogued manuscript I didn’t know existed. Such idiosyncratic recommendations are the things that research breakthroughs are made of, and I’ve yet to be convinced that computers alone can generate them.

If economic austerity replaces libraries with Google and librarians with AI chatbots, then research innovation will falter; the authoritative information needed by those seeking social mobility will be difficult to extricate; and yet another field occupied by women will see workers replaced by automation. Party Girl does not contemplate such a future, but by depicting a world lacerated by budget cuts but not yet taken over by computers, von Scherler Mayer’s film can make this future feel plausible while reminding viewers of what makes libraries worth fighting for. Viewed from the vantage of 2023, Party Girl is nothing less than an argument for why, for the sake of women’s self-actualization and the broader social good, librarians need to be embodied minds rather than streams of code.

When school’s out for summer, I’ll often reach for feel-good teacher memoirs like Teacher Man by Frank McCourt (2005), or Freedom Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell (1999), later for the screen in a 2007 film starring Hilary Swank. Although I’ve gotten weary and disheartened by so many memoirs by young, inexperienced white people changing BIPOC students’ lives overnight, my hunger for “teacher stories” is insatiable—and I’m always eager for the next exciting voice in educator literature (should we call it “Ed Lit?”). As a school librarian, I’ve long harbored the hope that our next blockbuster educator memoirist will provide a clear-eyed and reassuring book by a radical librarian. No one can “shush” us!

This May, my dream came true with a Publisher’s Weekly announcement that one of my far-flung colleagues in Louisiana, Amanda M. Jones, landed a deal with Bloomsbury to publish her memoir in the fall of 2024. According to her publisher, That Librarian, is “a David and Goliath story of Jones’s battle against book banning” and provides “a deeply intimate look at the onslaught of harassment she faced and her courageous decision to fight back.” Stories about educators and librarians seem more urgent than ever, and I can’t wait to go deeper than the news articles about free speech warriors.

Jones was School Library Journal’s 2021 co-librarian of the year for her innovative work. That same year, she attended a public library board meeting where she defended patrons right to access to LGBTQIA+ books. After this meeting, she was attacked online, received death threats, and stunned the whole country by suing her harassers. Although Jones lost in court, she has filed an appeal, and recently asserted her determination to take her battle all the way to the supreme court.

Her lawyers have estimated that Jones will spend up to $160,000 in legal fees by the time the case is over (she has a GoFundMe on her website). Even when she was publicly defamed and ostracized in her “two stoplight town,” and found it difficult to attend school events or shop in the grocery store without people whispering and pointing at her, Jones has continued relentlessly advocating for kids’ right to read.

I reported on Jones’ journey for my article “Stress Tested,” School Library Journal’s cover story in May. After its publication, I followed up with Jones to find out what was happening with her book deal, eager for news. As a longtime public school librarian in New York, I followed the twists and turns of Jones’ story with great interest, especially through articles by SLJ’s brilliant censorship expert, Kara Yorio.

As I read about Jones, I kept asking myself what I’d do if I were in her shoes. What was I willing to risk for the love of reading?  Financial security? My well-being? My family’s safety? Jones has risked it all—and her nonfiction book will layer memoir with cultural history, exploring the roots of her motivation and legal battles, and her insights into life in the rural south and white nationalism.

When I asked what prompted Jones to take her anti-censorship battle to court, she said she felt a “responsibility” to make the most of her platform as SLJ Co-School Librarian of the Year. “I’m white and straight,” she said. “It shouldn’t be up to marginalized people to fight….People who are privileged need to take a stand.”

When Jones put her mind to becoming a published author, she drew on her resources as a masterful researcher to make it happen. When she learned that a #WeNeedDiverseBooks fundraiser was auctioning various literary services, she bid on the chance to speak to a literary agent. Sarah N. Fisk from the Tobias Agency met with Jones and answered her questions about how to write a book proposal or query a book.

“I did not know the first thing about any of it,” Jones admitted. “It was just a meeting for me to ask questions. I was fortunate that Sarah and The Tobias Literary Agency emailed me later that day and asked if I was interested in signing with them.” Anton Mueller, Senior Editor of Bloomsbury, heard Jones’ NY Times First Person podcast and contacted her just two days after her meeting with Fisk to ask if she’d considered writing a book. And from there, everything fell into place.

*

Teachers and librarians have always had something to say—and it’s more critical than ever that we progressive educators speak up. If only eleven parents were responsible for sixty percent of book bans during the 2021 – 22 school year, working behalf of such groups as Moms of Liberty, I don’t know why their voices are so loud and powerful. We educators can do more to fight back. Think of all of the research skills, persuasive writing, speaking and media savvy that a whole nation of teachers can channel together.

I’m glad that one of the first books about censorship is coming out of the south, and I’m also eager for books by BIPOC librarians and educators. After Jones’ PW announcement, I wanted to follow up with Jean Darnell, another librarian I profiled in my SLJ article, to ask if she would also consider writing her memoir. A Black librarian in Texas, Darnell published a moving essay, “All I Can Do,” about surviving a school shooting in American Educator, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) magazine.

Darnell’s essay reflects the vital role of the librarian and all educators to provide emotional support and guidance to students. When I emailed Darnell to ask what her own librarian memoir would include, she shared her vision of a book about her experience teaching “emotional literacy” to teens. As she wrote, “I could fill that book with every salacious detail [of working in the library]” and her work helping students overcome everything from “teen drama” to “parental violence” and “embarking on bodily discovery/sexuality.”

Darnell’s students have asked her to adopt them because they longed to live in the library with her in the safe space she provided. “I’ve been their counselor, emotionally healthy adult, magical resource godmother and feedback friend,” she said.

Our roles as librarians position us to have some of the clearest insights into some of the biggest crises that America faces, from school violence to immigration to mental health to the future of our whole society. Darnell describes herself as a “responsible gun owner” haunted by the PTSD scars of a shooting at her former school. Her perspective about school violence is one that politicians and lawmakers should be hearing; she knows more than almost anyone.

Darnell argues in her American Educator essay that schools spend too much time on active shooter drills without addressing the true problem—mental health. Schools lack sufficient counselors and psychologists, so educators and librarians often fills the role of providing emotional support.

“We need to teach emotional literacy as a preventive strategy beyond the primary school years so that kids know how to ground themselves, work through their feelings, and realize there are alternatives to harming themselves or others,” Darnell asserted. When I read another essay of Darnell’s, “Unpacking Black Librarianship,” I trusted her compelling narrative style and wanted to hear everything she had to say.

In my research on recent educator memoirs, the most exciting book I found was, in fact, a group memoir by public school students, by well-regarded scholar Jeanne Theoharis and her colleagues. I hadn’t been aware of the 2009 book, Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Public Education. Unfortunately I expect to see that many of the problems from more than a decade ago have gotten worse. I hope that new generations of students will write about their experiences of book banning and fights over what they should be allowed to read. Young people’s voices are so crucial to this story.

I am eager for more publishing opportunities to be available to teenagers, especially young people of color. After working as a high school librarian for fourteen years, I know that young people are tired of adults talking about them and making decisions for them (often, the teens are smarter than the adults!) We shouldn’t underestimate what teens can do.

Think of Emma Gonzales, the school violence activist, and Greta Thurberg, climate change activist; these are just two examples. Many more can be found in Teen Trailblazers: 30 Fearless Girls Who Changed the World Before They Were 20 (2018). So who will be our teen spokesperson fighting for anti-censorship? Maybe our teen activist will be one of the York, Pennsylvania students who protested book bans and won this fall.

I’m also a huge fan of a book that hasn’t received nearly enough attention from the literary community. Amanda Oliver’s Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library (2022) is a personal and cultural history of the library, and paves the way for Amanda Jones’ book even though they cover different territory. Jones’ forthcoming book focuses on the culture wars while Oliver’s examines the way that libraries and librarians carry the unfair burdens of serving people in dire crisis without the proper resources or training. Oliver argues that librarians are being asked to fulfill too many roles for society, but that many decision-makers—and librarians themselves—are guilty of ignoring the institutional failures in libraries because, well, we all love libraries and want to be nostalgic and idealistic.

Will death threats become just another, routine part of a librarian’s day, something that might happen between locating a missing Ursula LeGuin paperback and helping a toddler’s parent locate the most fun ABC book?

American freedoms are coming unraveled, librarians of all stripes are getting caught up in these battles—and making this our work too. School and youth librarians are often hit the hardest, and we can’t really afford any extra stress. Most educational librarians work largely alone. In schools like my former one in New York City, we are expected to manage rooms of fifty or sixty students at a time without an assistant (although it’s technically not allowed, it’s very typical).

Through Oliver’s experiences serving as a librarian to some of the most vulnerable Washington, DC public school students, and later at a public library that mostly served unhoused people, she saw that librarians were often first-responders in emergencies; she and her colleagues regularly administered lifesaving measures such as Naloxone, for example. Oliver professed her love of libraries throughout the book, but also made compelling arguments that if we truly value libraries, we will reassess this underpaid, under-supported (which, like education is mostly done by women).

We can’t exercise magical thinking around libraries, Oliver says. By this token, we cannot praise Amanda Jones as a “librarian superhero” (I’m going to call her a “warrior,” but she deserves to remain a human!). Jones’ fight, while admirable, reflects just how much trouble we’re in as a society.

So, while I applaud her, I don’t want to see any other librarians taking on what she has. Jones cannot simultaneously educate young people and fight censorship—no one can. As I noted in my SLJ article, Jones was on a semester-long sabbatical for anxiety and depression. We need more free speech activists, more people fighting for librarians, and my hope is that Jones’ memoir will inspire a wide variety of citizens to join the fight.

Teachers and librarians are being targeted, criminalized and demonized (as the “arms of satan”) not only in  southern states like Louisiana, but even in liberal New Jersey suburbs within commuting distance of New York City. In Verona, a school librarian was fired recently for displaying books featuring LGBTQ and BIPOC stories. A librarian I know here in New York was threatened online after hosting an LGBTQ Coming Out gathering and displaying relevant books in her library.

If this is happening in my city, we are all in trouble. “You should write about this,” I urged my colleague, Lindsay Klemas. Not longer after, I emailed with Electric Literature contributing writer Deirdre Suguichi that she was contemplating writing about her years as a school librarian in Georgia.

Every few hours, my google alert tells me of a new book banning controversy, but I’m sure I can reset the alerts so I can hear about all the victories happening too. This morning, my New York colleague, Klemas, texted with an update. The HuffPost published her essay, “I Was Labeled a Pedophile and a Groomer in a Viral Video—and It Blew Up My Life.”

So, write on, librarians! Hate and fear might threaten to overpower us, but in the end, we need to believe that readers, writers and librarians in our country will have the last word.

Michael Chabon—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union—spent his Covid quarantine taking a trip…through time!

Well, not literally, but in an emotional and curatorial sense, the speculative fiction maestro can now be considered a time traveller.

Yes, as reported by Boing Boing earlier this week, Chabon “spent his Covid quarantine lovingly and meticulously creating a digital tribute to / replica of the Science Fiction and Fantasy section in the bookstore of his youth.”

On Sunday, Chabon posted the image of his digital bookshelf on Threads and wrote:

This started (and was mostly finished) as a COVID project.

One endless quarantine afternoon, I was in my Berkeley studio, staring at my old #DAW_SF and #BallantineAdultFantasy paperbacks, and contemplating, in my imagination, the “Science Fiction and Fantasy” section at the loooong-defunct Page One bookstore, back in #ColumbiaMD, where I grew up.

People, I tell you, I fuckin HAUNTED that section! For YEARS! And now as I sat around communing with my tattered old friends, I discovered that I retained a sharp recollection—title, author, cover design—of what felt like every single book that had ever appeared on those tall shelves along the left wall of Page One, toward the back, between 1972 and 1980.

This—which I finally finished, last night—was the result. Think of it—I did—as a kind of time telescope, a look back at the visuals that embodied and accompanied my early aspirations as a writer, and at the mass-market splendor of paperback sf and fantasy in those days.

For the pulpy SFF enthusiast, there’s an embarrassment of riches to be salivated over here: Star Wars and Star Trek novelizations, gorgeous Ray Bradbury editions, Gino D’Achille’s John Carter covers, Hugo Award collections edited by Isaac Asimov, and much, much more.

Working with the Booker Prize Foundation, Dua Lipa recently visited HMP Downview, a women’s prison in Surrey, to get a firsthand glimpse of Books Unlocked, a program set up by the BPF and the National Literacy to foster a culture of reading for incarcerated people. Lipa, who recently launched a book club of her own, said of the visit:

It was just kind of going into the room and understanding the books they love to read in their own time, how that makes them feel, how that’s been able to help them understand different emotions and feelings. [It] has been really inspiring and I’ve felt very privileged to be in that room to experience that with them. 

Head here for more about the Books Unlocked program.

This year, I’m celebrating Pride through LGBTQ children’s books. I’m building a new library for my two kids and wife Stefanie, who is trans and transitioned just two years ago. We began with Being You: A First Conversation About Gender (Penguin, 2021) and a pride alphabet book, Pride Puppy (Orca, 2021). These loving, age-appropriate celebrations of creative gender expression and different kinds of families communicate universal life lessons of loving oneself and others. As I stack towers of books around me, I feel as if I’m building a rainbow book fortress of protection around my queer family.

Stefanie and I didn’t grow up with such beautiful books. When Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman was published in 1989, we were 9 and 10 years old and already onto chapter books. We both remember the controversy around the book, but not the story itself. When we bought it, Heather felt like a long overdue gift. As we snuggle with our children and read the story, we flip through the sun-filled, watercolor-washed illustrations. The children featured in this book are chubby, muddy, messy, and very real, and the narration has a soothing cadence.

 Heather’s favorite number is two. She has two arms, two legs, two eyes, two hands, and two feet. Heather has two pets: a ginger-colored cat named Gingersnap and a big black dog named Midnight. Heather also has two mommies…

I’m a former school librarian who currently teaches children’s literature to MLS students at the Graduate School for Library and Information Studies at Queens College in New York City. When I teach future librarians about what makes a good picture book, I always say that the narration must contain an authentic child’s viewpoint, and the story should not be didactic. Newman’s book takes us through a preschool child’s routine, bursting with fingerpaint and everyday epiphanies. Gender is in fact a very subtle feature of the story.

When Heather’s classmate asks, “What does your father do?” there is a moment of reckoning (she wonders: “Am I the only one without a father?”) but it’s hardly a crisis. The classroom scene captures an experience so many kids will relate to, whether they have single, widowed or divorced parents, incarcerated parents, or are being raised by grandparents or other guardians. We must remember that our culture used to ostracize children of divorce too, but that has gradually become more widely accepted. Newman’s book reminds us that families and love can exist in many forms and configurations.

When my four-year-old swiped through the ebook version of Pride Puppy, on my phone, she was far more concerned about the missing puppy lost in the hubbub than she was about anyone’s sexuality. In this alphabet book by Robin Stevenson, illustrated by Julie McLaughlin, we follow a family through their first Pride parade. My kid loved the sweep of colorful flags and the noisy chaos of it. Kids love stories where everyone belongs, and no one is excluded. That kind of world feels natural to them. As Stevenson writes, “E [is] for everyone under the sun,” and “K [is] for kindness.” These books don’t indoctrinate our children into being anything—except compassionate.

From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea by Kai Cheng Thom, illustrated by Wai-Yant Li and Kai Yun Ching (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017), is a love song from a mother to a child. The child doesn’t fit gender norms, but the author doesn’t use terms like nonbinary or intersex. The child’s gender fluidity is viewed as a magical aspect of their personality:

Miu Lan grew up to be a strange, magical child who was always changing. They grew feathers and wings to fly with bluebirds in the mornings, scales and a tail to swim with fish in the afternoons, and fur and paws to play with puppies in the evenings.

The watery wash of saturated watercolor—aqua and plum with flecks and bursts of gold—and the figure of a child with fur, horns and wings, make this book ethereal. The child’s wild mischievousness, reminiscent of Max in the Where the Wild Things Are, perfectly balances the earnestness of the mother’s song that pulses through the story like rhythmic ocean waves: “Whatever you dream of, I believe you can be, from the stars in the sky to the fish in the sea…”

Worm Loves Worm by J.J. Austrian, and illustrated by Mike Curato (Baltzer + Bray, 2016), is a wholly enjoyable book about two worms who fall in love but face practical challenges, such as finding wedding rings when they lack fingers. The solution: wear the rings as belts.

When the officious Cricket tells the worms how things “have always been done,” with cake, hats and flowers, Worm answers: “But we don’t have heads for hats… or hands to hold flowers. ‘And we only eat dirt.’” Why was this adorable book ever banned? My ten-year-old was wondering the same thing until she reached the page where the worms say they don’t know who the bride or the groom will be—so they will both be brides, and both be grooms. (The book doesn’t state this, but worms are natural hermaphrodites, so the story is realistic). The book leaves me a warm afterglow of laughter and humor. I am perplexed that something so innocuous could cause an uproar in schools, which have many other urgent concerns these days.

As I continue collecting new LGBTQ books, I’ve noticed some patterns emerging. Gender creative books tend to be more culturally diverse than heteronormative ones. In The Boy and The Bindi by Vivek Shraya and illustrated by Rajni Perera (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016), a boy dreams of wearing a bindi on his forehead like his mother (the bindi is traditionally worn by women). Although the author doesn’t articulate that the child is crossing a gender boundary, there are hints, including a scene where children on the playground seem curious or unsettled by the boy’s bindi. The spare pages include geometrical watercolor patterns drawn from Indian fabrics, and sweeping, swirling spreads of the boy interacting with his mother. At the conclusion, the boy has discovered how his bindi represents spirituality, love and identity:

Well, bindi is like my third eye
Watching over me all the time
Making sure I don’t hide
Everything I am inside
And everything that I can be.

What I want my children to learn from LGBTQ books is that there are countless ways to exist in the world peacefully. I’m proud to be queer, but I honestly do not want to influence my children or students to be queer. No book can make you gay. But a book can uplift people who may feel excluded or marginalized for a wide variety of reasons—not just because of sexuality or gender identity. Children who are finding their voices, whether or not they will grow up to be straight or cis, queer or trans, need these books.

Children’s literature has not yet embraced disability inclusion very smoothly, but I noticed in Pride Puppy and Being You: A First Conversation about Gender that disabled characters are incorporated in a seamless and respectful way. This is rarely the case in heteronormative books.

 In My Rainbow (2020), illustrated by Art Twink, was co-authored by a mother-daughter pair, Trinity and DeShanna Neal, is based on Trinity’s experience of transitioning at age four. Trinity, a Black, transgender girl with autism who is now 20 wrote about her desire for fabulous hair as a preschooler. The main arc of the story is Trinity searches for hair that represents who she really is (and won’t tickle her neck and cause sensory discomfort). When her mom makes her a magenta and turquoise curls exploding with flowers, she’s overjoyed and walks with her head high.

The Neals’ book was included on a list of 850 books that Texas state representative Matt Krause recommended banning from schools in 2021 because they might make students feel “discomfort… about their race or sex.” Which children was he referring to? He was clearly ignoring the fact that the book was about a Black child comfortable in her own skin.

Like many progressive librarians and educators living in a liberal state like New York, I actually find banned book lists helpful—and use them to build lesson plans and choose books. I check these lists as regularly as the National Book Award or Caldecott Award pages for ideas of what books to read and teach. But my ardent hope is that these lists will disappear. Book banning shouldn’t exist in a democracy.

My fellow librarians and dear author friends have received death threats over censorship. If books are so powerful to the people who make threats, why don’t they just read? If books are so important, why not fund more libraries and schools? Why are our literacy rates so poor? According to an article about Gallup poll analysis data from the U.S. of Education of this year, “54% of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read at a level below that of the sixth grade.” I am afraid this will get worse.

When I spoke with Sarah Prager, an author who has produced a small library of LGBTQ children’s histories, from picture books to YA over the last five years, she described a major, recent shift in our cultural landscape.

When Prager published her first work of YA narrative nonfiction, Queer, There and Everywhere: 20 People Who Changed the World, in 2017, she expected some backlash. But instead, she mostly received fan mail. The opposition to her work didn’t really begin until 2021, when the Texas legislature included Queer, There and Everywhere and Rainbow Revolutionaries on the same list of 850 banned books as Trinity Neal’s. “And that kicked things off,” Prager says. “The 2020s are terrifying,” she said. What scares her most is that these book bans go hand in hand with movements to block other citizens’ rights, such as access to trans and queer medical care.

When I gently asked Prager how this hateful climate impacted her life as a writer, she peered up at the ceiling, thinking long and hard. It was the longest silence I’ve ever experienced in an interview. We moved onto a different question. After years of brutal fighting, I can understand why some challenged authors do not want to talk about censorship in interviews. They need to preserve their energy for fighting—and writing.

When I reached out to Kyle Lukoff, a Stonewall and Newbery winner, and National Book Award Finalist who has also authored numerous children’s and middle grade books including Too Bright to See (2021) and When Aiden Became a Big Brother (2019), he also graciously declined to be interviewed on the bans. Instead, he invited me to quote from his pinned 2022 Twitter thread in which he explained his reluctance to speak on the subject.

I’m not the first to note how “banned books” has tidily replaced “diversity” as a way to silo marginalized authors away from discussing our craft, making us serve, again, only as emissaries of our people.

It’s crucial to talk about the movement to ban books…but I’m sick about always talking about what my enemies are doing, and wish I could just talk about what I’m doing, who my characters are, what stories I’m bringing into the world.

Lukoff’s 2022 Stonewall Award acceptance speech grappled with hate and censorship and he has spoken out against banning in many public forums. But he needs to be a writer and author as well as an activist. We all need to step up and defend books—not just the authors.

I want to acknowledge to Lukoff, Prager, and all of my favorite queer authors how much they have sacrificed by producing these books. Writers, librarians and educators have put themselves on the line so that my own queer family can feel safer. And for this, my friends, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

You know when two people you like turn out to know each other, and you think, oh COOL but also WEIRD? That’s how I feel about a photo I saw of Channing Tatum dropping into Emma Straub’s Books Are Magic store in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, on Tuesday to promote his third children’s book, Sparkella and the Big Lie.

I’m a tough study of children’s books, and especially of celebrity-helmed children’s books, but, as previously noted, I think Tatum has hit something of a sweet spot, leaning into his single dadness and leveraging some of that youthful joie de vivre we all loved in films like Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street (the unrecognizable reboot) in his Sparkella series.

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Tatum told part-time children’s book authors Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager (a leading voice on books, almost as powerful as Lit Hub) that he wrote the story thinking back to his daughter’s first really big lie that “ate her up,” after she stole a toy car from school and didn’t know how to take it back. “She thought I was gonna call the police,” he said, explaining that he promises she’ll never be in trouble if she tells the truth.

He sounds like a fun, good parent. The kind of guy who passed out drunk in the desert in a Snuggie and is friends with someone who got “SIT HERE” tattooed on his lip, but also knows how to set the kinds of boundaries with a child that make them feel safe. The kind of guy who likes to bring a little razzle dazzle to an independent bookstore.

Who said the literary bloke was dead?