- Tessa Michaelson Schmidt: Good evening.
My name is Tessa Michaelson Schmidt,
and I'm the director
of the Cooperative Children's Book Center,
the CCBC, a library of the School of Education.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison
occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land,
a place their nation has called Dejope since time immemorial.
In an 1832 treaty,
the Ho-Chunk were forced to cede this territory.
Decades of ethnic cleansing followed when both the federal
and state government repeatedly, but unsuccessfully,
sought to forcibly remove the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin.
We acknowledge the circumstances
that led to the forced removal of the Ho-Chunk people
and honor their legacy of resistance and resilience.
This history of colonization informs our work and vision
for a collaborative future.
We recognize and respect the inherent sovereignty
of the Ho-Chunk Nation
and the 11 other Native nations within the boundaries
of the state of Wisconsin.
Now welcome, everyone, to the 2024 Charlotte Zolotow lecture.
Whether you are joining us here in person
in Tripp Commons in Memorial Union,
live streaming via PBS Wisconsin,
or viewing this recording later,
we are glad to have you part of this the special event.
The CCBC established this lecture
to honor Charlotte Zolotow,
a distinguished children's book editor at Harper Junior Books,
an author of more than 65 picture books,
including such classic works
as Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present
and William's Doll.
Miss Zolotow attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison
on a writing scholarship from 1933 to 1936,
where she studied with Professor Helen C. White.
Tonight, Meg Medina will speak to us
about "Writing the Truth in Contentious Times."
At the CCBC, we have long admired Meg
for her strong and authentic writing,
as well as for her amplification
of underrepresented Latina stories.
We know Meg will tell us a good story tonight,
and that she will also inspire us to speak our truth.
We are honored to have her deliver tonight's lecture.
To tell you more about Meg Medina,
I've invited Francesca Rodriguez to the podium.
Francesca is the manager of strategic initiatives
in the dean's office in the School of Ed.
She's also an avid reader, a parent,
and an advocate for libraries and literacy.
[audience applauding]
- Francesca Rodriguez: Hello, everyone.
Thank you for coming tonight.
As Tessa said, I'm Francesca.
Everybody calls me Franny on campus.
And I am on the board
of the Madison Public Library Foundation, which, yay!
And I'm also a library superuser.
I am, we probably have 20 books at our house
and 10 audiobooks downloaded with Libby right now.
So, but it is in,
and I'm also the manager of strategic initiatives
at the School of Education, and it's in this latter capacity
that I've been asked to introduce Meg tonight.
And let me start first with a confession.
I had never read any of Meg's books
before being asked to do this introduction about a year ago,
but having now binged as many of her books
as I could get my hands on,
I am now a certified Meg Medina superfan,
as I am sure many of you are, too.
Meg's work has the hallmarks of any great writer,
but my personal connection to her work goes even deeper.
It's about feeling seen.
When I was growing up,
I never saw myself in any works of fiction.
But in Meg's book, there's a deep connection with
and recognition of my own experience as a Latina.
I found myself laughing out loud so many times
while reading Meg's books, thinking, "You see me, chica."
[chuckles] For example, describing la abuela
in Merci Suárez as the manager
of the catastrophic concerns department of our family,
[laughs] that I can relate to well,
or when Piddy is accused of not being Latina enough
in Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass.
Or when Merci's mother and brother
paint the gym of her private school
in exchange for textbooks.
That last one hit me hard.
My mom and I used to clean a ballet studio at night
so that I could take free classes at the ballet studio.
I 100% saw myself in that scene.
Even as a middle-aged adult, years away from middle school,
I found your stories personal, personally validating.
I can only imagine if my middle school self
had been able to read these books.
And I'm filled with a profound sense of gratitude
that Latina kids today,
knowing my daughters who are here tonight,
have access to your vivid portrayals
of Latino families and young people.
By sharing the richness and complexity of Latino life,
you help break stereotypes and broaden the horizons of readers
who may not have encountered these experiences before.
And your writing does foster empathy and understanding
for readers from all backgrounds.
Your books have allowed me to recall
and reflect on my memories of growing up Chicana in Texas,
with my very large and loving family.
This brings me so much warmth up here in chilly Wisconsin.
Meg, we are so thrilled to have you tonight
as tonight's featured author.
Now more than ever,
we need voices and points of view
to help us make sense of what can feel like two realities.
I can't wait to hear what you have to say
about "Writing the Truth in Contentious Times."
Please help me welcome Meg Medina.
[audience applauding]
- Meg Medina: Ta-da!
Okay.
All right, I'll put it here.
Buenas noches, hi, everybody.
Thank you for coming out tonight.
It's always nice to be here in Madison.
What a beautiful city.
I got to walk down to the lake today,
and it was just a gorgeous day.
When I was last here, I was receiving, in 2021
I believe, that I received the 2021 Zolotow Prize
for my picture book, Evelyn Del Rey is Moving Away,
or if you read it en Español, Evelyn Del Rey se muda.
It was a lovely evening.
But what I remember most about that evening
were the book talks on the wonderful recommended list
that CCBC puts out.
And I want, before we step into my comments tonight,
I wanted you to know that the CCBC's
enthusiastic book talk served as the gold standard for me
and the model of my book-talking platform
as ambassador for Young People's Literature.
So thank you for that example.
My ambassador platform is "Cuéntame!: Let's Talk Books,"
a bilingual platform,
and it centers around creating book joy,
beginning with how we talk about books
and how we discover books together.
All to say, this example that you guys gave me
just gave me a way to think about how to talk about books
with energy and spice and brevity.
And I hope that I have done it as well as you have.
All of my picture books are roadmapped for tonight,
by the way.
I'll focus my comments on picture book,
since that is where I intersect most closely
with the Zolotow Award,
and because my new picture book, No More Señora Mimí,
was just published in September,
and it's sort of top of mind for me this season,
but also because the invitation committee
was interested in my thoughts on intellectual freedom,
I'm gonna share with you tonight
what it has been like to serve as ambassador
during a really contentious period
around children's literature.
So let's dig in, shall we?
So the first thing is really a question for you.
Have you ever stopped to consider in your life
how you've used books across all the stages of your life?
And I mean the whole span,
from the time you were very young to now.
I hadn't really given that a lot of thought,
except when I was asked to become youth ambassador,
I found myself having to really give this idea some thought.
I wanted to be really thoughtful
in how I was planning my work with young people.
I wanted to approach them with the truth,
as I had experienced it around reading.
And if I was going to talk to young people
about the importance of reading,
I wanted to make sure that I was talking to them
about what I truly found, what I found to be true,
and not just from statistics or factoids
that I pulled from research,
which tend to really just sort of wash over them
and have no meaning.
So the first thing I did when I received this call
and really started thinking about a platform,
was to sit down with a pad and paper
and dig back in my mind to my earliest year.
I do not remember having picture books read to me, sadly.
But I can really,
I can't say exactly why not, but I can more or less guess.
My mother spoke very little English,
and also, she was fairly new to the country.
She was grappling with being a single mother in a new country,
following her exit from Cuba
during that country's revolution.
There would have been scant time after work
and very little emotional energy, I think,
or even money to buy books to have in our apartment to share.
But here's what I do remember, that just a few years later,
as an elementary-age reader in a school
that gave us sustained silent reading time,
I used books as story,
as entertainment, as distraction.
Books were also a way that I connected with friends
in my class who also liked reading.
And sometimes, they were ways
that I felt could feel proud of myself,
such as when I read lots of books, right,
or finished a particularly hard one.
Back then, books were very importantly windows
into American life for me.
My home at home was very Cuban.
And so I could see how families, at least fictionalized ones,
were organized, how they talked to one another.
This is where I learned about rooms called dens
in people's homes, and that people
were sometimes assigned chores,
and there was this thing called an allowance.
Just as importantly, books...
Just as importantly, my mom, by that time, had found a way
to use books as necessary windows
also into my Cuban heritage.
I'm bicultural, I was born here.
I'm a first-generation U.S.-born Cuban.
And so I did not have the ability to visit the island
or meet my family that was still there.
Cuba was a phantom presence: very real, but not seen.
So my mother somehow bought me an edition of a book in Spanish
called La Edad de Oro, The Golden Era,
a children's book by José Martí,
Cuba's beloved poet and patron of independence movement,
based on his famous children's magazine.
She taught us who Martí was, what he stood for,
and she shared a poem of his
that she loved as a child herself.
It was called "Los zapaticos de rosa."
Later I recall a Spanish primer, too,
that my uncle, shortly after his arrival,
used to teach me how to read in Spanish.
Books in late elementary school
were good primers for my budding feminism, too,
and my girl positive sensitivities.
1970s, people.
Neither of those things were necessarily pronounced
in my home.
Books by Judy Blume, though,
named things like the frustration with one's mother,
and unpack the mysteries of menstruation.
The Nancy Drew series offered scenarios
where no one questioned
whether three teenage girls in a sports coupe
had the wits or nerve to take down criminals and solve cases.
The teen years were a bit of a blur, I'll admit.
I sneak read my sister's copy of Valley of the Dolls
that I found lying around in my apartment,
and also The Happy Hooker, which was an eye-opener.
[scattered laughter]
Notice that I did not become a drug user
or a Danish sex worker as a result.
[audience laughing]
I don't remember much YA literature from my youth
other than Go Ask Alice,
which I read tucked inside my comparative government textbook
in the ninth grade
while we were supposedly reading about communism,
which had already caused my family so much suffering.
No one asked me about that,
and I stayed mum on the subject and read on.
Back then, in high school, I was living with my father
and his second family in Massachusetts,
an experience that would prove excruciating for all involved.
I would wander that big, unfriendly house
and find my way to a room in his basement
where there were dozens of old paperbacks.
I read Agatha Christie and Chaim Potok,
medical journals with gross pictures.
Really anything to escape the loneliness of those days.
As a college student in Queens College,
books were an awakening.
They were a bridge to a literary world
that seemed so far from the people that I knew
and the lives that we were living.
But it was also a first glimpse into writing, as what?
It could be a career?
Imagine it.
Especially when I discovered the literature of Latin America
that had somehow managed to squeak
into some of my college courses.
As a young English and creative writing teacher
in the '90s,
I used countless books to model for my students
the many ways that they could shape
their questions and experiences into stories and essays.
As a parent in my early 30s,
I used books to brace myself for the unknown,
to find answers for the questions that terrified me.
It was What to Expect the First Year
that drove me to my, to go to my pediatrician
and ask why my baby was not crawling,
or sitting, or reaching up at nearly a year.
Later, as our family grew,
I used books by Kevin Henkes, Chrysanthemum,
to help Sandra work out her school dramas.
I used the Jokelopedia to give my son, Alex,
an outlet for his obsession with all things
that were funny and not.
[scattered laughter]
And here I am now, of course, in my sixth decade of life,
an author of works for young people.
Books, now the ones that I write,
help me make sense of all of that
that came before.
And they give me a way to name all the things now
that I couldn't name then.
They give me a connection to readers,
but also very deeply to myself.
So what does such an accounting provide us?
For me, it confirmed that a reading life
evolves as you grow.
It changes with your tastes and maturity
and with your life circumstances.
But if you're lucky, a reading life is, above all,
a constant presence that can help you live
and make sense of things.
When I was asked to become the eighth National Ambassador
of Young People's Literature, I did this accounting,
as I said.
I could see it was offering me an approach
to what felt like a very big, unwieldy job.
I would be the nation's book friend.
I would use my time to spark book joy
and show kids painless ways to start their own reading life.
Books would be an essential part of my caretaking toolkit
for the nation's children.
Young children, as you know, have seen a lot in recent years.
And some of that, that they've seen,
will take them a lifetime to understand.
The interruption of their academic and social lives
due to a pandemic,
the financial and emotional stress on their families
that this brought on,
the subsequent shifts in how we work,
how we study, how we seek entertainment,
how we do or do not connect with other human beings,
the toxic discord in the adult world
over seemingly anything at all.
I believed at the start of my term,
and I believe now, that books are one way
to help them heal and move forward and grow.
And I believe that all of us
in the children's pipeline, teachers, professors,
authors, illustrators, editors, booksellers,
marketing specialists, librarians,
parents, all of us can use books as an essential part
of the collective caretaking and love for children.
I want to give you some concrete examples of what I mean.
As ambassador, I've traveled all over the country to schools
and public libraries.
I've invited families to come visit me
during public office hours at the Library of Congress in D.C.,
and I created a video series
where authors come and talk with me about the books they love
and the ones that they write.
This whole thing is made possible
by three basic entities: Every Child a Reader,
which originated the role of ambassador
and which organizes and helps fund my tour,
the Library of Congress,
which lends its international reputation,
financial resources, and staff support
for the activities that I designed,
and by my publisher, Candlewick Press,
which provides books to all the schools
and provided dedicated staff to help me manage
the insane schedule that is required.
Whether traveling or receiving visitors at the library,
I have, without fail,
been greeted with love and enthusiasm
by the students and by the caring adults
who've worked so hard to plan the logistics of these visits.
It would be impossible for me to describe all the exciting people
that I've met and the sweet exchanges,
but I'm gonna highlight five to underscore
how books and caretaking intersect for them.
Here's the first: Office Hours.
Office Hours, families applied to visit with me
when I held office hours.
They were every other month on a Saturday,
and I would train up two hours from Richmond,
and they would come for about 25 minutes,
and we would talk all things books.
We'd take pictures,
they'd learn a little bit about, you know,
the funny parts of the library that I like.
Like, for example, I'll give you a secret.
When the wind blows very hard in Washington, D.C.,
those old windows make a sound like someone passing gas.
It's like, [mimics flatulence], that's the sound they make.
Kids love that.
Okay, so I want to show you this family I want you to meet.
The children are named Baxter, the older girl,
Bixby, the middle girl, and the little boy is Twig,
because the dad's name is Branch.
[audience exclaiming]
I know, I love it, too.
This is a family where everyone was reading and talking
and most importantly of all, sharing book love.
If Baxter read a book that she liked, she saved it for Bixby.
Branch made sure that his love of comic books
was shared with his kids, and as a result,
that made them the graphic novel enthusiasts that they were.
As a family, they liked to go to bookish things:
events like author signings and festivals,
Office Hours at the Library of Congress.
But what I could see, the common thread
was that books were woven into their family
and talking about the books that they loved.
There are many threads available in a family.
Many things hold us together.
Maybe we hike together.
Maybe we're all mad for Marvel or movies.
But reading was a way
that this family felt connected to each other
and their reading lives.
Another family that I met during Office Hours is this one,
a mom and her two daughters.
And they came with a friend, and it was a bilingual visit,
which made me feel very proud.
We did this visit in Spanish and English.
The mom spoke solamente español.
The girls spoke both.
With them, I think the friend
was from a literacy organization.
Now, the older sister was passionate about nonfiction.
I love kids like this.
They wanna know stuff.
They feel strong when they have the facts to share.
The weirder, the better.
And she wanted to know all things about outer space
and science.
She said she wants to be a doctor.
The younger one was a Dog Man fan,
and she loved good old-fashioned fiction stories.
What was remarkable to me was not only
how animated the kids were about what they liked to read
and how they could explain to me
why they loved these books,
but it was their mom's backstory.
She told me that her parents in El Salvador
neither read nor wrote at all.
She herself, she said,
could read and write only a little bit.
"Me defiendo," she said,
which means, "I can defend myself,"
which generally implies, you know, "I get by."
But here in this country,
her daughters had been immersed in books.
They had developed an early book life.
And now, she said to me, she was looking at her two daughters,
dreaming of careers and the wider world.
Books gave them a vehicle to enjoy themselves and learn,
but also to see new paths and possibilities.
The road was also a treasured experience.
This is in Milwaukee, the community center.
This is my third example.
Here was a favorite stop,
the Center for the Book in Milwaukee,
specifically, El Centro de Comunidad Unida,
United Community Center,
located in the pocket of the city
with a very high Latin population.
The center began, of all things, as a boxing program.
What's not to love?
It was an absolutely gorgeous facility
that communicated success, power, and beauty.
Often when we think of community centers,
we think of shoestring budgets and leaky roofs and all of that.
But this, this was something else.
This was a spectacular place
that celebrates Latin achievement in the community
and around the world.
Many of the leaders and volunteers
were once children who attended these programs.
They boast an internationally traveled orchestra,
among many of their achievements.
And of course, what caught my eye
and my attention was their dedication to books and reading
and the arts,
which they saw as part of how kids connect to their culture.
Finally, I want to point to a trip
for which I have no pictures.
I went as part of the tour to the border
to meet unaccompanied minors being housed
at Key Casa Shelter in Brownsville, Texas.
This was a challenging ask
that I made of the library almost immediately
upon being named.
As the first Latina ambassador,
it seemed essential to include a visit to the border.
The problem was, as it was explained to me,
that the library and the ambassador role are,
strictly speaking, nonpartisan.
However, because this issue was so important to me
and because my visit was about books and reading and story,
this was ultimately arranged for me.
I have no slide to share
because I was not permitted to photograph at all.
The night before I was to visit the center,
I received a message, in fact, that oh, no,
there was a paperwork snafu
and that my visit would be impossible.
The center, we argued back and forth a bit, and ultimately,
the center would bring the children to me
to visit at their organization's headquarters
and not where the children live.
As a former teacher and as a Latina and as a mother,
this trip was necessary and also gutting.
For the youngest children,
I did a reading of Mango, abuela y yo,
followed by a game of concentration
based on the characters in the book.
With the second group, kids who were 8 to 12,
I read from Merci Suárez se pone las pilas,
which translates to "Merci Suárez puts in her batteries,"
meaning Merci Suárez Changes Gears.
And I braved my fear of reading Spanish aloud.
And finally, I read with the teenagers older than 13,
Yaqui Delgado quiere darte una paliza,
and we laughed about how hard
and awkward it is to read in a new language.
And I got help from several excellent readers in the room
when I stumbled on words.
I looked out, and I saw the faces of children
who looked just like mine and maybe like some of yours,
and who deserve better from this gutted globe.
The magnitude of what these vulnerable children
were going to face felt overwhelming,
because in the best-case scenario,
they will be reconnected with family here.
In the worst, they will go into foster care.
And that is to say nothing of what it will take
for them to acquire language and catch up on their learning,
and maybe hardest of all, bear the resentment and accusations
that currently abound around them.
That visit allowed me to tap into my belief about books
as an agent of relief and that potential power.
I hope that the young people found some relief
during our time together,
which was filled with moments of laughter.
I hope it gave them at least one good memory
that is not traumatizing, of a few moments
to feel some sort of ease.
When our time was through,
they each received a free book, which they reached for eagerly.
Even the teenagers wanted the picture book.
My deepest hope is that they stay safe,
that some of them will reach for books and stories again,
and that they'll tell their own vital stories
when they're ready,
in the spirit of Javier Zamora and Julissa Arce
and Reyna Grande, who were once in their shoes.
These books, okay.
So finally, I wanted to shine the light on some of my authors
who've been part of "Let's Talk Books."
"Let's Talk Books" is a video project.
I wanted to incorporate screen as part of the platform,
because screens, one way or another,
are part of our kids' lives,
and because it doesn't have to be a battle
between screen and books all the time.
"Let's Talk Books" is housed at the Library of Congress
on their YouTube page,
and I spoke with 18 of my favorite authors,
asking them to book talk
a title that they loved as a child,
and then talk to me a little bit about their own work.
The videos are bite-sized.
They're, like, seven minutes or so.
It's like a Russell Stover's box of chocolates, right?
You just get to sample them.
But I did that intentionally so that a teacher
or a librarian or a reader can get a taste of an author
as a way to start a book,
or to do some research after they've finished reading it,
or simply just learn about
how an author is thinking about a certain topic.
Here's why I bring it up
as part of caretaking and children's books.
The authors live all over the country.
They are impossibly busy people.
So you have to imagine my shock when I called them,
and they all agreed to be part of the project.
They came by train and plane and automobile to Washington, D.C.,
receiving absolutely no payment except a thank you from me
and a little Library of Congress ornament that I bought them.
They did this for children.
These incredible creatives acted as caretakers
for children at the highest level
by sacrificing their time and attention for them.
And I brought you just a quick little sample of Raúl.
- Raúl the Third: His surroundings and his heritage
through comic books.
And that's why I recommend this book.
- Meg: I love this book also.
I'm so glad you brought this book.
Talk about you as a little kid,
because I hear you and your brothers were a handful,
and your mother had to turn to the library
to get some rest from you.
So was the library as,
I mean, it seems like it was a lifesaver for her.
Did you and your brothers love the library as much as she did?
- Oh, absolutely.
The library was a lifesaver for the entire family.
My mom wisely decided to start walking us down to the library,
and it was really a magical place for us.
You know, my mom tells us, you know,
"It's the first time
I felt like we were a part of the community,"
because they would always invite us back to participate
in all sorts of fun things, you know, from art making,
I saw jugglers there, puppet shows.
I was part of the reading programs.
I have, like, little certificates of participation,
reading logs, all sorts of fun and interesting things.
And it definitely opened up my eyes.
- I'm gonna stop there because you can go
and see the rest of the video, but they're wonderful.
All of them were terrific.
So all to say, these incredible creatives
make part of an essential team caretaking for children
in all circumstances.
It's part of our collective caretaking role,
and it's our job as adults, I think, to care for children,
all parts of them, including their literary lives.
Which brings us now to how we do this in contentious times.
So...
This type of caretaking has intersected, for me,
with the nation's political temperature
in a really difficult way.
In the 2023-24 school year,
PEN America has recorded 10,000 book bans in the U.S.,
and the works of some of our nation's
most important voices are among them.
Some of you who follow my work know
that I write across age groups and that I have a writing clave,
which is sort of an underpinning of my writing,
the sacred, simple beat,
like a musical clave that's always an exploration
of girls and culture, growing up and family.
I return again and again to examine
where those points intersect, for better or for worse.
Whether I'm writing for a reader who is 5 or 17,
I am mining that point and searching for what it reveals.
If I'm asking the right and honest questions,
I find new answers I hadn't considered before.
It has been a sad surprise
that sometimes my clave has led me into the fray.
Currently, one of my young adult novels,
this one, has been removed from public library shelves
in Clay County, Florida.
The novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
is about bullying,
but it's also about a young Latina
grappling with her sense of identity.
It is rough in spots
because the experience of being bullied
and finding out how you fit into your culture is rough in spots.
In other words, it's truthful to the experience.
Writing the truth about the lives of young people
and their families can land you easily
on a banned or restricted list.
An especially damaging situation for writers
whose work give voice to people traditionally on the margins.
As we know from decades of research,
there simply aren't enough diverse voices on the shelves
for young people.
When the most powerful voices of a community
are branded dangerous or un-American,
we compound that problem.
We refuse those children access
to respectful representation of who they actually are.
We refuse them the care that we are talking about.
Now, most banning targets sexually-explicit material
and LGBTQ+ themes,
although really, almost anything can be up for debate.
These three books, for example.
A few years ago, one of my picture books,
Mango, Abuela, and Me,
was part of a sweeping ban in Central York, Pennsylvania.
It was about material focused on critical race theory, they said.
For the unfamiliar with my work,
Mango, Abuela, and Me is a story about a little girl
and her grandmother who used their pet parrot
to help them overcome a language barrier
when abuela comes to join the household.
It's a story
that looks at the process of learning a new language
and how we can help one another achieve that.
It's a story that resembles the experience
of thousands of children
in English language learning classrooms.
So what do we do about the truth here,
when the truth threatens someone else's definition
of what is appropriate or normal?
What are the experiences that are allowed to be normalized
and which are stigmatized?
And at what cost?
You might be familiar with my very first picture book,
Tía Isa Wants a Car,
which is about a little girl and her aunt,
her tía, working together to save for the first family car.
The book includes references to remittances,
money sent home to home countries,
to a child in the care of someone
other than her biological parents.
It includes a look at sexism and economic need
and the very real pain of family separations.
This is the reality of many people who live in this country
and have family of origin elsewhere in the world
and who don't wish to see those family members starve.
It is the reality of people who are, in fact,
part of the American story.
It was part of mine.
Here is a letter that I wrote
when I was first learning to write Spanish.
It's to one of my mother's dear aunts,
whom she left behind in Cuba and missed dearly.
I wrote dozens of these letters
on that thin little onion paper that we used back then.
And over the years,
my family jumped through countless hoops
to send care packages and funds back home.
It was an act of love.
I think it's essential to write and celebrate what is true.
Evelyn Del Rey is Moving Away
is about two friends enjoying a last play date together.
It's a story about friendship and connection.
However, it's also about different family structures,
a single mom and her daughter alongside a family
that is traditionally nuclear family.
It also shows that Latinos span multiple races.
An obvious truth to us,
but one that is so hard to find
in mainstream media representations
of Latinos as a group.
And here is my most recent work, No More Señora Mimí,
beautifully illustrated by Brittany Cicchese,
which celebrates la nana in children's lives,
a babysitter, the connections between children
and their in-home caretakers,
a job that in this country right now
is often done by Brown and Black women.
Do they contain anything objectionable, these books?
Un-American?
It seems right now that the answer is "maybe."
I like for my books to be for everyone,
but I'm aware that some adults self-select out of my books
because of the Spanish,
or because of the perceived notion that the story
or the characters will be unrelatable to them,
or that the experiences are too dissimilar in some way.
It takes extra effort from talented librarians
and well-read teachers
and sustained marketing to combat that notion.
But these days, the battle is even harder
than just fighting perceived barriers.
It's fighting very real ones that are being erected.
Currently on my radar is the troubling branding.
The term "DEI" is a dismissive phrase
that has gained some traction in circles,
and is seen as something else
that must be despised and dismantled.
I worry for the authors who will work hard to write the stories,
only to have them disparaged and siloed in this way,
if not banned outright,
as in the case of Love in the Library.
I continue to worry for exhausted teachers
and librarians who may find it easier
to avoid certain books or topics,
to keep the peace with their principals,
to keep their families safe, or to simply keep their jobs.
They may opt, in other words, to soft censor.
And above all, I worry for the young people
whose experiences appear in these challenged works.
When we remove a book that tells their lived reality
and their cultural story, we communicate insignificance.
We foment shame about the many different experiences
that make us human.
We add an obstacle to their ability to have books
as part of what helps them grow.
The only answer is to continue to fight
to protect these works.
Now, during my time as ambassador,
this has felt like a particularly
dicey challenge for me.
Imagine the quandary.
Every Child a Reader and Candlewick,
of course, are fierce
and open advocates of children's right to read,
and they defend vigorously every attempt to ban books.
And the library, too, supports the freedom to read.
But the library exists in a more precarious position,
and it must maintain its impartiality.
Its chief and longest-lasting benefactor
is the United States Congress,
at a time when partisan politics on this issue is at fever pitch.
In all frankness,
I have sometimes been at a loss for what to do publicly,
at a time when my community needs me the most.
I want to respect the librarian's position
in our nation, and the library's position in our nation.
And I do deeply respect parents' rights to make choices
for their own families.
But as a private citizen,
as an author, as a colleague to many fine authors,
as an advocate for children's lives,
I can't support efforts to remove books
for an entire community.
I've tried my best to keep my focus on serving children,
rather than on the political dynamics of this situation,
although those dynamics can hardly be denied.
Working as an ambassador for the last two years
has required professional diplomacy
and respectful exchanges,
even when the stakes and tempers have run very high,
even when dear friends and colleagues
and I have been targeted.
In speaking with parents,
I lead with what books taught me.
I sort of leave out Valley of the Dolls.
[audience laughing]
And I tell them what was true about books in my family
and in my own former teaching life.
I tell them that I think children seek agency
as they grow up, including agency over what they read,
and that they are more apt to read
when they can choose what they read freely.
So my personal view is to trust in the professionalism
of librarians to select and shelve books properly.
I vote to remove obstacles
and to encourage young people to choose and think about
and discuss with their family,
like Baxter and Bixby and Branch and Twig,
about their reading choices.
As for me as an author,
I will continue to write into the headwinds, friends,
because I will write the truth.
There may be some authors who will feel
that they have to self-center,
self-censor to avoid creating problems for themselves,
but my hunch is that most will continue
to write their truths, even at a very high personal cost,
such as disappearing invitations to do school visits,
which is actually happening.
There is an urgency, I think, to writing the truth,
especially as the very notion of truth
has become something of a novelty.
I applaud my many colleagues who are holding one another up
through organizations such as PEN, and ALA,
and Authors Against Book Bans, and all the others
who have been heavy in the fight.
It will take stamina and all of us to defend children's right
to read and not take the easy way out.
It's exhausting work to appear at board meetings,
to join lawsuits, for heaven's sakes,
to do letter writing campaigns and the like.
But it is worse to have all of your work
and your very character denigrated.
And worst of all,
to leave young readers without access to stories
that might help them make sense of the world.
I will conclude my work as ambassador in a few weeks.
And then Meg Medina, the author only, returns,
and I will resume the work of shaping children's stories
that allow them to know themselves and the world better.
And I will write what is true.
This generation of children are looking to us,
and we need to be there.
And with that, I'm going to say thank you
and open it to questions.
[audience applauding]