When former First Lady Jill Biden needed to impress Mexican first lady Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller during a visit to the White House, she turned to the library. “I called Carla Hayden at the Library of Congress,” Biden recalled, and the library assembled a collection of materials from Mexico. “I had to drag [Müller] out of there after two hours looking at this artifact and that religious book.”
In conversation with American Library Association (ALA) President Sam Helmick during the ALA President’s Program at ALA’s 2026 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago on June 28, Biden spoke about her time in the White House and her new book, View from the East Wing (Gallery Books).
“I know there was a lot of press about one chapter, the infamous debate,” she said. “The book is 35 chapters about my life as a mother, as a grandmother, as a teacher, as a sister, as a friend, and as a working woman, who tried to balance it all. I hope you see that side of me.”
Biden remained a full-time community college professor during her time as second and later first lady, becoming the first presidential spouse to maintain an outside career.
“I say to my students all the time that we have to commit ourselves to the act of kindness,” she said. “I think Joe was elected because he was an empathetic leader.”
Biden reminisced about modernizing the White House tour, which entered through the East Wing (“You remember that?” she joked), and updating the White House library to include children’s books—a surprisingly arduous, two-year process. “You had to go through this committee and that committee. I thought to myself, ‘Why the hell didn’t I just say, put the books in the library!’”
Much of the Biden family’s public service has focused on the fight against cancer. She founded the Biden Breast Health Initiative in the early 1990s to visit every school in Delaware with a doctor or nurse to teach about breast health and self-examinations. “I started that because at my school, three of the librarians had breast cancer, and I thought, what can I do?”
In 2016, President Obama asked Joe Biden to start the Biden Cancer Moonshot, with a goal of dramatically reducing cancer mortality. The move came shortly after Beau Biden died in 2015 of glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. “When you hear the word, ‘cancer,’ it’s like your world stops,” she said. “My husband now has Stage 4 prostate cancer. It did metastasize to his bones, so once again I’m on the phone almost every day with doctors.”
She promised that this legacy of advocacy would be part of Biden’s Presidential Library: “One of the things I’m going to do is to have a pillar on cancer so we can get some of the answers and research for American families.”
