“Librarians are lit!” author Kwame Alexander said to hundreds of enthusiastic library workers attending his June 29 talk at the American Library Association’s 2024 Annual Conference and Exhibition in San Diego. To raucous applause, he joked, “Look, this is not a Taylor Swift concert.”
Alexander has written 40 books, including the Newbery Medal–winning title The Crossover and Caldecott-winning The Undefeated. He brought onstage his recent Emmy Award for the Disney+ television adaptation of The Crossover, thanking librarians for his success.
“Librarians are some of the most important people in my life, and libraries are woven throughout so many of my memories, from childhood to today,” he said. “In my past, present, and future, libraries are love.”
Alexander’s latest title, Black Star (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, September), features Charley Cuffey, a 12-year-old Black girl in a “quest for freedom to be who she wants to be,” he said, which is the first female pitcher to play professional baseball.
The inspiration for the character, he said, came from several sources. One was his great grandmother, who was “bold and brave, and she had a voice, and she was unafraid to lift it.” Second, he expressed gratitude for all the women in “my family and yours, who built homes, led churches, nurtured communities, and raised families.” And finally, he credited a 5th grader, a 10-year-old who wrote Alexander a letter in 2019, pointing out that none of his main characters are female. The author read the full letter to attendees to much laughter and applause.
As he received his Emmy Award for Outstanding Young Teen Series in December, Alexander said he thought of this bold and brave girl and “all the women who came before her who did the same thing under turbulent and sometimes violent conditions.” He cited the Black Americans who left the Jim Crow South and struggled daily for economic, social, and educational equality.
In the 1920s, there were 15,297 librarians, only 69 of whom were Black. Alexander named some of those pioneers, including Nella Larsen and Vivian Harsh. “Why do we need to know this?” he asked. “Because 100 years before Moms for Liberty began their attack on our reading culture, these women battled overt and covert censorship and fought book bans.”
For public and school librarians looking to “protect the sanctity of the written word,” Alexander suggested looking back to the Black librarians at the turn of the century who resisted. And to those librarians of the Pack Horse Library Project who delivered books on horseback to remote regions of the Appalachian Mountains between 1935 and 1943.
“They believed words and books could offer hope,” he said. “They believed books could help folks reimagine what’s possible and that is the kind of freedom books are a portal for.”
Alexander concluded by reiterating that he fell in love with libraries “because libraries are love. Libraries are an essential part of an American story,” helping to shape all generations and all people to be the people we are meant to be, despite the hardships.
“Libraries are not just the refuge in the storm, my friend. Libraries are the rainbow.”
