Acevedo Shares Poetry, Gift of Literature

By Kacee Anderson/Northbrook Elementary

Elizabeth Acevedo captured the attention of her audience by opening with a powerful poem. The Arthur Curley Lecture speaker has been a writer, poet, and performer for 12 years. The session touched on how she fell in love with reading, began as a writer, and the purpose of both of these art forms.

Acevedo’s parents were Dominican immigrants. Her father worked on a factory line and her mother took care of other children, so that she could feed her own. Acevedo described her literature-rich home. Her father bought three newspapers every day. Her mother read lots of medical texts. “Literature was at home, but I thought it was an adult thing, what grownups did.”

Acevedo credits her mother for being the reason she loved books. Her mother brought her a large book and said they would start the book together, but she would finish it by herself. “I fell in love with reading, and the empowerment it brought.” Acevedo did not have much of a classroom or school library. She started forcing her mother to go the library twice a week.

“My love of reading is directly related to my mother’s love of me; her efforts to make me into a “literary being” were a result of her wanting to equip me with a facility of language and an access to knowledge.”

She appreciated the fact that her own reading wasn’t regulated; the act of reading is what was encouraged. Acevedo grew up in a house of storytellers. She learned timing and pacing from her father’s stories and jokes. Her mother told stories of her own childhood and her grandfather was a gifted orator. Because of this, Acevedo mentioned, “I didn’t think my writing was meant to be read, it was meant to be heard.”

She shared her writing with her teacher who encouraged her. The teacher brought manuscripts for students to read and it was at this point Acevedo realized, “Writing is not permanent the first time you put it on paper. Writing can evolve.”

Acevedo talked about teaching eighth grade English and being the first core teacher many of her students had experienced who looked like them. She performed two more poems, one from the forthcoming The Poet X, and one in response to a writing assignment given by an alienating professor. She faced struggles in her own master’s degree program being the only person of African and Latinx descent, and often felt alone and isolated. “I think constantly about our literary canon and how many students are left out of that and how many students are looking for stories like their own. I was lucky. I think about the students around me and in my community who were not so lucky.”

Acevedo urged everyone to seek out the contemporary stories that are being added to the literary canon today. “Every time you put a story in someone’s hand, you’re engaging in an act of love, community building, and offering a gift.” The Poet X will be released in March.

RUSA’s Notable Books Council, first established in 1944, has announced the 2018 selections of the Notable Books List, an annual best-of list comprised of 26 titles written for adult readers and published in the U.S. including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. For a complete list with annotations, please visit www.rusaupdate.org.

The 2018 selections are:

Fiction

Stay with Me: A Novel by Ayobami Adebayo, Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf.

Days Without End: A Novel by Sebastian Barry, Viking.

The Last Ballad: A Novel by Wiley Cash, William Morrow.

American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad, Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf.

Here in Berlin: A Novel by Christina Garcia, Counterpoint Press.

Less: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer, Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown and Company.

Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid, Riverhead Books.

Human Acts: A Novel by Han Kang, Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Grand Central Publishing.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, Soho Press Inc.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Random House.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Inc.

Nonfiction

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie, Little, Brown and Company.

Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden, Atlantic Monthly Press.

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui, Abrams ComicArts, an imprint of ABRAMS.

Grant by Ron Chernow, Penguin Press.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone, Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris, Scientific American/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxanne Gay, Harper.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, Doubleday.

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison, Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf.

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore, Sourcebooks.

Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky, Doubleday.

The Blood of Emmet Till by Timothy B. Tyson, Simon and Schuster.

Poetry

I Know Your Kind by William Brewer, Milkweed Editions.

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown, Persea Books.

By Amy Carlton, American Libraries

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) introduced its new Selection and Reconsideration Policy Toolkit for Public, School, and Academic Libraries at the Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits in Denver on February 10. The session was part of the Symposium on the Future of Libraries.

The toolkit fully revises and updates a previous workbook and now includes information for public and academic libraries in addition to school libraries. It is divided into four sections: an overview on why libraries need a selection policy; the basic components of a policy; reconsideration procedures and processes; and an appendix with a bibliography, core intellectual freedom documents, and information on challenge support and reporting censorship.

Each section includes sample documents, but Intellectual Freedom Committee Chair Helen Adams advised against cutting and pasting them. The forms are intended to spark discussions locally about what is appropriate in each library and each community.

Kristin Pekoll, a former public librarian and current assistant director of OIF, said one of the first questions she asks when librarians call her office to report a challenge is what the library’s selections policies are. Those policies are important to have and to have access to. Pekoll also advised tackling any policy revisions or updates cyclically, not in the middle of a challenge. The small-town Wisconsin library where she worked went through a challenge in 2008, and its policy hadn’t been updated since 1985. However, the library staff waited until the challenge was resolved before revising their rules.

Pekoll noted in particular the section on challenge support and reporting censorship and urged librarians to call OIF during challenges to materials. “Reporting challenges is a professional responsibility,” she said.

Lisa Errico, associate professor at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, discussed how academic libraries have different issues with challenges and censorship because of their organizational structure. Academic libraries may be managed by a chair, a dean, or a director, and it’s important for librarians to know the designated path for reporting issues.

Academic libraries may have more independence and may be able to harness campus support to develop their selection policies. Students and classroom faculty play a role in selecting resources; however, the library should clarify that it has final say in both selection and weeding.

Valerie Nye, library director at the Institute of American Indian Arts, explained that academic libraries might also face complaints about what isn’t in a collection or how the collection is organized. Policies must go beyond procedures.

Academic libraries often collect in controversial areas to benefit scholars who study multiple sides of an issue – what is art to some might be considered porn to others, for example. She mentioned the American Association of University Professors as a good resource.

April M. Dawkins, assistant professor in the department of library and information studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, explained that school libraries have seen an uptick in challenges to classroom collections. In compiling the toolkit, the authors had to consider many possible variations on who could file a complaint.

Print copies of the toolkit were distributed to session attendees and will be available through the ALA store soon. The full toolkit is now available online http://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit.