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experiences

Book Festivals Highlight Diverse Works Amid Banned Books Movement

Two book festivals in Maryland have kick-started the summer off in a year when literary diversity is under attack in the form of book bans.

Books in Bloom and Gaithersburg Book Festival held family-friendly community events that featured a number of authors who either identify on the diversity spectrum or are passionate about freedom of speech in literature. Over the last year, more parents nationwide are asking school libraries to take books off shelves they deem inappropriate for their children to read while some libraries are reactively subtracting books to avoid controversy.

This movement of banning books is sparking opposition as authors and readers alike are going out of their way to support not only freedom of speech but support the variety of books meant to be read by children. The political divide was felt at these book festivals and may become a theme for other similar events in the U.S. throughout the year.

Banned books gain spotlight

Books in Bloom calls itself a progressive book festival in the master-planned city of Columbia, Maryland. To show support for banned books, the festival dedicated one of its soundstages to authors who discussed freedom of speech.

A vibrant setting in Merriweather District’s Color Burst Park, the book festival had a giant book-shaped display describing some of the top banned books in history from Toni Morrison‘s Beloved and Song of Solomon to Alice Walker‘s The Color Purple. With Busboys and Poets as the independent bookstore for the event and a location in the park, most books for sale were books by authors who are Black and/or LGBTQIA+.

Queer memoirs All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe had notable stacks on the tables with other titles that have become the face of many bans though they were created for the middle grade and young adult audiences. The bans are usually due to racial and cultural content, sexually explicit content, and offensive language.

Headliners included a panel with PEN America, the nonprofit organization advocating in the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression, and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland’s 8th congressional district and author of Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Raskin also attended Gaithersburg Book Festival to sell and sign his latest book.

The book festival’s keynote speaker was Carl Bernstein, the well-known The Washington Post reporter who co-headed the news coverage on the Watergate scandal in 1972. On the festival’s main stage, he marveled at his time growing up around Columbia and how he first became a cub reporter as a high school dropout in his new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid In The Newsroom.

The last Books in Bloom was held less than a year ago in-person in October with The New York Times reporter and The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones serving as the keynote speaker.

Diverse works lead way

Reminiscent of a large outdoor book festival such as Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Gaithersburg Book Festival in Gaithersburg, Maryland marked its 12th year as an event supporting the greater community with inviting traditionally published authors and offering seminars on book publishing and creative writing for children and adults.

Authors such Dhonielle Clayton, who has a new middle grade release with The Marvellers, and Kimberly Jones, who is promoting her social justice young adult novel Why We Fly with co-author Gilly Segal, discussed their works at the annual event. Dhonielle, a Gaithersburg native, and Kimberly are some of the top YA Black authors who have been outspoken about diversity in literature and social justice matters.

Asked about some of her summer read recommendations, Dhonielle mentioned Valentina Salazar Is Not a Monster Hunter by Zoraida Córdova; the Track series by Jason Reynolds; and The Devouring Wolf by Natalie C. Parker, in which Dhonielle says there’s a wolf character named after her.

Another author at the event was Jeanine Cummins, who gained notoriety with her immigration novel American Dirt, interviewing Reyna Grande about her book A Ballad of Love and Glory. American Dirt follows a Mexican woman trying to escape to the U.S. with her young son after her family is murdered.

Some high-profile Hispanic and Latine authors spoke out about the White Latina author’s seven-figure advance because they said the publishing industry would never offer them such a sum for centering stories on Hispanic and Latine characters. They also claimed the book had inaccuracies in the culture and language that wasn’t native to the author. On the other hand, there were Hispanic and Latine authors and celebrities who supported the Oprah’s Book Club selection.

Since American Dirt came out in 2020, Jeanine, like many authors who had released their works at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, now have the chance to work the promotion circuit in-person.

Social justice and historical nonfiction were the focus of many authors’ works at the book festival. Gayle Jessup White talked about her lineage connected to former slave-holding president Thomas Jefferson in her book Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Lasting Legacy. Kristin Henning shared her experience representing Black youth in the D.C. court system and how she conceived the idea for her book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth.

Along with Raskin, Democratic U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff for California’s 28th congressional district visited the event to chat about his book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.

D.C. area indie bookstore chain Politics and Prose served as the event bookseller.

The pre-summer book festivals helped usher in the first literary events for authors and readers to enjoy as society emerges out of the pandemic and the world of book publishing remains volatile in the wake of book bans.

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what's lit

Meena Harris Adds Phenomenal Book Club to Growing Multimedia Portfolio

Meena Harris attends the Los Angeles screening of “Women of the Movement”. The series is based on the true story of Mamie Till-Mobley, who in 1955 risked her life to find justice after her son Emmett was brutally murdered in the Jim Crow South. The six-episode series will air in three parts beginning Jan. 6, 2022 for three consecutive weeks on ABC.

For a 2021 literary lookback, we noticed Phenomenal Media mature this year with the addition of a book club focused on exposing readers to works by underrepresented authors, particularly women of color.

The four-year-old company founded by Meena Harris launched the Phenomenal Book Club in November with choosing The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and its young readers’ companion The 1619 Project: Born on the Water as the inaugural picks and inviting author and editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and illustrator Nikkolas Smith to a virtual event. Phenomenal Book Club was the exclusive book club partner for the books based on The New York Times project named after the year enslaved Africans first came to the U.S.

A bona fide social media star, lawyer, and activist, Meena is best known for being the niece of our first female, first Black, and first Asian second-in-command, Vice President Kamala Harris. Her pro-vaccine Dec. 21 tweet announcing she has a breakthrough case of Covid-19 after receiving her booster shot went viral with over 70,000 likes. The success online, her family connections, and her entrepreneurial activism spirit has opened doors for her to grow her media company named after Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman.”

Besides her history-making aunt, Meena’s family tree also consists of her mother Maya Harris, who has also developed a reputation expressing her activism via Twitter as a lawyer and policy expert; her stepfather Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber; and her late grandmother Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist whose story is told in Kamala’s 2020 memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.

Expressing activism through books

Like her aunt, Meena has a publishing career. She wrote two children’s books: Ambitious Girl, published by Little, Brown Young Readers and illustrated by Marissa Valdez, about a girl finding her journey to overcome the “too ambitious” label; and Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea, published by HarperCollins’ imprint Balzer + Bray and illustrated by Ana Ramírez González, about the kid versions of her aunt and mother organizing their community. Both New York Times best-selling books came out in the last year and most likely served as inspiration for Phenomenal Book Club.

Meena’s company started in 2017 as Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a community-oriented organization focused on social causes mainly through message shirts. Top campaigns include the #PhenomenalVoter campaign to encourage voters to exercise their right in the 2018 midterm elections to the Justice for Breonna Taylor last year that manufactured shirts saying “Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.”

So far, the merch maker’s interaction with over 1,000 celebrities, athletes, and activists has catapulted it into a multimedia venture that also includes Phenomenal Productions that’s described as having “a specific emphasis on communities of color and underrepresented voting blocs.”

Curating books for children

The mother of two daughters, Meena has voiced her opinion that anti-racism works need to be incorporated into children’s libraries through their parents since schools on average have failed to add these works to their curricula. She wrote in The Washington Post op-ed published Nov. 15:

Of course, for Black and Brown parents, this isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. Many of us have already taken it upon ourselves to give our children the full, accurate history lesson we know they must hear — just as our parents did for us, and their parents for them. But it’s time all American families start taking time at home to discuss the injustices that shaped our nation’s past, the work still to be done in our present, and the values that should define our future.

The new book club will announce selections quarterly and highlight a book already published between those selections. One of the missions of the book club is to aid the publishing industry in upholding its commitments to anti-racism and equity after the George Floyd protests.

Community chats last week were featured on the book club’s Instagram for its first highlight, Severance by Ling Ma, and promoting a giveaway on social media for 50 editions. For the holidays, Phenomenal is selling sweatshirts with a reproductive rights message and cookbooks by women of color.

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experiences

‘Books in Bloom’ Literary Festival Lauds Progressive Voices

Annual literary festival Books in Bloom on Sunday marked the grand opening of a multifaceted bookstore chain and welcomed a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its main stage.

Based in a mixed-use cultural center called the Merriweather District in the master-planned community of Columbia, Maryland, Books in Bloom has become one of the D.C. metro area’s most well-known progressive book events. In its fifth year, the festival hosted several authors at Color Burst Park throughout the day with The 1619 Project creator and The New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones serving as the featured author. Over 150 spectators roamed the park’s grounds to eat, drink, and be bookish.

The festival also highlighted the soft opening of the new location of Busboys and Poets, a popular D.C. bookstore chain known for its added restaurant, bar, café, and venue concept. Dozens lined up at the bookstore-eatery after the festival, where the business had a pop-up stand. Beside its tent was the Howard County mobile library.

With past headliners such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, political journalist April Ryan, and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this year’s headliner Nikole Hannah-Jones was joined by the following authors:

Amy Argetsinger, author of There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America

Milagros Phillips, author of Cracking the Healer’s Code

Jake Tapper, author of The Devil May Dance

Maureen Corrigan, author of So We Read On

Ram Devineni, Ashley A. Woods, and Yusef Komunyakaa of Jupiter Invincible

Laura Lippman, author of Dream Girl

Stacey Vanek Smith, author of Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace

Aparna Verma, author of The Boy with Fire

In anticipation of the Penguin Random House Nov. 16 release of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and the children’s version The 1619 Project: Born on the Water with Piecing Me Together novelist Renée Watson, Nikole sat in an hourlong conversation with Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallat. She broke down the pivotal year of 1619 and how the conflicting nature of events fails to be taught in our schools.

“Two things happened in 1619: the arrival of the White Lion and the beginning of African slavery in the thirteen colonies, but it’s also when the country took its first step towards democracy,” she said. “It’s when the English colonists took a vote on this land for the first time. Democracy and anti-democracy are birthed in the same moment. The idea of freedom and slavery is birthed in the same moment in this country, but we’re not taught that.”

Tweeting under the user name Ida Bae Wells, Nikole also explained why Ida B. Wells is her role model, especially when the newspaper she works for now once called the groundbreaking Black investigative journalist a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress,” also referenced in Nikole’s Twitter bio.

“What Ida B. Wells means to me personally is she was the first example of a Black woman doing what I hoped to do, which shows you a lot about our field, right?” she said. “That I had to go to a woman born right at the Emancipation Proclamation to see a model of a Black investigative reporter who was a woman, who was a feminist, who was a civil rights activist, who was doing the type of reporting that I wanted to see.”

“But also that legacy of lineage matters,” she continued. “To understand that there were badass Black women who were doing things at a time when there was no help that was going to come to protect Ida B. Wells when she was investigating lynchings.”

She added the actions of Black female writers before her sets the tone for her work:

It gives you courage. It gives you strength. It helps you understand what you’re doing, and it gives you humility that you didn’t create this. There are a lot of folks who came before you. There are a lot of folks who had to sacrifice and suffer for you to do the work that you do and that, to me, gives the motivation for the work that I’m trying to do because I have to repay this debt that I owe.

Besides the literary content, the park’s atmosphere was filled with Instagrammable features, including a welcome arch made from books, light-studded signs, and pumpkin-and-hay stacks, splashed with the festival’s lavender-hued branding. A chalkboard requested attendees write down what they’re reading. The district also had restaurants with outside seating like Dok Khao Thai Eatery, The Charmery, Clove & Cardamom, and Cured and 18th & 21st.

The event was free with tickets available on Eventbrite. Almost all attendees followed the mask mandate. Street and garage parking around the Merriweather District was free for the festival.

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what's lit

One World Authors Mark Banned Books Week With Conversation on Self-Education

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

One World hosted an event Wednesday featuring some of the most celebrated and debated authors of our time for a conversation on what they wished they had learned during their youth.

In honor of Banned Books Week, the Random House imprint invited authors via pre-recorded video interviews such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and Bryan Stevenson to mark the “annual celebration of the freedom to read” from Sept. 26 to Oct. 2.

“Banning books is something that’s happened for many, many years and then there’s also the long-standing practice of omitting entire histories and identities from school curriculum around this country, as well as the fact that many books simply never get published,” said event co-host Elizabeth Méndez Berry, the One World vice president and executive editor. “One World authors, many of them have actually dedicated their lives to writing the books that they were not able to read coming up.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, said she learned how histories and cultures were wiped away from her schooling when she was younger.

“I didn’t remember if there were certain books my schools were prohibited from teaching us when I was a child, but I do know that there were entire histories, and peoples, that were simply erased,” she said. “I was taught about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and how they were men who made their living off of human bondage, and that their primary occupation was that of being a slave owner.”

The New York Times journalist and Howard University professor also mentioned how Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption and other books have been banned from prisons. Helping place books in prisoners’ hands has become a growing civil rights issue with groups such as Noname Book Club starting a program to send books monthly to incarcerated readers.

Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, said she didn’t learn about Bacon’s Rebellion until she was learning about labor history in her twenties. The rebellion, which occurred in 1676 ignited by colonists’ failure to steal Native American lands, resulted in the burning of Virginia’s capital of Jamestown and united White indentured servants and Black slaves.

“Once the rebellion was crushed, the colonial plantation elite decided they needed to drive a permanent wedge between White and Black workers to keep them from ever joining forces against them,” she said. “Again, the post-Bacon laws in large part created the system of racial hierarchy that we take for granted as part of our history.” 

For modern history, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning author Cathy Park Hong said she didn’t recall learning in school about the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Japanese Americans living in World War II internment camps seemed like a “footnote.”

“In all of my English classes, I don’t recall reading a single novel or short story, or even a poem by an Asian American author,” she said. “Because of this, it took me a long time to realize I had permission to be a writer, because for so long, I didn’t think I had a place in American literature because I had no role models. In my history classes, too, I learned very little, if anything, about Asians in America.” 

Race and ethnicity in America wasn’t the only theme. Golem Girl: A Memoir author Riva Lehrer discussed her experience growing up disabled in the 1960s. She said though she went to a top school that wouldn’t put her on the path to becoming a sweatshop worker, there weren’t many discussions on what path she should take.

“What we didn’t get was any idea of what we could be in the world,” said Riva, a queer painter. “We got no encouragement to dream, to think about wanting be an engineer or a doctor or a botanist or all the things that would have been open to people back then at a normal school.”

Banned Books Week started in 1982 after the surge in more books being challenged by schools, libraries, and bookstores around the U.S. The top 10 challenged books of last year can be found here. The event is on YouTube.