Keynoters and other speakers at American Library Association (ALA) conferences over the years have come to the conference from a wide range of disciplines, but their speeches all incorporate at least a few minutes attesting to the value of libraries in their lives—some landing more powerfully than others. At this year’s ALA Annual, held June 27–July 2 in San Diego, CA, speakers went beyond tales of being avid library users as children to tell stories that painted vivid pictures of what libraries, literacy, and unfettered access can mean to a kid who is looking to understand their world a little better.

TREVOR NOAH

Trevor Noah and Lessa Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada Photo credit: Lisa Peet

Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central from 2015–22 and author of the memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, kicked off the conference on June 28 in conversation with 2022–23 ALA President Lessa Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada. Noah’s new book, Into the Uncut Grass , with illustrator Sabina Hahn—out from One World in October—is described as an all-ages philosophical fable, and after listening to him talk it’s easy to see how those threads come together in his work. Creating his new book, he “was writing for me as a younger child and me as an adult,” Noah said. “I love books that connect the generations”—particularly those that tackle difficult subjects, distilling tough concepts into appropriate words and scenarios to show characters navigating through conflict.

Growing up, Noah said, his family didn’t have much, so he read a lot. His small local library was quiet, well-kept, and organized, with a librarian who pointed him in different directions. “Your imagination shouldn’t be limited to your resources,” he said, “and that’s one thing the library did.”

He added, “Everyone who was in there had one thread that tied them all together, and that was curiosity”—some people reading about thermodynamics, him reading about a giant peach. “A book is powerful, but the library is the magic behind that power. It imbues that space with an energy that I’ll never take for granted.” Those books stuck with him, he said, and Narnia still lives in his head. He didn’t write the book for kids so much as for anyone who’s ever been a kid.

Magic aside, Noah pointed to the deep importance of libraries. In addition to context and curation, they connect people physically. “We’re so nichefied in life,” he said. “There are fewer opportunities to be in a space with people who are not like us.” He denounced the challenges and political crossfire libraries are facing, and what that might mean for the future of young, curious readers—by censoring information, you’re creating a barrier between a child and the world they’re going to encounter. Noah hopes that when parents and children are reading his book, it will encourage them to question the assumptions they hold about themselves and others. It’s “a book that applies to both the acorn and the oak tree.”

KWAME ALEXANDER

Kwame Alexander (and Emmy) Photo credit: EPNAC/ALA

Poet, educator, producer, editor, and author Kwame Alexander had an upcoming book to talk about as well—Black Star, out in September from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. But right out of the gate as the Main Stage Speaker Saturday morning—after exclaiming “Libraries are lit!” in response to the roar of applause—his message was that “in my past, present, and future, libraries are love.” Librarians, he added, were the reason he won an Emmy award this year for the TV adaptation of his YA verse novel The Crossover (he brought the Emmy onstage, to the audience’s delight). When he accepted the award, Alexander remembered, he thanked his mom; “I hope I thanked public librarians.”

Alexander is well-versed in the story of Black librarians and their fights to keep books centering Black history and by Black authors on the shelves. One hundred years before Moms for Liberty began their attack, he explained, “these women battled overt and covert censorship and book bans” when too many “overtly Black books” made up a collection, pointing to librarians Nella Larsen, Vivian Gordon Harsh, and Virginia Y. Lee. And “if we want a model for how to be brave and bold and inspired in the face of isolation and hopelessness,” he told the crowd, look no further than the Pack Horse Librarians, who delivered books in the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression. “My mother was my first librarian,” he added, “who introduced me to the poetry of Lucille Clifton and Fox in Socks.”

Those women all inspired Alexander’s new book, about a 12-year-old Black girl growing up in a segregated town in the South who wants to be the first female pitcher to play pro baseball. So did a fifth-grade girl, who in 2019 sent him a marvelously poised and confident letter—which he read in its entirety—encouraging him to make the main character in his next book female.

Alexander’s talk ran the gamut: entertaining stories from his life, a lesson in Black librarianship, a compassionate response to a difficult audience question, and even a good prank, where a disguised Jerry Craft pretended to be a clueless audience member, then shucked off his wig and mask and joined Alexander onstage to reveal their upcoming collaboration. Alexander ended, however, with a joyful shout-out to the audience: “Libraries are love, libraries are an essential part of our American story. You are an essential part of that reshaping.”

HANIF ABDURRAQIB

Hanif Abdurraqib Photo credit: EPNAC/ALA

At Unite Against Book Bans’ second annual Rally for the Right to Read on Friday evening, poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib talked about his love for libraries and the TV show Quantum Leap—both represented, for him, the possibility of being able to enter someone else’s narrative.

Plus, he added, the reading pods at the new Livingston branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library were like little spaceships. They were, in fact, modes of transport—the branch was built when he was eight, in his traditionally neglected neighborhood. Although his mother was a reader who put books in his hands—“I loved having someone in my house who said you deserve access to books and then would talk to me about them,” Abdurraqib said—before he began visiting the library he hadn’t experienced that degree of access. When he was 10, he recalled, he picked up Toni Morrison’s Jazz and was moved by the narrator’s love of their city, realizing that “You have as much influence over a city as the city has over you.”

Censorship chips away at the possibility of inviting someone into that world, he said—a crime when many young people are on the margins already. If the language of censorship is pressed into someone and they are made to feel ashamed, it hurts everyone.

“I know for sure the world is becoming more cruel. That’s just a simple reality,” Abdurraqib added, referencing the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, handed down earlier that day, that enforcing rules prohibiting unhoused people from camping on public property does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

“If the world is less survivable for the most vulnerable, it is only a matter of time until it becomes less survivable for the rest of us,” he said. Rethinking his love of Quantum Leap, Abdurraqib noted that the protagonist’s leaps through space and time were controlled by a time travel machine. As an adult, he said, he prefers a different narrative: “You do not have to live a life where you’re at the mercy of someone whose machinery is not your own.”