As always, authors were everywhere at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference, held June 22–27 in Chicago. The conference was bookended by Opening General Session speaker Judy Blume, a perennially best-selling novelist currently experiencing a new wave of interest, and the Closing Session speakers, YA best-selling poet Amanda Gorman and Caldecott and Coretta Scott King–honored illustrator Christian Robinson. Gorman and Robinson discussed how their latest collaboration, Something, Someday (Viking Books for Young Readers), reveals that grief can be empowering.

Blume, who spoke from experience about the need to defend the freedom to read, offered a quick, caustically humorous response to the moderator’s prompt, “Say you’re in a room with Ron DeSantis,” that summed up the conference’s prevailing mood of activist resistance to book banning. (Blume owns a bookstore in Key West, FL.) Gorman, whoseThe Hill We Climb—titled after the poem she read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration—was recently restricted in a Florida school, reinforced that mood by reciting from her new work: “Sometimes you feel like you are all alone/ But someday, somewhere, you find a friend/ Someone who will hope with you/ Who believes in your dream./ Someone who will fight with you.”

United for Libraries (UFL) staged its usual panoply of book panels, among them First Author, First Book (including collection development librarian Terah Shelton Harris, One Summer in Savannah,Sourcebooks), Isn’t It Romantic? (including YA-to-adult author Ally Carter, The Blonde Identity, Avon), It’s a Mystery to Me (topped off by Lori Rader-Day,The Death of Us, Morrow), and Reads Like Fiction: Nonfiction You Can’t Put Down (with David Shih, whose Chinese Prodigal: A Memoir in Eight Arguments, from Atlantic Monthly, offers a deeply nuanced view of affirmative action).

UFL–PRH luncheon: (l.-r.) Barbara Hoffert, Nathan Hill, Daniel Mason, Kiley Reid, and Bryan Washington Photo credit: Kelly Coyle-Crivelli

More UFL programming included a joint luncheon with Penguin Random House featuring literary heavyweights Nathan Hill (Wellness, Knopf), Daniel Mason (North Woods, Random), Kiley Reid (Come and Get It, Putnam), and Bryan Washington (Family Meal, Riverhead), whose conversations ranged from making characters real to the way authors omnivorously collect ideas, just as the toy Slime collects everything in its path. At UFL’s annual Gala Author Tea, sponsored by Data Axle Reference Solutions, authors Melanie Benjamin (California Golden, Delacorte), Lindsay Hunter (Hot Springs Drive, Roxane Gay: Grove Atlantic), Ayana Mathis (The Unsettled, Knopf), and Denene Millner (One Blood, Forge) touched on knotty family issues, while Kim van Alkemade’s Counting Lost Stars (Morrow) revisited the Holocaust and Anise Vance’s debut novel, Hush Harbor (Hanover Square: HTP), pondered a next step in social justice. Vance, who spoke movingly about his children as well as his mother’s escape from Iran, said he felt abashed to be presenting with best-selling and award-winning authors. The moderator’s comment afterward that he would surely be joining their ranks met with a heady round of applause.

After roaming the aisles, librarians Migdalia Jimenez (Chicago PL), Annabelle Mortensen (Skokie PL, IL), Ashley Rayner (National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago), Magan Szwarek (Schaumburg Township District Library, IL), and Rebecca Vnuk (executive director, LibraryReads) gathered for the Booklist and Library Reads Read’n’Rave to present their finds. Among big names such as Walter Mosley (Touched, Atlantic Monthly), Zadie Smith (The Fraud, Penguin Pr.), and Daniel Mason, there were dozens of surprises like Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s essay collection Cacophony of Bone (Milkweed), Kate Brody’s mystery Rabbit Hole (Soho Crime), Sara Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (Seal), and Laura Piper Lee’s romance Hannah Tate, Beyond Repair (Union Square).