“I was a library kid. Growing up, we moved around a lot, and I while I can’t remember some of my teachers’ names, I can still vividly recall the joy of the stacks, the feeling of a dozen fresh Baby-Sitters Club or Sweet Valley High paperbacks stuffed in a plastic grocery bag, ready to be devoured like actual treats. Books were the perfect companion for the perpetual ‘new kid’ who didn’t have anyone to talk to at lunch.”

“When I was young, my mother brought me to the library at least once a week, our visits as routine as buying groceries or going to school. No matter what neighborhood we moved to, there was always a branch nearby, complete with a musty card catalog, squeaky revolving racks stuffed with paperbacks, and a librarian who would listen carefully to our questions and guide us to the right books.”

“Fictional stories like this one help us—help me—process my own adventures. They help me feel less alone, feel a part of a community of humans just trying to do their best in this wild, wide world.”

“Like a lot of authors, I grew up at the library. One of my first memories is of quietly reading at my local library in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan—I guess I was around four—when a pair of ladies saw me and asked if I was really reading the words or just looking at the pictures. I was reading, I told them.”

“I have spent an absurd proportion of my life in the library. My mother used to take me and my four siblings to the library every week—religiously. She did everything religiously. Especially religion. At the library we would each pick out four or five books, and mum would inspect them to ensure we hadn’t selected anything scandalous, before letting us check them out.”

“When I think of libraries, a flipbook of memories flashes through my mind. My local – the one I grew up with – is Watsonia Library in the north-east of Melbourne, Australia. It’s a low white building plonked right beside a busy train line and directly underneath two enormous transmission towers. Not exactly a dreamy location, but for many years it was my favourite place in the world.”

Check out Jay Ellis, Jane Pek, M. T. Anderson, David F. Walker, Edward Burns, Cece Bell, and Del Sandeen in this series of videos filmed on the show floor at ALA Annual!

“I work as a high school librarian now. I still celebrate Banned Books Week every year, but it’s different, because I actually understand it. ‘Did you notice that most of these bans are for books with Black or LGBTQ+ characters?’ I ask the students. I tell them to remember that these statistics are only a small fraction of the story; I tell them that most book bans are insidious, as they were in my former town.”

“The library, to me, was two magical things at the same time: the safest and coziest place on earth with a thousand adventures snuggled up inside of it.”

“The Haunting of Moscow House is many things. It is about a society on the cusp of momentous change, a persecuted group in history now quite forgotten, a female-centric story of survival and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood that make this possible, an old house with hundreds of years of past and memory. But at its heart, The Haunting of Moscow House is a ghost story.”

Red at the Bone has become one of the most banned books in the country with teachers, librarians, and community leaders fighting to keep this seminal book on shelves.

“When I was a child, my happiest memories are of my family’s frequent trips to the library. My mom adored the library with a cheerful, vehement passion that was contagious; going to the library triggered that same Pavlovian response as “Hey kids, we’re going for ice cream”—it was a treat!”