Dear Librarians: A Letter from Abi Maxwell, Author of One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman

“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.”

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Dear Librarians: A Letter from Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, Author of The Haunting of Moscow House

“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.”

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Dear Librarians: A Letter from Suzanne Rindell, Author of Summer Fridays

“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!”

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Dear Librarians: A Letter from Tasha Coryell, Author of Love Letters to a Serial Killer

“The library was where I learned to love mysteries. Nancy Drew, to be more specific. I have a core memory of the line of yellow books in the kids’ section of my local public library. I read every single one that the library had. I read so many that I started to guess the endings. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the protagonist of my novel becomes a kind of detective herself, though her boyfriend is significantly less upstanding than Nancy’s Ned Nickerson.”

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Dear Librarians: A Letter from Simone Soltani, Author of Cross the Line

I’m a little teary-eyed as I write this, because libraries have played a huge role in my life. I wouldn’t be the person—or the writer—I am today without them. My debut novel, CROSS THE LINE, wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t been exposed to books of all genres, had a safe space to explore my creativity in, and experienced the kindness of librarians.

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Dear Librarians: A Letter from Amanda Eyre Ward, Author of Lovers and Liars

“I could talk for hours about libraries—why I need them, what they provide, what threats they face—but what I’ve learned is that a librarian is the perfect main character for a novel because librarians know absolutely everything about their patrons and their town.”

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Dear Librarians: A Letter from Devorah Heitner, Author of Growing Up in Public

Parents and caregivers are eager for research-based support on raising kids and teens in the digital age. There are a lot of gloom and doom books out there that basically tell us that “smartphones have destroyed a generation.” My book, Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, offers a different perspective.

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Dear Librarians: A Letter From Rachel Slade, Author of Making It in America

“Library magic is quite real when you’re open to it, which fortunately, I am. To make the magic work, you need to open yourself to possibility and serendipity. Then the library gods take over, guiding your eyeballs to writing that might launch you further into whatever madness brought you to the library in the first place.”

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Dear Librarians: A Letter from Khaled Hosseini, Author of The Kite Runner

Inside a drawer in my office desk sits a stash of manilla envelopes. Inside each are some of the letters I have collected over a span of nearly twenty years from high school students across the U.S. In these writings, the students share with me, often quite poignantly, what impact reading The Kite Runner has had on their lives.

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