Cognotes 2018 Midwinter Meeting Denver Highlights - 9

MIDWINTER MEETING HIGHLIGHTS

DENVER

COGNOTES

Acevedo Shares Poetry, Gift of Literature
By Kacee Anderson/Northbrook Elementary

Elizabeth Acevedo captured the attention of
her audience by opening with a powerful poem.
The Arthur Curley Lecture speaker has been a
writer, poet, and performer for 12 years. The
session touched on how she fell in love with
reading, began as a writer, and the purpose of
both of these art forms.
Acevedo's parents were Dominican immigrants. Her father worked on a factory line and
her mother took care of other children, so that
she could feed her own. Acevedo described her
literature-rich home. Her father bought three
newspapers every day. Her mother read lots of
medical texts. "Literature was at home, but I
thought it was an adult thing, what grownups
did."
Acevedo credits her mother for being the
reason she loved books. Her mother brought her
a large book and said they would start the book
together, but she would finish it by herself. "I
fell in love with reading, and the empowerment
it brought." Acevedo did not have much of a
classroom or school library. She started forcing
her mother to go the library twice a week.
"My love of reading is directly related to my
mother's love of me; her efforts to make me into
a "literary being" were a result of her wanting
to equip me with a facility of language and an
access to knowledge."

She appreciated the fact that
her own reading wasn't regulated;
'WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY MATTERS'
the act of reading is what was
encouraged. Acevedo grew up
in a house of storytellers. She
learned timing and pacing from
her father's stories and jokes. Her
mother told stories of her own
childhood and her grandfather
was a gifted orator. Because of
this, Acevedo mentioned, "I didn't
think my writing was meant to be
read, it was meant to be heard."
She shared her writing with her
teacher who encouraged her. The
teacher brought manuscripts for
students to read and it was at this
point Acevedo realized, "Writing
is not permanent the first time
you put it on paper. Writing can
evolve."
Acevedo talked about teaching
eighth grade English and being the
first core teacher many of her students had experienced who looked
Acevedo urged everyone to seek out the
like them. She performed two more poems, one felt alone and isolated. "I think constantly about
from the forthcoming The Poet X, and one in our literary canon and how many students are contemporary stories that are being added to
response to a writing assignment given by an left out of that and how many students are the literary canon today. "Every time you put a
alienating professor. She faced struggles in her looking for stories like their own. I was lucky. I story in someone's hand, you're engaging in an
own master's degree program being the only think about the students around me and in my act of love, community building, and offering
a gift." The Poet X will be released in March.
person of African and Latinx descent, and often community who were not so lucky."

RUSA Council Announces 2018 Notable Books List
RUSA's Notable Books Council, first established in 1944, has announced the 2018
selections of the Notable Books List, an annual best-of list comprised of 26 titles written
for adult readers and published in the U.S.
including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. For
a complete list with annotations, please visit
www.rusaupdate.org.
The 2018 selections are:
Fiction
Stay with Me: A Novel by Ayobami Adebayo,
Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf.
Days Without End: A Novel by Sebastian
Barry, Viking.
The Last Ballad: A Novel by Wiley Cash,
William Morrow.
American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad,
Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf.
Here in Berlin: A Novel by Christina Garcia,

Counterpoint Press.
Less: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer, Lee
Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown and Company.
Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid,
Riverhead Books.
Human Acts: A Novel by Han Kang, Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing
Group.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Grand Central
Publishing.
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, Soho
Press Inc.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders,
Random House.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward,
Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Inc.
Nonfiction
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A

Memoir by Sherman Alexie, Little, Brown and
Company.
Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American
War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden, Atlantic
Monthly Press.
The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
by Thi Bui, Abrams ComicArts, an imprint of
ABRAMS.
Grant by Ron Chernow, Penguin Press.
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story
of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who
Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone,
Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to
Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
by Lindsey Fitzharris, Scientific American/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxanne
Gay, Harper.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Mur-

ders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann,
Doubleday.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A
Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay
Redfield Jamison, Borzoi Books, Alfred A.
Knopf.
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's
Shining Women by Kate Moore, Sourcebooks.
Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and
Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by
David Oshinsky, Doubleday.
The Blood of Emmet Till by Timothy B.
Tyson, Simon and Schuster.
Poetry
I Know Your Kind by William Brewer, Milkweed Editions.
The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and
Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown, Persea
Books.

Protecting Your Pages with Policy: Office for Intellectual Freedom Debuts New Toolkit
By Amy Carlton, American Libraries

The American Library Association's Office
for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) introduced its
new Selection and Reconsideration Policy Toolkit
for Public, School, and Academic Libraries at
the Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits in Denver
on February 10. The session was part of the
Symposium on the Future of Libraries.
The toolkit fully revises and updates a previous workbook and now includes information
for public and academic libraries in addition to
school libraries. It is divided into four sections: an
overview on why libraries need a selection policy;
the basic components of a policy; reconsideration
procedures and processes; and an appendix with
a bibliography, core intellectual freedom documents, and information on challenge support
and reporting censorship.
Each section includes sample documents, but

Intellectual Freedom Committee Chair Helen
Adams advised against cutting and pasting them.
The forms are intended to spark discussions
locally about what is appropriate in each library
and each community.
Kristin Pekoll, a former public librarian and
current assistant director of OIF, said one of the
first questions she asks when librarians call her
office to report a challenge is what the library's
selections policies are. Those policies are important to have and to have access to. Pekoll also
advised tackling any policy revisions or updates
cyclically, not in the middle of a challenge. The
small-town Wisconsin library where she worked
went through a challenge in 2008, and its policy
hadn't been updated since 1985. However, the library staff waited until the challenge was resolved
before revising their rules.
Pekoll noted in particular the section on
challenge support and reporting censorship and

urged librarians to call OIF during challenges to
materials. "Reporting challenges is a professional
responsibility," she said.
Lisa Errico, associate professor at Nassau
Community College in Garden City, New York,
discussed how academic libraries have different
issues with challenges and censorship because of
their organizational structure. Academic libraries
may be managed by a chair, a dean, or a director, and it's important for librarians to know the
designated path for reporting issues.
Academic libraries may have more independence and may be able to harness campus support to develop their selection policies. Students
and classroom faculty play a role in selecting
resources; however, the library should clarify that
it has final say in both selection and weeding.
Valerie Nye, library director at the Institute of
American Indian Arts, explained that academic
libraries might also face complaints about what

isn't in a collection or how the collection is
organized. Policies must go beyond procedures.
Academic libraries often collect in controversial areas to benefit scholars who study multiple
sides of an issue - what is art to some might be
considered porn to others, for example. She mentioned the American Association of University
Professors as a good resource.
April M. Dawkins, assistant professor in the
department of library and information studies at
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
explained that school libraries have seen an uptick
in challenges to classroom collections. In compiling the toolkit, the authors had to consider many
possible variations on who could file a complaint.
Print copies of the toolkit were distributed to session attendees and will be available
through the ALA store soon. The full toolkit is
now available online http://www.ala.org/tools/
challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit.

http://www.rusaupdate.org http://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit http://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit

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