American Libraries

Loriene Roy: Banned Books Week—a great opportunity to highlight some of the great things libraries do. Of course, we have this list of banned books. We're here today in Chicago at the Banned Books Week Read-Out, celebrating the freedom to read in our country, celebrating with the authors of banned books and the people who are elected to represent ALA. I got to read from The Lorax today.

Judith Krug: The message is: Read a banned book and urge your users, your patrons, to read a banned book because every book on our Banned Book List talks about the condition of the human being. It talks about our relationship with other human beings, with our society and with the world at large. In each of these books, there's something for somebody. The authors are terrific. They're excited to be here, they're excited to be involved, they're excited to be celebrating their right to write the way they want to, the right to have it published, and our right to read their materials.

Carolyn Mackler: As I said when I was just speaking, I was shocked when I found that the The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things was the 4th most challenged book in America in 2006. I write the books, my publisher publishes them, but without the librarians and the booksellers, we cannot get the books in the hand of teenagers. As I said sometimes I get emails from librarians saying, "I'm really nervous about my job because my principal doesn't want to have this book out. But I believe in it." And those are our true heroes.

Chris Crutcher: We are locked in this together, I mean librarians save our lives daily; they're on the front lines. You know, I'm sitting safe in my house when I'm writing those things. The librarians are right there in the library when people come in and start yelling about them. For some reason, there are a whole bunch of people in this country these days who don't want to hear the truth and they certainly don't like to hear it in its native tongue. And we tend to write stories that scare them and when they get scared they try to censor us. And this is a celebration of telling those truths. And I wouldn't miss it for anything.