Through collective action, we create change. Emily Drabinski talks why union philosophies are crucial to literary advocacy; the tweet heard round the world and what it says about American political fears; and how we utilize the tools available to protect libraries, library workers, and access to literature.
Show Notes:
Organize Your Library: Building the Collective Power of Library Workers by Angelo Moreno, Kelly McElroy, Meredith Kahn, and Emily Drabinski
Strange People on the Hill by Michael Edison Hayden
“What Happened to the SPLC—and Me” by Michael Edison Hayden
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation
Mariame Kaba, Prisons, Prose, & Protest
Amanda Jones
Dr. Delara Begum
Maia Kobabe
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Bible
Sorting Things Out by Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker
Transcript
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (00:02)
What I love about Emily Drabinsky's social media bio is how to the point it is. On Instagram, it simply reads “reader, writer, library worker, ALA past president, the problem is profit, organize your workspace.” That so perfectly captures Emily's approach to the world and to her advocacy, though it certainly only tells part of the story.
Emily is an academic librarian by day, as well as an author, a freelance writer, a union organizer, and so much more. She served as the president of the American Library Association in 2023 after being elected by the membership. But from the start it became clear her presidency would be anything but typical. Between escalating attacks on libraries, unprecedented levels of book bans, and a troublesome philosophy in library land that neutrality was the way forward, Emily found herself in a position that stood in opposition to her own work. Sometimes alone, without the support network that should have been there, helping promote a message of working together and standing up against an existential threat to our democratic institutions.
Despite having known and talked with Emily for years–we had a phone call days, weeks upon her election to the presidency about how ALA could leverage its membership to organize against book censorship on the ground–we actually didn't get the chance to meet until very recently. She and I were among the guests invited to speak on a panel about book censorship at the 2026 Kinship and American Studies Conference in Munster, Germany.
It was an honor to talk with her then, and I'm excited to bring some of what we talked about during our time in Munster together here to listeners. Welcome, Emily.
Emily (01:49)
Thanks, Kelly. I'm excited to be here with you.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (01:51)
Same. I'm excited to talk again. Let's start with the very, very basic: tell me who you are and what you do.
Emily (02:00)
So I am definitely someone who identifies as a librarian. I'm one of those people who went to my first class in library school and was like, “Yes, this project is my project.” I'm an academic librarian. That's how I spent the first 23 years of my career. I then transitioned into teaching full time. Right now I am the chair of the School of Information Studies at Queen's College at the City University of New York. My work now is about teaching and thinking about what is important to include in a curriculum for people who are gonna be information workers, including in our libraries. So that's sort of my job.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (02:41)
Is there anything else you would like to share just about what your passions are, what your interests are, things that might be tied to your practices and your philosophy behind the advocacy work that you do?
Emily (02:57)
Yeah, absolutely. I really try to let the world shape who I am, right? Like so I'm somebody who understands that who I am is produced by the systems and circumstances out of which I arise, right? So I understand myself to be ideologically produced, I'm an American, I'm white, I'm a woman, I'm a lesbian, sometimes queer, other times kind of depends who I'm talking to. But I try really hard to understand myself to be formed politically and let the world sort of shape me. And so one of the ways it has shaped me is through my activity in unions. I'm somebody who grew up, my dad was in the postal worker union and was part of the team that organized to get the right to wear shorts during the summer on his route in Boise, Idaho. So I definitely came from a pro-union family, but didn't think much about it except that unions are good and I was always a member and looked for jobs where I was a member.
But then I started working at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus in 2008. That campus happened to be home to the first private higher education unions in the United States and really one of the only ones. It was a strong union. It was formed when the administration was attempting to remove tenure from the faculty at that union. So it was born in a crisis and I joined it at a time of crisis, right? So 2008 was a big economic crisis. My union goes into bargaining for a contract that the bargaining doesn't go well. We go out on strike. We got on strike for three or four days. We came back in and the contract we ended up signing wasn't what I wanted it to be. So I'm a union now. I'm a union member and the union has signed a contract that's not good enough for me and I'm mad and I'm mad at the union, right?
And so I'm expecting that some of your listeners–if they're union people and if you're listening to this, I hope you're a union person by the end, right–but I was mad at my union. So that's gonna be very familiar to everybody. I think when we're mad at something, we have a couple of choices, right? We can be mad and stay mad and complain, or we can be mad and say, that needs to be different. What am I gonna do to make it different? And for me, I cared enough about the union that I wanted it to be different. So I ran for a position on the executive board.
I won a position on the board and then I became secretary. And if you're a librarian who's in higher ed, you know we are always the secretary. So that happened to me, too, right? So I'm the secretary for the faculty union. And years later when we're out bargaining for our next contract, bargaining stalls and we get locked out by our employer in the first lockout of faculty in the history of US higher education.
This is one place where Canada beat us first. I believe a university in Nova Scotia locked out its faculty. And so that lockout totally changed me forever. I learned what a lockout was. That's when the administration fires everybody in the union all at once. If you've been fired, you know what that means. I don't have to tell you, right? We lost health insurance immediately and we lost our paycheck immediately.
We had members in the unit who were sick with cancer, who were late in their pregnancies, and the administration knew that, and they knew that we all lived in Brooklyn on higher education salaries. And so none of us can go a month without pay. We didn't know when they locked us out how long we were going to be locked out. And I thought that that's when I knew that even though I liked these people personally because I worked with them, that structurally, they were in a position to make my life unlivable, and they chose to do that, rather than bargain for fair salaries.
So, you know, the lockout is a whole long story and I won't take up too much time with it, but organizing against that lockout and what came out of it and what I learned from it, I came to understand that really the only way we can win is when we organize collectively, and that organizing collectively is a thing we can do especially well as librarians. That's what my life has been since.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (07:27)
I think you kind of answered this question, but you're welcome to expand upon it or if there's more you want to include here, and that's what was the spark? What really got you into advocacy?
Emily (07:41)
I'm one of those people who's been an advocate from day one, right? Like I think I came out mad from the womb. My mom talks about how I used to crawl with one fist, one of my hands clenched in a fist. So I've kinda always been mad. I have a twin sister, Kate, and the two of us were writing letters to the editor being angry about our senator Larry Craig from Idaho, you know, age 12. So I kind of was always doing that. But it's really understanding advocacy as organizing for something, as a power building project. That really only came to me through workplace organizing in the two thousands.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (08:21)
I’m going to ask a really tough question. We're three questions in, but I'm going right for the tough one. You posted a tweet and I'm going to read it. It said, “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president elect of the American Library Association. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity and my mom is so proud. I love you, mom.”
That was the tweet heard around the world. Why do you believe there was such an intense reaction to a statement of pride and excitement? It’s one that came from your personal social media account, and that reaction came both from those who'd been working to challenge libraries and those who'd been doing the work in uplifting and supporting libraries.
Emily (09:13)
I think you cannot put Marxist and lesbian next to each other in a social media post and not have something like that happen, you know? I don't really know enough to be sure, but they've got something that runs and picks up Marxist and queer together. And of course the history of the United States of America is a history of twinning those things and attacking them both, right? Of imagining that the threat to the nation is homosexuals and the threat to the nation is communists, right?
We're talking to each other here in July, right? When the president of the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the country with a speech about how the greatest threat is Marxist like me, right? I think that's why it caught the ire of the right. And the right is very effective at stirring up rage and anger about those two things, right?
You know, when I see Marxist lesbian together, I'm like, good, that means that somebody's gonna make sure there are napkins, right? Or that there are enough chairs, right? I see Marxist lesbian, I'm like, that's a person who got stuff done and who's not afraid to wash the dishes, you know, and do the stuff other people don't want to do, right? Like that's what I see.
But what they see is this sort of tool they can use to scare people, and it's really effective and it's really politically effective. And it was especially politically effective in places where libraries are under attack. I talked to somebody who told me this story: she was a librarian in Alabama and she didn't go a week without hearing somebody in her community calling–she was a library director in a small community in Alabama–asking her, “Are you a Marxist lesbian, too?”
When we don't give people an alternative narrative to that, where there's nothing that we're giving people sort of politically, culturally, socially, there are no stories or history of the left and how it has actually improved life for many people in the United States of America, right? All you can do is sort of believe the boogeyman of the right and think that the problem, the reason you're getting harassed is because of the existence of me, right?
And I get it, I totally get it. And I can't even tell you how much time I've spent trying to understand that position in that situation. I think people reacted really out of fear and really wanting that to stop. And the easiest way to make it stop was if I would go away.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (11:59)
Everything you say makes perfect sense, right? And I know you have spent years thinking about this one dang thing you said and the impact it had, right? When I read that statement now in 2026, all I see is just this excitement and this pride.
Emily (12:19)
My god, I was so excited. It's like the definition of an excited utterance. I was so thrilled.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (12:26)
Yeah, you love your mom. Mom would be proud. Like you got elected by your peers for this position and to have what is such a spirit of joy turned into this tool of cruelty is I think maybe something more people relate to right now than they maybe want to admit that they relate to.
Emily (12:54)
Yeah. And you know, it was yeah, it was really tough for me because I couldn't believe it, right? 'Cause it's not as if I became a Marxist lesbian upon tweeting that, right? My academic work very clearly takes a materialist Marxist position. That's who I am and it's who I've always been, if you know me or know my work at all. And so I've lived a whole life of losing, right? I've never seen anybody who believed that collective power was the way forward in any position of leadership in any institution or organization that I was a part of. It was amazing, right? Because I was explicit about it, right? And you know, I think I had a profile in a socialist magazine about the socialist organizing approach I took to my campaign, which honestly I think is why I won. Because my approach was an organizing one. I thought I'll run this campaign as sort of a public example that if you call more people than the other guy, if you talk to more people than the other guy, you're gonna win, you know, and I think that's true, right? And in the course of talking to those people and building towards those majorities, you build something that's even greater than the election in a sense of solidarity and connection.
So I'm talking to you from New York City. It's World Cup season. I spent the game on Tuesday watching at a neighborhood watch party put together by our explicitly and avowedly socialist mayor. And they get out fans because it's super hot here. And on the back, it's covered with QR codes, right? One is like transit routes, one is where to find a bathroom, another is how to get involved with organizing in the city. And it's like all these needs met and you know it's everybody in my neighborhood, cross-race, cross-class, immigrant. That's what the socialist future is, right? And so how do we talk about it in a way that's not scary?
I think the thing that's regrettable for me is tweeting Marxist lesbian. And honestly, I thought I was just talking to my friends who are all Marxist lesbians, right? Which is dumb of me because it's social media. But I thought, like, if that can be a thing that we embrace and are excited about and we have more of that, then you know, we can build towards the kinds of majorities we need for something bigger than the ALA. So I felt bad in the sense that saying that provocative phrase short circuited. But as you say, I've been like Monday morning quarterbacking for years now.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (15:32)
Totally.
Let's talk a little bit about this in a different way. As an advocate whose work is so centered on collective power, one reality you faced was isolation and distance from the organization you were working with during your presidential tenure. This isn't uncommon for advocates to experience. You know, I'm thinking about Michael Edison Hayden, who just had a book come out called Strange People on the Hill about V Dare in a small West Virginia town. He talked about in his lead up to the book publication, his work with the Southern Poverty Law Center and being a union guy there and how he was left behind by this organization that he was doing this work on behalf of. When I think of his story and having read that book, I think of you and your story and how many other people who are in similar positions we don't hear their stories from, but we know that it's happening, right? Can you speak to that experience and what you took away in terms of community and coalition building and maybe to about the roadblocks that advocates might find that they don't anticipate?
Emily (16:59)
You know, one of the things that we say a lot in the labor movement is never go alone, right?
I think it's hard for people maybe to understand what it felt like in the moment of the attack and how little we were prepared for it, and by we I mean me personally, and I think the American Library Association as an organization. So the first time that it became clear that it would be more than just a social media brouhaha was when the Montana State Library Commission held a hearing about whether or not to end their membership with the American Library Association. And that was in, I believe, I took office in July, and I think that was in maybe late August or September, early in my tenure. And I joined the call, it was like an online Zoom call, and listened to the presentations from the people who wanted them to withdraw. And the arguments they used were that the US Constitution bans Marxism because Marxism is contrary to individual liberty, which is protected under the Constitution, therefore it would be unconstitutional for the Montana State Library Commission to retain its membership in this national professional development/advocacy for libraries organization, right?
It doesn't make any sense, right? It's clearly not a Marxist organization, but that was their argument. And then they opened up the mic for comments and somebody came on and began reading at length from Leviticus, which made it clear to me that yes, this was about me being a Marxist, but calling it about my Marxism was an alibi for everyday run-of-the-mill ordinary anti-gay stuff that all of us have been hearing our whole lives and certainly since the first Trump election on, you know, turning up the volume on that.
And then I heard the arguments that came from our side, and they were my arguments as well at the time. And those arguments were, well, Emily is one person, elected president, but there's many people on the board of many political persuasions, and her term will only last one year. And really, the President of the American Library Association is not a real job, right? It's like you're the face of the organization, but you're not really the organization. So it doesn't matter very much that she's here as a Marxist lesbian.
I was in all the meetings where we were coming up with what we were gonna say, what the argument was gonna be, and it made sense to me they said, don't worry, she's not gonna be here for very long, she can't do anything. And then in retrospect, watching what happened, right after that, it was clear that what we had done was say,” You're right about what Emily is and how bad that is, but don't worry, it's not gonna be here for very long.”
When we did that, we didn't offer an alternate narrative. What we could have said was, she identifies as a Marxist lesbian, you identify as, you know, a capitalist Mormon, and that's just two different ways of being people. And we all believe in libraries, right? And that it's okay to be me, you know, and it's complex.
I ran for office because I care about the American Library Association. I believe in it. I think a US library field without the world's largest and oldest professional association: nobody wins with that, right? So I ran to support the association and to bring what I thought were people who could be and could want to be a part of it into sort of the fold, right? And so what do we do to build the organization? That's always my question: was the action I'm about to take going to build the organization?
The problem is when you're in a crisis, you can't be a really good judge of that. So it made sense at the time to be like, don't worry, she's not here very long. But I think ultimately that didn't give the librarian in rural Idaho any way to talk to her. We didn't give her an alternate talking point, which could have been, “Yeah, that's who Emily is. I'm not that. You know me. I live and work in your community. I'm not a Marxist or I am a Marxist or whatever. And we all believe in libraries.”
How did it feel to me personally? You know, this is hard because of course I made many missteps. It took me a while to figure out how to effectively hide my socialism and stop talking about it in public for the year, which was I think important to do. But I definitely, you know, was caught on some hot mics and things. But one of my comrades said to me at the socialist conference in Chicago, he said, you know, the best thing you can do right now is spend a lot of time with people who agree with you. For me, that unfortunately wasn't a lot of people inside of ALA. I wasn't in a position to spend a lot of time with staff or anything; it was just a small number of people. So I spent a lot of time with my comrades on the left who are part of a a socialist movement project that, you know, preceded my term at ALA and certainly has gone on after it.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (23:23)
I think we were also in a really interesting moment in 2023 where there was a belief that everything happening to target libraries and to target the materials in libraries was going to be a short term project. We still believed that it wasn't going to be this long effort, right? And so offering that alternate narrative may not have felt as necessary. Not because it's not necessary, but we probably didn't see the need for it because we didn't think that we'd be here in 2026 having these same conversations. We thought that it would kind of fade away. We thought maybe, you know, if we were good, it would stop. And I think upon reflection and just upon history, we know that's not true.
Emily (24:21)
Right? And that's something you learn in the union movement right away. It does not matter if you're right. Doesn't matter. Not important. You're right, great. Clap clap. That plus $8 will get you a coffee in your city, right?
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (24:35)
Right.
Emily (24:35)
So it doesn't matter what you're right. If you're right, it only matters to you personally and how you're building with and around it. What matters is how much power you've built. And so I think we failed to reckon with that.
I don't think ALA is necessarily the right avenue for this, but I think there are more ways that I wish that the DSA, for example, would pick up book banning as an issue. And I wish that more librarians would see that being part of an organized socialist movement in their communities could actually expand their opportunity.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (25:16)
Yeah, because this isn't a one group thing. This is a a collective effort to put it in the terms that we're having a conversation about right now,
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (25:24)
Who do you learn from? Who are some of the people or organizations or groups or moments in history that have really taught you how you do the work you do?
Emily (25:39)
Be a little bit of a cheese ball here and say I've learned so much from my girlfriend. So much from my girlfriend. She was an organizer with the graduate student union at the University of Michigan when she was getting her doctorate and was on the bargaining committee and is the truest organizer I've ever met. When I met her, she had a kid, I didn't want one. Now my 18-year-old son just moved in with my cousin in Portland.
So she's an organizer. And by which I mean she helps you figure out what it is that you want and helps you get it done. So having her to sharpen my political analysis every day has been a real gift.
And then I learned from movement scholars, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. If you haven't read any of her work, you should. She's a prison abolitionist. So she believes in abolishing prisons, and part of abolition is affirmative projects, about building the world that we do want, and that's a world with libraries. So she's one of the people I read and respect a lot.
In terms of activism, Mariame Kaba, who's been instrumental in organizing a public library movement here in the city that has permanently changed the terms of the conversation around library funding. And you know, it's no mistake that Kaba is also a prison abolitionist and, you know, that's a kind of power building project. It's not union work, but it's both thinking relentlessly and constantly about how to win, which I think is one of the real differences between an organizing mindset and an advocacy mindset.
It's not enough to send the letter. The letter is a tool, right? So what are we gonna do with the letter now that we have it? This being the question I think we don't ask and answer often enough.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (27:41)
That was one of the things that I talked with another advocate as part of this show about the importance of having data, but then what do you do with that data? Data is a tool, right? and it's important, but it should spur something with it.
Emily (27:59)
Right. So before I was before union work, I would get a petition, I would sign it and think it's probably good if they have a lot of names on the petition because the more names it looks like the more people. And that's true. But now that I've been on the other side of the petition and I've made it, I understand that I'm using that petition to get your name and your phone number. And then the question is, what am I gonna do next? Right.
So now I've got your name and now what What action am I gonna pull together as an organizer that can get everybody on my petition to do something else that helps them feel more committed to this? So it's a shift from thinking that it's just a tool, right? It makes me think about one of my favorite things that Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, which is about that famous Audrey Lord quote–
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (28:58)
You can't dismantle the house with the master's tools.
Emily (29:00)
Yeah, you will never dismantle the house with the master's tools. And what Gilmore says is that the most important part of that quote is the apostrophe. That as that as long as they are the master's tools, you can never dismantle the house. Right? And so it's about getting those tools to be ours. Which is why, I think often on the left we abandon the mainstream liberal organization. We say the American Library Association, it's a liberal organization. It doesn't share my radical politics or whatever. And it doesn't, right? I am a Marxist. The American Library Association does not take a political position like that, right? But all the tools are there and all the resources. And I mean everything from staff who set up meeting times, that's a resource if you've ever been the person who had to set up the meetings to you know, the grant funds that they have sitting there to the governance structures that get us all together. I was just at an ALA annual where I serve on the ALA council and I got an opportunity to talk to 120 library workers from all over the country about issues that matter to us, about lowering the barrier to library card access, right? About recognizing the work of government librarians, right? So this is like all that infrastructure that's inside the organization and those are the tools. And so we gotta go get them. I think that's important.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (30:28)
What keeps you going?
Emily (30:31)
Winning.
I was just on a panel and they asked us about self-care. And I was like, the best self-care is winning. And I think it is so important to remember that in any kind of advocacy work, if all you do is lose, it's gonna bum you out, right? Sometimes that means redefining what we think of as wins. So one of my personal heroes that I learn a lot from that I didn't name and is Amanda Jones, right?
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (31:02)
Yeah.
Emily (31:03)
I remember talking to Amanda on the phone at the beginning of my term because I was just trying to talk to people who were doing what I saw as the kind of work that I wanted to be connected with or doing. I called her on the phone and I was like, How are you doing? How are you organizing? And she was telling me about the Parish and how they were getting together to ban book bans and talking about how she wanted it to go statewide so that every Parish in Louisiana would have a coalition of citizens organizing against censorship.
And I remember her telling me, but so far we only have three. And I was like, if you have more than your own, you have done so much more than most of us will ever do in a lifetime. And to have three so early in the game, you know, and I'm astounded, right? Because it's astounding. And so I think it's both winning and then when we get wins, recognizing and spending the time recognizing those wins, taking credit for it, and having a party. Like I think that's really sustaining.
In the short term, I try to get my ego needs met outside of work. So I'm usually training for some sport I can't do or picking up some hobby that I'm bad at. Right now, it's house plants as I was showing you on video because we were lucky enough to be on video.
Right now I'm really leaning into my indoor garden. I turned 51 this year. I understand this is part of what it means to turn 51 is to turn towards plants, but I am finding watching the time scale of their growth to be really helpful. I'm somebody who's always going. I say yes as much as possible. and so the plants are a good way of reminding myself that energy has to go inward too, if you're gonna keep growing.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (32:59)
You kind of touched on this in that answer, but I'll ask it outright, and that's what kind of self care do you practice?
Emily (33:08)
I am religious about my reading. I'm a huge reader. I continue to really believe in the power of books to expand our imagination and to give us empathy and insight into other worlds. So it's the first thing I do every morning, without fail. Unless there's some sort of catastrophe as I wake up in the morning, I make my coffee and I read my novel.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (33:33)
That's perfect. I love that.
So I'm gonna ask a hard question. But this one is thinking about people and thinking about institutions. Can they ever be neutral? And what does neutrality mean anyway?
Where and how does advocacy help dismantle personal and structural understanding of the role of democratic institutions?
Emily (34:20)
It's a big one.
I think when I describe myself as a Marxist, and one of my favorite Marxist friends says you can't be a Marxist if you describe yourself as a Marxist. So I always keep that in mind. But one of the things it means to me is that I have a materialist analysis, which means that I'm less interested in an abstract question about whether the institution can remain neutral, because I think every word that I just said is contestable, right? What's an institution?
What are the constraints? What needs to happen and what are the circumstances that would need to be in place for it to be neutral, right? Any of those questions could be deconstructed, I guess. But no, they can't be neutral. And they can't be neutral because neutrality operates in the realm of the purely abstract and fictional. So it's not good or bad, right? It just can’t be. Like I have to choose one book or over another. I have to reserve the room for one group or a different group. I have to have the bathroom open in the children's room or closed in the children's room. I have to make these decisions and they're concrete.I have to close on the weekends, right?
All of those are political statements, right? Like I worked at my first job in a library was at the Jefferson Market branch of New York Public Library. It was in the trainee program. And that branch had one bathroom, it was in the children's room, and they closed it because they didn't have the staff to manage the use of the bathroom, right? And you don't need me to say any more if you work in a public library that's a political choice.
But it's also a choice based on staffing constraints. But also, what is our commitment to maintaining a free and open and accessible public restroom in this public building. So that choice is not neutral, even though I think it can be for people whose worldviews were never contested, right?
I know my political ideology because I have to, because it's not dominant. Right? So all the people who are like, we're not Marxists, well, what are you? Tell me what you are. Because I want you to also have to articulate to yourself your own ideological position.
One of the things that really bugged me at the in the very beginning of my career about the library catalog is I was teaching a class at Sarah Lawrence College and the class was about women's history, and I was explaining how in that catalog, because of how it had been maintained, you had to search Black women, Afro American women, African American women, and Negro women in order to get everything in our library about African American women's history. That was a material example of the political argument that Black women have to work four times as hard, right? And I was like, well, this is amazingly handy to have this like evidence right here.
Then someone in the class asked me, well, what do I do if I want to look up information about white women? And then somebody piped up, but you just search white women. And I was like, the fact that white never has to be named, that has to never never has to be articulated or described. I kind of feel the same way about a sort of liberal ideology that is anti left. It's like, well, what do you believe? 'Cause I think you believe what I believe, which is that libraries are important, kids should have public schools, hospitals should be in our neighborhoods, and potholes should be filled.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (38:31)
What advice or thought would you want to impart on somebody who is just getting into literary advocacy?
Emily (38:40)
You don't have to solve the problem on your own. In fact, the single most important thing you could do is go to the next meeting, stay, even if it's boring, and introduce yourself to someone you don't know at the break.
Because it's advocacy around the issue. I want to know the people that I meet around this issue. I'm going to want to be able to talk to them when they come for something else that we all collectively care about.
And I think sort of lowering the bar on what counts as advocacy, for yourself is really important. I might look like somebody who ran for president and was but mostly, I show up to meetings and
I take the minutes, and that's most of what advocacy is.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (39:33)
It really is, and I think that one of the things that another guest said was wishing they had had more confidence when they started. that it is not as hard as it seems, right? They wish they had had more confidence just to start. I think that that ties in so perfectly with this. It's like, just do the thing.
Emily (39:52)
You don't have to be a special person. And you don't have to like get ready. Like literally just show up at the meeting when it says.
Fill in this petition, fill it in, and then maybe reply to the organizer and say, I'd like to do a little more. Do you have any work for me? You know, it's small, small stuff.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (40:10)
I'm gonna ask the same question, but I'm gonna ask it in terms of those who've been doing the work for a long time. What advice or thoughts would you have to share with them?
Emily (40:28)
I can't believe we're still doing this. I can't believe it and I can't believe how much harder it's gotten and I know that and I see you. So I think I would say that first.
And then I think I'm in need of what you're asking me to provide, which is we gotta we gotta get together and celebrate our wins more, I guess. I do think there are openings. I feel real hope when I see some of the political changes that have been happening.
I was lucky enough last November to get to travel to Bangladesh. One of my colleagues at Queen's College is an alum of the University of Dhaka. I was able to go and work with Dr. Delara Begum, who is an academic librarian in Dhaka, and just spent some time visiting libraries and touring around and talking to people. I remember talking to one person who said, you know, I am very concerned about what I see when I look at America, but what I see when I look at America and librarians is that all of you are with us. So I think that, you know, thinking about how connected our struggle is with global struggles and how actually quite strong and in solidarity authors, readers, writers, and library workers are right now. I think there's a lot of hope there, even if it doesn't feel like it at the minute.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (42:05)
I’m going to go back to that very first thing you said with this question before asking you my final question. And that's to say, I think sometimes we forget the power of just saying, “Wow, this is a lot that we're still doing this.” Because I think even when you're working in a community and you've built a coalition, sometimes it still feels like you are carrying the weight of the struggle yourself.
Sometimes just saying it out loud to other people who are doing that work is kind of a collective permission slip to be like, yeah, this is hard and we are all feeling the weight of how hard it is.
Emily (42:43)
You know, I ran into Maia Kobabe at Flame Con, just before the Trump re-election, and we were talking. We were like, I think it might be over. Harassment toward me had really died down, and nobody was trying to leave the American Library Association. Maia said e hadn't gotten as much hate lately. We had no idea that not only were we not winning, but we were about to lose on a kind of historic scale that I am still really struggling to understand. So yeah, yeah, it's tough.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (43:19)
So my last question I've been told is maybe the hardest question. I don't see it that way, but my guests do, and it's this.
This is a podcast about liberating literature. And I use the word liberating in all the senses of the word. So I like to end each conversation the same way by bringing it back to books. Can you talk about a book that has been influential in your life? And it could be a book that inspires you or a story that's just stuck with you for some reason.
Emily (43:45)
Well, like all of your guests, I'm sure I have like 800 answers to this question, and it has been an absolute delight running them around in my head. Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I'm reading the Bible for the first time this year. That seems like required reading for understanding the current moment and different people's political convictions. But the book that was most formative for me and how I understand the world is Sorting Things Out by Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker. This is a book that was assigned to me my first semester in library school by Dr. Barbara Kwashnick, who will always be my hero for fundamentally reorienting my brain.
This is a book about how we order things and what power lies in that ordering. She made this argument through the book that if you can visualize the classification schema, then it can be real. And you know, maybe the classification schema didn't stay with me forever. But that sense that if you can picture it, if you can visualize it, if you can materialize it in your brain, then you can begin to see what it is you want to work for. That has really stuck with me. and so it's a book about making the boring, silent infrastructure of our lives visible and changeable.
I think everybody should read it.
Kelly Jensen/Liberating Lit (45:11)
Thank you so much for joining me today, Emily. And just know how much I appreciate your time and your insight and how much you have brought to this conversation, even though it, you know, picks at some wounds that are difficult, but I think everybody can learn from that certainly you have learned a lot from, whether you wish to or not, right?
Emily (45:37)
Yeah, I mean I wouldn't change it for the world and you know, I spent my ALA term trying to meet as many people as possible so they'd know that Marxist lesbians weren't scary and every single person I met along the way was wonderful. It was a real gift, all of it.
