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| Judy Blume | |
Judy Blume, one of the best-loved champions for free speech, spoke to a standing-room only crowd at the American Library Association's Annual Conference opening day in Chicago on Friday. Blume was in conversation with Simon & Schuster's children's division publisher Justin Chanda, who asked her why she decided to attend ALA. "If ever there were a chance to thank you," she told librarians from across the country, "this is the year to do it."
She described her weekly trips to the Elizabeth, N.J., public library from age four with her mother, buying Madeline--her favorite book as a child--for her own daughter, and more recently, starting her own bookstore, Books & Books in Key West, Fla. "Most booksellers want to grow up to be writers..." raucous laughter kept Blume from finishing her sentence. "I live in Key West. We won't say the name of the state," Blume continued. "Not a week goes by when a teacher says to me, I could lose my job [for just reading the wrong book]."
Blume said the current wave of book-banning is much more targeted than the one in the 1980s, but also that we've never been more equipped to fight it, with Judith Krug at the Freedom to Read Foundation, PEN America, and the National Coalition Against Censorship banding together. "Some people think they can't control much, but they want to control what children read. They can't control what children think," Blume said. "They don't want kids to think--to be curious." Chanda asked, "If you had Ron DeSantis in this room, what would you say?" Without a pause, Blume answered, "What are you afraid of?”