Saturday, March 15, 2025
2:00 - 4:00 pm
African American Museum and Library at Oakland, 659 14th Street, Oakland, CA
Join the Banned Scholars Project in African American Studies and the African American Museum and Library at Oakland for a roundtable discussion about the battle against literary censorship with writers, editors, librarians, advocates, and creative intellectuals.
Read more about banned books from our banned books resource guide, written by Carolyn F. Norman and Nichole Brown.
Check out the “Support a Black Author, buy a banned book!” booklist from Oakland Public Librarian Nichole Brown to see banned books available at the Oakland Public Library.
Burning and burying books has been elevated as a practice in the so-called progress and modernity of the 21st century. While book banning predates the Gutenberg Bible published in 1455, cultural norms, politics, personal beliefs, and school policies have conspired to continue muting, challenging, trashing, burning, and upending the works of thousands of writers, some of whom speak real truth to brutal power and others who simply take us on imaginary journeys into the realms of the unknown. These factors have conspired to deem thousands of books too incendiary to circulate, revising history, crippling library services, and further narrowing the intellect and curiosity of millions of Americans. In this hyper-digital world and in a country driven by minute-by-minute, head-spinning fascism, protecting the word has become an even more daunting challenge, but one from which we will not bend or yield. Our panel of writers, editors, librarians, advocates, and creative intellectuals will come together to continue the decades-long mission to protect and enshrine the voices of writers documenting ideas and forging creative expressions across genres and empowering the mind, especially of the young, for whom the book is becoming further and further out of reach, increasingly replaced by digital thunder.
Meet the Panelists:
Carolyn F. Norman is the President of the California Librarians Black Caucus (CLBC) and is a library consultant with QualityMetrics. She has experience as an academic librarian, and has worked in three segments of the educational environment. Carolyn served as a state level library and learning resources policy and program specialist with the Chancellor’s Office, California Community Colleges for the 100+ libraries in the college system. She has been instrumental in advancing initiatives at the local, state, and national level. Carolyn is a member of the American Library Association, the California Library Association, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) and the California Librarians Black Caucus (CLBC).
Educator and Cultural Broker Daphne Muse is the Elder-in-Residence in Abolitionist Democracy in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Author of four books, her social commentaries, and articles have been published in The Atlantic, The Black Scholar, Mothering Magazine, and aired on public radio. She recently returned to writing a novel, and The Cousins Are Coming, a children’s picture book set in the throes of American immigration policies. In 2023, she launched Old School+New School=Mo’Betta School, an intergenerational initiative to bridge generations. Home is the Oasis in the Diaspora in Brentwood, California.
Nicholas “Niko” Perez is the program manager of Campus Free Speech at PEN America. In this role, he advances PEN America’s efforts to catalyze a more informed, civic culture through free expression education for the rising generation and the general public, and supports advocacy, analysis, and outreach in the national debate around free speech and inclusion in higher education. Perez led Next Gen PEN America, PEN America’s campaign dedicated to empowering a new generation of free expression advocates and building a youth advocacy network that can work together to facilitate positive change. Perez previously worked for the Columbia University Human Rights Advocates Program and consulted for the Human Rights Education and Training section at the United Nations. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia University in human rights and humanitarian policy and a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in international politics.
Diane Wachtell is the Executive Director of The New Press, an award-winning, not-for-profit, public interest book publisher, which she co-founded with André Schiffrin in 1990. Wachtell was responsible for The New Press’s groundbreaking May It Please the Court series of books and audio recordings of Supreme Court oral arguments, and for acquiring and editing bestsellers including Jim Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. She has spearheaded The Press’s criminal justice program and publishes on progressive education, race, national security, and the law, as well as a small list of prize-winning international fiction. Before co-founding The New Press, Wachtell worked at Pantheon Books and Alfred A. Knopf. Wachtell graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, where she received the first prize in Comparative Literature.
Innosanto Nagara was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia at the height of the New Order dictatorship. His father was a dissident poet and playwright who was often under threat for his works. Innosanto moved to the U.S. in 1988 to study zoology at UC Davis, but instead of becoming a zoologist he became an activist and a graphic designer. He worked as a freelance designer for a range of activist organizations, campaigns, and design collectives in the 90’s, and then helped develop the design department of Inkworks Press in Berkeley. In 2002, he founded Design Action Collective in Oakland, a worker coop design studio dedicated to providing visual communications services to social change movement organizations. In 2012, Inno wrote and illustrated A is for Activist, which became a national bestseller. Since then, he has written numerous other children’s books on social justice themes: Counting on Community, My Night in the Planetarium, The Wedding Portrait, M is for Movement, and Oh, the Things We’re For!. Inno is also a founding member of the Social Justice Children’s Books collective that has held an annual gathering of social justice-themed children’s book creators for the past eight years. Most recently they have collaborated with the Bay Area Book Festival to curate their upcoming Family Day activities.