Social Justice Issues Front and Center at Book Expo

No matter which conference you're attending you can always count on Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Reporter (https://www.bookreporter.com/) to host lively panel discussions and this year's  Book Expo was no exception. First time authors were especially powerful in their Q & A sessions with Carol as she dug deeply into issues of racism, poverty, and the downsides of 24/7 social media exposes. No, not everyone is a journalist and sometimes what we see and film is not what's actually happening right in front of our eyes.

Such was the case for Kim Brooks who spoke about her book "Small Animals," in which she describes her life being turned upside down by a stranger who posted a video of her leaving her child in the car while she ran into a drugstore to pick up a prescription.

While admitting it was wrong, objectively, she opined that in today's internet age we as a people are so quick to judge without engaging. She wishes the stranger had just approached her. Instead the police were called, her vehicle was confiscated, her custody of her child was called into question in a series of cascading developments that could have been avoided.




Casey Gerald's memoir, "There Will Be No Miracles Here," will be published in October. Raised in poverty, earning a football scholarship to Yale, Mr. Gerald would seem to be living the American dream when, in fact, it was anything but. His passionate presentation spoke to the systemic racism that underlies every success story as he has examined what it means to get ahead and at what cost to your identity. This one appears to be a must-read.

Another exciting debut is forthcoming from the delightful Weyetu Moore who's written a novel about the founding of Monrovia, Liberia, as seen through the eyes of three disparate characters. "She Would be King" tells the tale of Gbessa, an African refugee left for dead after a snake bite, June, an enslaved woman who escaped a plantation in Virginia, and Norman, a mixed-race child of a British colonizer on Jamaica, as they use their wits and talent to bridge the gap between the various indigenous Liberian tribes and the new African-American settlers seeking a place to call home. Look for this in September.

And for those of you who may be attending the American Library Association conference in New Orleans, do look for editor and all around book expert Sarah Weinman, who will be touting her first non-fiction, true crime book based on the life of Sally Horner, the young woman upon whom Nabokov based his infamous "Lolita." According to Weinman, the famous author never acknowledged how much he knew about the 1949 kidnapping, in Camden, New Jersey, of the eleven-year-old Horner and how it informed his novel. Weinman brings a feminist outrage and an editor's eye to the facts of Horner's case and that of so many other young girls who have disappeared at the hands of pedophiles or rapists, never to be seen again.