Radical Readers

Generations of readers have discovered the power of books through a family member, a teacher, or LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow.

But 2.5 million children across the United States are enrolled in districts without libraries, according to the U.S. Department of Education. On top of that, too many books fail to represent the children reading them. Of the thousands of children’s books published in 2023, only 12% had a Black primary character, 10% Asian, 7% Latine, and 2% Indigenous, according to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. 

Since books can reflect and affirm readers’ identities, as well as give them a view into worlds unlike their own, it’s important to expand beyond the whiteness that has long dominated children’s literature. These radical librarians, educators, and bibliophiles are working to get books in the hands of more children, and ensuring the characters in those books look and live like them.

Iesha Malone, the Book Lady of South Side

Iesha Malone is on the front lines of increasing book access in Chicago’s South Side. “Roseland is one of the poorest communities in Chicago and one of the most violence-stricken,” Malone explains. Growing up there, she was instilled with the importance of reading by her father, and she turned to books as a form of escape. 

As Malone, her sons, and her neighbors were demonstrating in the 2020 uprising for Black lives and then rebuilding in the aftermath, she realized she had to travel outside her neighborhood to find books with meaningful representation. As a teacher and reading specialist, she began dreaming about bringing these kinds of books to Roseland. “I wanted new books—books that represented the community. Books with Black protagonists. Books with people who went through stuff and overcame,” she says. 

And so, in 2020, Malone started Rose Café, named after Tupac Shakur’s poem “The Rose That Grew From Concrete.” “It talks about how roses and beautiful things still can rise through adversity,” Malone said on Instagram.

Malone put out a call for book donations on Instagram and was overwhelmed by the response. In the early days, she distributed books by hand, including leaving them on public transit for children to pick up. Rose Café has since grown into a series of pop-up shops at community events throughout the city. To date, Rose Café has given away 15,000 books, conducts virtual author interviews, and hosts book clubs. “The dialogue between these different genres of women—older women, white women, Black women—was really good, and I had to keep going on with it,” Malone says.

Malone currently runs the organization alone, while teaching full time. But she’s still dreaming about Rose Café’s future: Malone is fundraising for a storefront, which she imagines as a coffee shop, bookstore, and gathering space for her community.  

Ultimately, Malone hopes that increasing book access will help to counter violence in the community. “Access to literacy, reading more books, and seeing how some people have overcome and done things the nonviolent way brings a different perspective on how to change things,” Malone says. “There’s a better way to do it.”

Storybook Maze, Radical Street Librarian

When Storybook Maze was a student, her teacher read aloud Pride and Prejudice and “opened the road of reading” for her. As an adult, Maze read aloud to her nieces on her front stoop in Baltimore, and neighborhood children began to gather around to listen. Some said they did not have books in their homes. She realized that her neighborhood was severely lacking in meaningful access to books. “I had assumed that urban areas are not seen as book deserts, but they can be,” Maze says, adding that the presence of a library does not always mean children have the ability to access it.

Maze decided to shift her career from English teacher to librarian, which brought her to multiple branches in the greater Baltimore area. Seeing how every community’s needs were different inspired her to start thinking of creative, out-of-the-box approaches to introducing books to young people—like installing free book vending machines around the city. “One of my favorite parts of the job is seeing the kids light up when they see a book that represents and reflects them,” Maze says. “People come back more and more, because I pair them with the perfect book for them that opens up that world of reading.”

Maze hosts pop-up book giveaways in and around Baltimore, always curating the collection to represent the community she’s in. At an event in a predominantly Spanish-speaking community, Maze brought a collection of books in Spanish. A father at the event received a book and told Maze that with it, he would be able to read a book to his child for the first time since they traveled to the United States. “He was tearing up,” Maze recalls.

Maze is now fundraising for a book trolley as a way to combine her pop-up giveaways with her street-corner story times—“an ice cream truck but with books,” she calls it. Maze hopes that her story will inspire other radical street librarians to join her mission in their own communities. “Start small, even if you have only a picnic table, and see how it goes.” 

Mychal Threets, aka Mychal the Librarian

Mychal Threets is on a mission to spread “library joy.” The solace he found in books, and the characters he grew to love, helped him through his childhood mental health challenges. “I loved Junie B. Jones and Encyclopedia Brown,” he says. “I think they just meant so much to me because of struggling to make friends and fit in.” As a college and grad student, Threets worked at a local library in the Bay Area and went on to work in multiple branches of the Solano County Library, “from a shelver to supervisor,” Threets says. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Threets started a TikTok account to share that the library was open, and to raise awareness of the resources the library offered. With excitement and the characteristic “Yes!” that has become his trademark, he came to be known as Mychal the Librarian. 

Threets’ library joy is contagious, as evidenced by his nearly 800,000 followers. Threets’ mission and message goes deeper than fun, though. He wants to encourage reading by continuing to establish the library as a place of belonging and inclusivity. “That’s the beauty of literacy, of access to books, that we all have these stories,” he says. “All of our voices should be heard.”

In March 2024, Threets left his job in the public library system to care for his mental health. Threets, who has experienced cyberbullying, views his career move as analogous to putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others. “I always encourage people to treat the library people with kindness,” he says. “They’re superheroes who wear cardigans instead of capes.” 

Threets is now using his platform to help destigmatize mental health issues. “There’s no shame in taking medication,” he said in a recent video, and goes on to commend his viewers for taking care of themselves and choosing to stay another day. “Live, laugh, Lexapro!” he says with a smile.

Threets, who recently became PBS’s resident librarian, got to guest star in a digital short with Arthur the aardvark, whose library card is tattooed on Threets’ arm. Threets continues to share videos and find library joy through the real-life stories of kids and grown-ups “remembering the truth that they belong in their local library just as they are.”

Whether talking about books or mental health, Threets’ main message remains the same: “Really all I’m doing is just trying to get people to remember that they do matter.” 

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Erin Jones is a Maryland-based freelance journalist and founder of Galvanize and Grow Copywriting. A former English and humanities teacher, she holds a B.A. in English from Hood College and an M.A. from Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English.

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