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I went to the Atlanta Public Library in Fulton County
and sat on the bean bag chair surrounded by books
as if I were in a candy store, and learning about
Agatha Christie, Lois Duncan and Steven King
and having my friends show me,"You've got to see this," and running me over to different
shelves
and also being without my parents,
feeling like I could be in the library and be independent
and I could choose what to read. Obviously, that's something that I
still believe in very strongly, that we should be able to choose what we read,
and kids should as well.[On budget cuts] If libraries lose their budgets,
then our culture is losing out,
and we will be known as the "Age of Ignorance," and I believe that.
I don't understand it. I don't understand how politicians can even think that way because
the best way to prevent our country from falling into...
you know, any kind of trouble, is to educate people and make their brains grow.
and that's where libraries come in.
They bring books, they bring the entire world, they also
bring a homeless man the chance sit down and fill out a job application
or an hispanic mom a chance to bring their daughter to bilingual storytime,
or me a chance, in college, to go...once I was told in
Creative Writing 101 that I wasn't good enough to continue
with the program.
The library is where I went to cry
and to grab "Ramona the Brave" off the shelf
and to encourage myself to regroup and
say, "I can."
I'm working in a novel called "Shine,"
which
is another one of those books that some people are going to have a hard time with.
It's about a young man who has been the victim of a hate crime,
and a young girl in the rural South
who finds it within herself
not to fight for her own injustices, but to fight for her
friend and to fugure out who in her
community did this
horrible thing to her friend.
So it's about
prejudice, intolerance and
oh, I guess, the surprising bonds
that can help you get through all that.