Newswise — As colleges across the country observe the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, September 29-October 6, Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., will hold a literary flash mob read-out at 1:00 p.m. on Monday, October 1, in the college’s Skillman Library in conjunction with Judith's Reading Room, a non-profit literacy organization based in Bethlehem, Pa. The flash mob will consist of students, faculty, and Judith's Reading Room volunteers standing in a group near the entrance of the library and reading passages out loud from 30 of the American Library Association’s top banned and challenged books, including To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Harry Potter, Beloved, The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby.
In addition to Lafayette College, Judith's Reading Room--which received a competitive grant from the American Library Association--has partnered with Villanova University in Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, to promote Banned Books Week by holding read-outs and related events.
Lafayette College’s efforts this year are being organized by librarian Ana Luhrs and Erin D’Amelio, a senior who is double majoring in English and French, and minoring in psychology. D’Amelio interned at Judith’s Reading Room over the summer where she assembled customized libraries that were then donated to nursing homes, after-school programs, women’s shelters and other groups.
Judith's Reading Room http://www.judithsreadingroom.org/ was started by Cathy and Scott Leiber to provide “freedom through literature” to underserved communities. They named the non-profit organization after the late Judith Krug, founder of Banned Books Week, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and Scott Leiber’s first cousin.
The first Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 by Krug, ALA director for over 40 years, in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Last year, there were 326 reported challenges of books, according to the Office of Intellectual Freedom, and many more go unreported--that’s in addition to the 11,300 books that have been challenged since 1982.
Judith Krug, who died in 2009, was not only an anti-censorship activist, "she was a First Amendment warrior,” according to Donna Decker, a professor of English who teaches the popular undergraduate “Banned Books” course at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire. “Judith Krug stood up for those books and our unmitigated right to read them when she went toe to toe with such august entities as the Patriot Act and the U.S. Supreme Court,” says Decker. “Hers was a passionate activism, a decades-long fearless fight for intellectual freedom--and our gratitude to Judith Krug is particularly keen during Banned Books week.”
###
RSS