Coming off two lightly attended conferences in a row and facing funding threats from President Trump, 2017 got off to a rough start for the American Library Association. But an upbeat 2017 ALA annual conference in Chicago, which concluded with a rousing speech by Hillary Clinton on June 27, may have just turned their year around.
Total attendance in Chicago hit 22,702, with the number of paid attendees (excluding exhibitors) up nearly 50% from last year’s annual conference in Orlando—a welcome rebound as well from the 2017 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta. Held over Trump's inauguration weekend this past January and competing with Women's Marches across the country, that show ranked as the lowest-attended Midwinter Meeting in 25 years.
In Chicago, a strong slate of speakers expressed support for libraries—including Clinton—and sought to energize librarians for the political, professional, and budget battles that lie ahead.
In her keynote, Clinton criticized President Trump’s proposed cuts to libraries and other agencies, including the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and she likened the current climate in America to something out of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451. She said Trump’s proposed cuts were “shortsighted” and “deeply disturbing,” and warned that if enacted they would disproportionately harm rural and underserved communities.
“As librarians, once again you have to be on the front lines of one of the most important fights we have ever faced in the history of our country—the fight to defend truth and reason, evidence, and facts,” Clinton said, to loud applause. “We are facing some very challenging times and we all have to rise to the occasion. This goes far beyond any kind of political party or partisan feeling, it really does go to who we are as Americans, what we stand for, the values that we’ve inherited, and the values we will pass along.”
In addition to Clinton, who will publish an as-yet-untitled memoir this fall with Simon & Schuster, as well as a new edition of her classic kids' book It Takes a Village, this year’s program included talks from a number of award-winning authors, including Hamilton author Ron Chernow, and 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners Colson Whitehead (The Undergound Railroad) and Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City), who were in Chicago to pick up their Carnegie Medals at a reception on Saturday, June 24.
Sarah Jessica Parker was also on hand to announce her first official selection as honorary chair of the ALA’s new Book Club Central: Stephanie Powell Watts’s debut novel No One Is Coming to Save Us (Ecco). Launched at the conference, ALA Book Club Central is an online platform of reading resources, including recommendations, book lists, and other content for book clubs and their readers. In her role as honorary chair, Parker, who recently launched a new fiction line (SJP for Hogarth, in partnership with Molly Stern at Crown) will offer additional picks throughout the year, “books that have moved me personally,” she told librarians, “and that I believe are richly deserving.”
Another high-profile attendee, librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, was awarded the 2017 Melvil Dewey Medal at the show. The honor, given annually by ALA, recognizes “creative leadership of high order.” Unlike her predecessor, Hayden, a former ALA president, told PW she will be a regular attendee at ALA conferences.
Perhaps the most compelling speech of the conference, however, came at the Carnegie reception honoring Whitehead and Desmond, from the evening's featured speaker, author Sara Paretsky, who captivated her audience with a clarion call for librarians, authors, and publishers to stand up for truth and reason.
“We are living in an age of rage, lies, and willful stupidity. The 24-hour news cycle keeps us on the brink of hysteria with tales of terrorists, pizza-parlor pedophilia rings, the imminent imposition of sharia on our nation, ISIS, climate change, and America’s horrific number of gun deaths,” Paretsky said. “The person who puts together the most compelling narrative out of these jostling fragments is the person who controls what we think, say, and ultimately do. When we don’t check for facts, when we don’t pay attention to the whole arc of an event long enough to build a reliable narrative, we are at the mercy of unreliable narrators. That’s why works like The Underground Railroad and Evicted are so important. They help us keep a plumb line to that most elusive quality: the truth.”
The 2018 ALA Annual Conference is set for June 21 to 16, in New Orleans. After that, the next five conferences are scheduled to trade off between Chicago, and Washington D.C., cities where ALA has offices, and cities that traditionally host the best-attended annual conferences.
