Every day brings another skirmish around book banning and another complaint crossing a librarian’s desk. Picture book author Jenny Fox, who writes as J.F. Fox (Friday Night Wrestlefest), is on a mission to inform children, caregivers, and policymakers about the value of libraries and diverse books. At Painted Words, the literary agency where she’s represented by Claire Morance, Fox launched a postcard campaign to advocate for school librarians and the freedom to read.

Fox’s activism grew out of her concern about the shortage of certified school librarians, including in her own children’s K–12 schools. She worries that cutbacks to library services, which coincide with radical book banning efforts, undermine children’s education across the U.S. “Not only are librarians the ones curating the collections to make them diverse and representative, but they’re the first line of defense in protecting the freedom to read,” Fox said.

“In New York City, where we have about 1,600 schools and the system serves more than a million children, we had roughly 260 certified librarians on staff, for all the schools,” Fox explained, referencing an article in Chalkbeat to which she contributed. “In our School District 15 in Brooklyn,” she said, “more than half the schools don’t have librarians, including high schools and middle schools that are state-mandated to have them.”

In 2021, Fox aimed her first postcard campaign at elected officials and the New York City Department of Education. In search of an illustration for the initiative, she approached fellow Painted Words creator Jia Liu (Who Needs Friends?). “I asked Jia if she would provide a piece of art, and she did,” Fox said.

Fox identified key officials, batch-printed address labels to make the process easy for teachers, and asked kids to add a note about what they liked to read. “I even made a fake mailbox that I put in the lobby of the school, so they could feel like they were really mailing their cards,” she said. “Then I took them all to the post office.” She describes the box as a “letter to Santa” approach, reinforcing children’s civic engagement.

The campaign put Fox on city councilmembers’ radar, and “we did some rallies and had a meeting at the DOE” to sound the alarm about schools’ loss of librarians and vulnerability to censorship.

More Designs for a Wider Audience

After this project’s success, Fox scaled up. She approached Painted Words agent and marketer Sarah Dillard to find out whether the agency’s rising illustrators might craft images for libraries and against book bans. Because librarians invite authors and illustrators to their schools—an essential sideline to many creators’ work—“we should support them back,” Fox said.

“As a summer challenge [in 2023], mainly for the illustrators, we already had started giving a prompt every week,” Dillard said. “Jenny’s project fit in beautifully with what we were doing, and people got excited about it.”

The art appears on printable postcards, available as free downloads on Fox’s author website and ready to circulate as part of anti-censorship efforts. On the flip side of each card, which includes an illustrator credit, children can answer a checkbox question (“My school has a librarian? Yes/No”) and add a personal detail (“I like to read about: _____”).

Up-and-coming illustrators, some published and some with newer portfolios, volunteered original artwork. Alex Nees, an illustrator of Choctaw and German descent who lives in Germany, and Romina Rollhauser, an Argentine illustrator now living in the Netherlands, crafted cards to push back against book censorship. Other contributors include TeMika Grooms, illustrator of Sen. Raphael Warnock’s picture-book memoir Put Your Shoes On and Get Ready!; Cherise Harris, illustrator of Don Tate’s biography Jerry Changed the Game!; and Huy Voun Lee, Cambodian American author-illustrator of Like a Dandelion. All emphasized censorship’s outsize influence on children, notably children of color, LGBTQ+ kids, and children at schools that are poorly funded.

Fox emphasizes that postcard campaigns are a form of public engagement for all, and hopes her efforts with Painted Words encourage others to try a similar approach their agency or publishing house. The idea, she said, is to freely share tools for grassroots action.