Editorial: The Wrong Card, This Year's Edwards-Award Winner

Years back, I served on the American Library Association’s (ALA) Notable Books Council, which selects an annual list of the best books for adults. My first year on the committee, I pitched a novel by Philip Roth to the group. About a sentence or two into my presentation, one of the senior committee members interrupted me.

“But don’t you know what he did to his wife?” she asked.

I neither knew nor cared. But as the rest of the committee members nodded their heads knowingly, I realized there was no way Mr. Roth’s book was making our list.

It also occurred to me, although I was too inexperienced to argue, that the Library Bill of Rights—part of our professional code of practice—should apply to awards as much as to library collections, and that an author’s personal views or actions should have no bearing on the selection of his or her works.

Fast-forward to last month: I’m sitting in the audience at ALA’s youth media awards and the science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card is named as the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for “lifetime achievement in writing for young adults” (see “Card Wins Edwards Award,” p. 12). My first thought? “Don’t they know about this guy’s crazy, anti-gay rants?”

Suddenly I caught myself sitting squarely in the censor’s seat. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be.

Here at SLJ we pay close attention to the Edwards Award. While it’s administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), we sponsor the award. In fact, it was founded 20 years ago by Lillian Gerhardt, then SLJ’s editor-in-chief, and our Book Review Editor Trev Jones.

What’s disturbing about Mr. Card isn’t that he fails some politically correct litmus test, or that he’s merely socially conservative. It’s the sheer virulence of his many remarks about gays and lesbians. To me, Card’s a textbook homophobe, a charge he vigorously denies.

Racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia each have different historical origins and expressions, and I’m uncomfortable comparing them to one another. Still, I bet that if Card were a white supremacist or a Holocaust denier, the Edwards committee would have practiced one of librarianship’s dirty little secrets—self-censorship—rather than risk a national outcry.

Unlike the Newbery or Caldecott Medals, which are about specific books, the Edwards Award honors an author. While it singles out works for recognition, the titles are really a technicality (although useful for collection building). Let’s face it, within a year, all anyone remembers is who won. YALSA conflates things further by billing the award as a “lifetime achievement,” making the meaning of the award even more ambiguous for the general reader. That readership includes gay and lesbian teens.

I’m not big on overly protecting teens. I know the world is full of contradictions, and the faster you start figuring them out, the better. Yet I can’t help but feel sorry for those gay kids. YALSA has elevated a man whose lifetime achievements include writings that are likely to undo the very charge of the award: helping teens “understand themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationship with others and with society.”

Am I happy about this year’s winner? Not at all. Do I support the committee’s decision? Unequivocally. In the end, as valid as one feels one’s reasons might be, we can’t tamper with freedom of expression as represented in the Library Bill of Rights and the Code of Ethics.

So congratulations, Mr. Card. And thanks for your selection, members of the 2008 Margaret A. Edwards Award Committee. Every day we expect librarians on the front lines to uphold the tenets of intellectual freedom. This year’s Edwards Award has reminded me of how very difficult that can be.

bkenney@reedbusiness.com