Between reciting stanzas from his Newbery-winning The Crossover and sharing stories of his youth and impactful school visits, author Kwame Alexander reminded SLJ Summit school librarian attendees about the power of their position.

Kwame Alexander Photo credit: Thomas Knowlton

“Books have the capacity and the potential to help young people imagine a better world, a different world, a world where they matter, a world where they are significant, a world where they can actually control the outcome of their life,” Alexander said during the closing keynote conversation with Sonia Alcántara-Antoine, CEO of Baltimore County Public Library (BCPL) at BCPL’s Owings Mills branch.

“I’m really interested in inspiring kids to see their power in finding their voice and lifting their voice,” Alexander said. “I’m really interested in that in this moment. And I posit that words and literature and books can do that. They become supplemental to the work that you all are doing in classrooms and libraries. Because the opposite is also true—that you hold in your hands the capacity to destroy kids, like my AP English teacher who gave me an F on a paper I wrote my senior year—I almost didn’t graduate—because she said the paper was so good, there was no way I could have written it.”

Alexander remembered his high school teachers’ and librarians’ assessment of his reading life at the time.

“They were upset that I wasn’t engaged, and they called me reluctant,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m reluctant to read the books that you want me to read. I am not a reluctant reader. I’m disinterested.’”

And then he turned to the intent of those in the room.

“If y’all’s goal is to get kids reading—if that’s your goal—that’s a respectable goal,” he said. “If your goal is to get kids to want to read, I think that requires a whole ’nother level of innovation and just common sense.”

The key to that is student choice, he said, “allowing students to find that book that is going to rip their heart out and stomp on it…. knowing your student well enough to be able to point them in the direction of that book. You've got to know your kids. You can’t keep forcing them to read Tuck Everlasting, and then they’re not reading, and you call them reluctant.”

He offered a second way to engage readers: poetry.

“It may not be the answer, but I posit that an answer is poetry,” he said. “Poetry is so concise, it’s so rhythmic, it’s so repetitious, it has so much white space that allows for a spiritual journey. It is a bridge to allow our children to be able to learn to appreciate longer forms of literature. Poetry can be that bridge, but we’re so afraid of it. We think of it as staid and incomprehensible. We’ve forgotten that we actually love it.”

Celebrate the wins

The November 7–9 conference featured panel discussions about legislative advocacy and fighting for the right to read; creating reading culture; and breakout sessions on various topics including using AI, teaching media literacy, and creating connection with middle grade main characters; as well as a graphic novels author panel with Dan Santat, Colleen AF Venable, and Jeffrey Brown.

The weekend began with a keynote address from 2025 School Librarian of the Year Tim Jones. As he stressed he importance of humor in teaching, learning, coping, and thriving, he also touched on serious topics in the profession.

“Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good,” Jones told his peers. “We want to be perfect and that’s not great. There’s not a single librarian in this room that does all the things, so we need to give ourselves [a] break. That feeling, if weaponized, becomes invisibility, which then becomes imposter syndrome. That’s how we lose funding and, in a way, some respect.”

Celebrate all of the wins, Jones said, while sharing some he had heard from fellow librarians while attending the American ­Association of School Librarians conference in October. These can be difficult times, he added, when the battles being fought are over much bigger issues than ­overdue books.

“Truth is under attack,” Jones said. “We are witnessing propaganda going viral. Viral content promoting cruelty. Cruelty masquerading as morality. Anti-intellectualism dressed up as patriotism. Civil dialogue has been replaced by name-calling, scapegoating, sea lioning, [and] gaslighting.”

Amidst it all, school librarians show up every day to guide their students through the chaos.

“When algorithms confuse them, we teach them to question,” Jones said. “When they’re told not to trust anyone, we remind them they can still trust us. This is the work we do every day, holding back chaos with caffeine, Canva, and sheer determination. We’re basically the only people on earth that can go from fixing the laminator to saving democracy in one afternoon.”