Kathleen T. Horning is one of the most influential librarians you’ll ever meet—and one of the kindest

It’s been a heck of a year for Kathleen T. Horning. In January, Horning (known affectionately to friends and colleagues as K. T.) was tapped to deliver the 2010 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, joining a list of past presenters that includes children’s book greats Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, and Kevin Henkes, a friend and fellow resident of Madison, WI. In April, the American Library Association (ALA) named Horning the winner of the Scholastic Library Publishing Award for her “extraordinary contributions to promoting access to books and encouraging a love of reading for lifelong learning.” Although she says both honors “came as a really huge surprise,” it’s tough to think of a more deserving recipient.

Photograph by Darren Hauck/Getty Images for RBI

As librarians from Maine to Multnomah know, Horning is the author of From Cover to Cover: Evaluating and Reviewing Children’s Books (HarperCollins, 1997), the quintessential guide to gauging books for young readers. She’s also a mentor to many librarians and a regular contributor to online discussion groups and blogs. And Horning is no stranger to high-profile positions. She’s past president of the Association for Library Service to Children and the United States Board on Books for Young People, and a former Newbery Award chair. When it comes to kids’ books, few folks can surpass Horning’s encyclopedic knowledge of authors, illustrators, and publishers. In 2002, she succeeded her mentor, Ginny Moore Kruse, as director of the University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), the special collection and research library where Horning began working as a student nearly 30 years ago. Horning lives with her partner, Emily Kokie, an attorney, and, she says, “their two intrepid fish, Bubbles and Omar.” When I interviewed the 53-year-old librarian by phone recently, I promised we’d be through in less than an hour, only to run way overtime (I couldn’t help myself!). Characteristically, Horning was kind, unhurried, and happy to share her story. As an undergrad, you majored in linguistics. How did you wind up becoming a librarian? I really love linguistics, but I began to realize when I was approaching my senior year in college that there really wasn’t anything you could do with a linguistics degree except for going on and getting a doctorate and teaching it to other people. So I decided I would teach English as a Second Language, because you could pretty much go anywhere in the world and make a living at it. There was a series of five courses here at the University of Wisconsin to get certified in English as a Second Language. One of the classes was on the fourth floor of Helen C. White Hall, which is where the library school and the CCBC are. One day I arrived early for class, and I just wandered down to the CCBC. It’s a very, very small library, and when I walked in, I felt very conspicuous. There was a woman sitting at the reference desk who asked me if I needed help. Obviously, I looked like I did. What did you say? I said, “Oh, no! I know what I’m doing,” and I tried to act like I did. I started looking at this little group of children’s books that was right in front of me, and she said, “Are you interested in coming to our monthly book discussion?” I was trying to keep up this ruse of belonging there, so I said I was interested, and I actually checked out one of the books, and I really enjoyed reading it. I hadn’t read a children’s book since I’d been a child. I read all of the books for the discussions and attended them. I loved getting together with this group of adults who were serious about children’s books. They were also really fun, and I began to realize that this was something I could do after I graduated. I could go to library school and spend my life doing this. So, that’s what I did! Do you remember what you read for that first discussion group? Oh, I do. Actually, it’s really kind of a funny story. Nowadays one of CCBC’s discussion guidelines is that you can only make positive comments first. If you have things that kept you from appreciating a book, you have to wait until everyone has had a chance to say what they appreciated. But back then, when I went to my first discussion, I didn’t say anything about the first book they discussed—which I absolutely loved—because right away they just started ripping it to shreds. Oh, no! I was really embarrassed. I’d written a fan letter to the author, and I just thought it was the most amazing book. But I didn’t say anything. Then when I went back the next month, the same thing happened. They just started ripping to shreds a book I had really loved. But that time I spoke up and said, “You know, I really like this book, and I want to tell you what I liked about it.” And I felt vindicated, because it went on to be a Newbery Honor Book that year. What was the name of the book? A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle. That’s very funny. After I left, the CCBC librarians actually had a discussion and began wondering how many other people attended their meetings and wouldn’t say anything, like I did that very first time. They realized how hard it was for people to say what they appreciated about a book when you started off with negative comments. So that’s what led them to create the discussion guidelines. In the 1980s, CCBC started publishing data on multicultural children’s books. Right, we actually started that in 1985. That year, Ginny Moore Kruse was on the Coretta Scott King Award committee. So she knew exactly how many books were eligible for the Coretta Scott King Award, which honors books by African-American authors and illustrators. There were just 18 books that she received that year. And of those 18, only 12 had any kind of cultural content related to the African-American experience. That’s shocking. We were just appalled. We estimated there were about 2,500 new books published for children that year—and of those, only 18 were by African-American authors and illustrators. We were so shocked by that number that we published it in the introduction to CCBC Choices for that year. That had a real impact because, while I think that was something that African-American librarians, teachers, and parents knew was true, other people felt there were more multicultural books than there actually were. When we looked at the Subject Guide to Children’s Books in Print for that year under “Blacks”—that was the subject—there was maybe a half-page of entries for nonfiction and fiction. But if you turned back a few pages and looked for “Bears” fiction, the entries went on for three pages. There were more children’s books with personified bears as main characters than there were with African Americans as main characters. So we started keeping track of that statistic on a regular basis and printed it every year in CCBC Choices. After a few years, we reached a point where we would have people quote that number back to us, which was always kind of funny. Publishers would say, “Did you know, there were only 30 [multicultural] books [published] last year?” Yep. I agree with [Coretta Scott King Honor winner] Alexis De Veaux: buying a book is a political act. You have to buy books by authors of color so that there will be more books published. You’ve also been a public librarian. What did you learn from that experience? I worked as a youth services librarian at Madison Public Library half-time for about 10 years, from 1989 to 1998, and at that same time I was working half-time as a librarian here at CCBC. The two jobs had pretty much the same base of knowledge, but they were so different in their applications. At the public library, I really enjoyed that direct contact with children, being able to do story hours and find out how children responded to the very books I was recommending in CCBC Choices. And then I also really loved doing programming, such as book discussions with school-aged children. It really helped me as a critic of children’s literature to understand the way that children read books. What they take from a book is often different from what an adult takes from a book. I’m not saying it’s necessarily better—it’s just different. I learned a lot from discussing books, particularly with third graders. Third graders are great readers and discussers, and they always seem to be very pleased to have an adult ask what they think of something. The thing I loved about working at the public library is you never knew who was going to walk through the door, or what they were going to say or ask or do. I really like that spontaneity. There’s a new edition of From Cover to Cover coming out next spring. What inspired you to write the book in the first place? [Author and longtime ALA council member] Ruth Gordon had been saying to me, “There just isn’t a book out there for reviewers on how to review children’s books.” She decided I was the person who should write one. Her editor at Harper for her poetry anthology was Robert Warren. So she started telling him there needed to be such a book and I was the person who should write it. And after about three years, I agreed to do it. When I started writing the book, the hardest thing for me was to find the right voice. I pictured myself speaking to a group of undergraduates here at CCBC. I often did a presentation for both undergraduate students and librarians on evaluating nonfiction. So that’s where I started. The very first thing I wrote was the chapter on evaluating nonfiction, and the rest just flowed from there. Your 2005 Horn Book article about the queer subtext in Harriet the Spy shook up a lot of folks. One of the wonderful things about really good children’s books is that different readers can read them in different ways and take from those stories what they need. When I was a child reading Harriet the Spy, I needed a heroine who spoke to me as a kid who felt like an outsider, who felt different, who didn’t fit into the rigid gender roles we had when I was a child. You know, we still had a dress code in school and things that girls couldn’t do. You couldn’t play Little League or sports back then. You couldn’t have a paper route. You couldn’t be an acolyte at church. There were all these things that I just grew up with girls not being able to do. When you were a kid, growing up in Des Moines, did you know you were gay? I didn’t really know that I was gay at that point in my life, but I knew that I felt different from the time I was about three. So I was always looking in books for other people like me, and Harriet really spoke to me. Now I know there are other people who have had a very similar experience with Harriet the Spy, people who later in life came out as lesbians or as gay men. So finding out much later that Louise Fitzhugh was indeed a lesbian herself, you know, all of these little pieces sort of fell into place. But I know there are other people who read Harriet the Spy who didn’t get those things out of it. Some of those people wrote critical letters to Horn Book. What did you make of that? It was almost as if people who objected to the piece expected everyone to have the same reading experience they had. And if someone had a different reading experience or interpretation, then it couldn’t be right. That’s how it struck me—as just an unwillingness to have the rug pulled out from underneath you. You know, we see the same thing in a lot of different ways. We see it, for example, with people who’ve grown up with the mythology of the Hollywood Indian deeply entrenched in their psyche. When they’re presented with a different reality, it really makes them reexamine everything they learned when they were younger, and that’s a very uncomfortable position for many people. If you were interviewing yourself, is there anything else you might ask? This is kind of a dumb question, but I might ask, if you could put one book into every home in the United States, what would it be? And the winner is… Baby Says by John Steptoe. It was one of my favorite books to read aloud during story hour. It has amazing writing. It only uses a few words, and it repeats three words over and over that are often the first words a baby learns. It also has this great relationship between the older brother and the little brother. When you’re reading it aloud to a group of two- and three-year-olds, they identify with the baby. And when you’re using it with kids who are a little older, they identify with the older brother. I’ve also found that it’s the easiest book in the world for a child who’s been struggling with learning to read. If there was a seven- or eight-year-old who was a regular at the library and I knew they were having a hard time reading, I liked to teach them to read Baby Says. Then you can send them over to the picture book area to find a younger child to read it aloud to. Baby Says is a real gem. It’s something that someone might overlook because the words are so simple. Steptoe is oftentimes thought of for his great art, but he was also a really brilliant writer of picture books. So, K. T., one last question. If you possessed superpowers and could have any job in the world, what would it be? I have this fantasy that in another lifetime I’d really like to be a geriatric nurse. I took care of my parents when each had a long, drawn-out illness that led to death. My mother was in the hospital for a long time. I can’t say I enjoyed taking care of her, but I found it was something that I was really good at, and I also realized that not everyone is good at it. I would end up taking care of whomever her roommate was, too. I think that each patient needs an advocate, someone who is just there paying attention to their needs. That would be my fantasy job—geriatric nurse/advocate. I really enjoy working with elderly people, and I love the stories they tell about their lives. They’ve had so many interesting experiences, even if their lives have been what we think of as quite ordinary. But if I had superpowers or won the lottery and had an endless supply of money, I would still probably come to work here every day, because I do really love this job that I’m doing.