We Reads: Literature That Nourishes Us
Graphic: Pink background. Center: Black text, “we reads,” over top a design with circle in center and 4 lines forming arch around the circle. Bottom text reads, “Literature that nourishes us.”
We Reads came together through the recognition that an ongoing, living resource to help guide readers to significant works by and for BIPOC, especially one curated by BIPOC librarians, was deeply needed. In 2020, Nicholae Cline approached We Here with a project, in the hopes of leveraging the We Here community and their collective knowledge to create seasonal recommended reading lists, centering literature written for us, by authors like us. Once the seeds of this idea were planted, they quickly took root and grew into a homegrown and BIPOC-focused initiative, nurtured through the careful cultivation and investment of our project team.
Throughout 2020, Nicholae, Jen Brown, Crystal Chen, and Charlotte Roh met to discuss the mission and vision for this project and were eager to gather literature reflecting BIPOC voices, rather than books reinforcing white and colonial lenses of mainstream publishing. We were inspired by a number of reading lists out of the Black Lives Matter movement and other racial justice movements. In particular, we looked at the Racial Justice Bookshelf as a model while also realizing a desire to focus on and address the gap for recommendation lists for adult fiction. Particularly in this tough pandemic year when authors are not getting the exposure and sales they need, we hoped such an effort would be especially impactful.
“We Reads is, first and foremost, about highlighting BIPOC voices in literature. It is also deeply personal, and joyfully so: we read as our whole selves, bringing our identities and experiences with us when we enter the world of a story or poem. The works collected here have resonated with, shaped, and nourished us this year, changing us in ways we might not yet understand and living inside us as we once chose to live inside them.”
It shouldn’t be a surprise that, as a group of librarians, a lot of our discussion centered around how things would be organized, i.e., the tagging. We felt strongly that tagging should be inclusive rather than hierarchical — a book like Pachinko, for example, might be tagged as Asian, East Asian, and Korean fiction, and those tags would have equal weight. We also talked about how to identify authors thoughtfully and with respect, in balance with comprehensiveness, and ultimately decided that we should go by how authors identified themselves, either in official bios or through interviews to center how they feel most comfortable expressing their identities. Our approach to this is a work in progress, and will continue to evolve as we read, learn, and discuss.
For our launch, we decided to put together a list that focuses on books and stories that we read personally, in order to recommend works without hesitation. Because of this, and because of the limited time and bandwidth that we all had (2020 y'all), our first We Reads collection isn’t very long or exhaustive, though we firmly believe that the titles we selected are a beautiful representation of the excellent literature published this year. We welcome submissions and suggestions, and we hope to expand to include other voices and literary forms in the future.
Finally, we wanted this list to be impactful and to showcase the power of BIPOC authors and readers. To that end, the project is also a resource for library workers more broadly, serving as a useful readers’ advisory and selection tool. By prioritizing BIPOC voices, we hope that this will further disrupt the status quo in the publishing industry at large (see our Bookshop statement) and in libraries’ collecting practices as well, while also facilitating awareness of and access to incredible literature. We recognize that there are many ways to work towards liberation and justice and that white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy won’t be dismantled by putting together a list or whisked away simply through changing our reading habits. And yet we believe, nevertheless, that this project is a humble, yet meaningful, contribution to the ongoing work of radically transforming the world we live in. One page at a time.