all right legalistic will live. Sure hopefully, I think we're live hello hello booksellers, how is the Winter Institute going wellness? wellness check on books My name is Anton Bulga Maza. I am the adult book buyer at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington DC. Thank you. And it is my immense pleasure to moderate panel called Beyond the binary with me since I read Miranda July, dancy Santa and Le Darian Williams. So please welcome them. Thank you all for being here. I am hoping to discuss how contemporary fiction sort of invites the reader to see categories that we would normally see as binary as more fluid and less sort of set. I think those of you who were here in the morning and heard Michelle Williams, Michelle Norris, talk about kind of characters of people who do not fit in one box. So I'm hoping that we will cover some of that. And we sort of tried to ask her panelists what they experience writing such characters are. So I think I'm going to start with asking all of you to sort of briefly introduce yourself to booksellers, and tell us what your new book is about and sort of, this is a room of booksellers and they're going to be enthusiastically selling your books when they're out. So if you sort of put yourselves in our place, and if you're talking to a customer, what would you tell them about your book and sort of what it is and why they should read it. So we can just throw
it to lindera and we can I listened like my first time at the bookseller. I have to hear how everyone else pitches themselves. But just really quickly, I'm not sure why I'm on this panel, because all of my characters are cisgendered able bodied, then straight. So I mean,
your first,
I guess. Yeah. So I'm a Deron. Williams. I am the author of the upcoming why a debut Blood at the Root. My book is about a black kid named Malik Baron who gets accepted into a magical HBCU and he must go there to learn about his ancestral magic, but also he discovers that his mom went there and she's been missing for quite some time and now he has to investigate some people there because they have something to do with it. And yeah, this is my debut year. It's a YA contemporary fantasy and it comes out May seventh my job
Hi, I'm dancy Cena. And my novel that's coming out in July is called colored television. And it's a dark comedy about a novelist who is flailing in the Los Angeles and has written this 10 year Opus that her husband calls them a lotto Warren Piece and she sort of flops with it. Nobody wants it so she decides to try her hand in Hollywood and gets caught up with this network mogul who wants to make the greatest biracial comedy of all time. And of course, there is no other biracial comedy so the standards are very low, but it is about her identity as an artist, her marriage her children and her attempt to kind of market her identity sort of exploited herself for Hollywood gains and the kind of rise and fall of that situation. And it's my sixth book, and I've really been writing about the multiracial experience in America for a very long time. I feel like a dinosaur in some ways. And um, so that's kind of, I think the first place I enter the the question of the non binary is the racial non binary.
Good, good book. My name is Miranda July. And my book is called all fours. And I guess I was thinking about I was feeling the fact that as a woman, there's a lot of engagement with with your journey. As a young woman and as a woman who can reproduce and a lot of kind of over involvement in your body, and then that abruptly stops it middle age. I actually turn 50 In two days. And let's all sing to me now. I'm getting up. Don't do that. And so there's this kind of like, just imagine if you will be, you know, imaginative and imagine all the information. Stop. I'm kidding. I feel like some of you know this. And the path up ahead isn't really all that written and what there is, is very narrow, that you might conceive of yourself in this this kind of narrow second half of your life. And so this woman my character, she she, she sets out on a on a road trip but she doesn't. She you know, says bite her husband and child and is going to drive across the country the US, but she stops 30 minutes away from her house and checks into a motel and is secretly they're having a kind of different sort of journey. And yeah, and it's it's funny. Dirty as spicy Spicy. Fried, we liked that WORD. We like the WORD. Yeah, we
hope to be dirty. Anyways.
Yeah. So so glad to be here with all of you.
Hi. I'm Mason Ziad and I'm a comedian, disability advocate, friends and fellow and I have five other jobs, because it's really expensive being disabled in America, and I'm the author of shiny misfit. It's considered a middle grade book, but it's for all a it's literally for all ages. I'm an old school comic book fan, who wrote a graphic novel had to call it a graphic novel, but it's a comic. Like, we'll call a graphic novel because that's what parents want. And the central character is disabled. She has cerebral palsy, which is what I have. But often when you see any literature about disabled people, whether it's children or adults, it's usually not written by the disabled person. And especially when we get into kids lit it tends to be the parent lens, which can be really dangerous for kids instead of like, you know, the social disabled lens. So shaming misfits is very serious. There's nothing funny about now. It's a comedic romp about a girl with cerebral palsy, who I wanted to write a book about misfits because I'm a misfit, right? I'm Palestinian, I'm Muslim. I'm a woman of color. I'm divorced. I'm disabled. I'm from New Jersey. I am. And the tagline on the book is you can fit in or you can stand out and the idea of shining misfits was, why is it that whenever we see these disabled characters, the people that are friends with them they either do it because it's like, they're volunteering for the Girl Scouts patch, or their parents, like promise them something, but no one had to do wants to be friends with the kids and I wanted to write a character who liked me you either want to be my best friend or you're terrified. But where shiny misfits really fits in to the idea beyond binary is people think that if you're disabled, that's all you are. And what I say is the disco which is the disability community intersects with every single other community, right. So we're talking about poverty, we're talking about invisible disabilities like autism, diabetes, or a divergence. We're talking about race, and we're talking about queerness. But and I'm getting like a little huh, because I have CP so like I shake all the time I shake it like Taylor Swift, and I just need the billionaire income. So if we can work on that, but I think the most important thing about shiny misfits in this moment in time is I chose to write a book with no borders. So while a lot of people like to say the characters are American, she's not. There's no borders. There's no borders in this book. So instead of referring to race, like Arab or Latino, or African, we went back to the First Nations and we did elements like rose gold mahogany, sand, and I'm, I'm shaking because I know that like I don't want to take any space from my other authors. But I'm a Palestinian author, writing a children's book, and a world where at least 10,000 children have been killed in the last four months. And I feel like what shiny misfits does is it strips away all of those divisions without taking away the culture, the race, the color, we can't just make everybody the same color to make them equal. But like as a Palestinian author, I am telling everyone in this room, we are being silenced. We're being pulled off the shelves. And I think shiny misfits is a book that can save lives and can get parents who are claiming for a perfect kid to accept the mess that they have instead and celebrate that. So. Absolutely. I will. This is the last thing stop the genocide ceasefire now, you
know, yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. You wrote a middle grade graphic novel, but I actually think that it sort of relates to Den Z's work, because you also your work is known for them. So your work isn't known for like its examination of racial and cultural identity. So in this new book, is there something different from the previous novels like how, how do you did you write sort of this particular one
well, it's, you know, when I started writing in the 90s, about characters who resembled my own world, I'm half black and half white and have grown up in a time when those families people like me really were not anywhere represented. And so I had to write into a kind of void of like these people who have existed since the beginning of this country and through very, you know, dark and disturbing ways that people like me came to be but I'm have continued to exist but been called by different names. And so I think my work is all connected. My body of work is all connected in that it sort of writes this reality into existence but comes at it from very different angles. And I really am sort of in this book, really embracing the sort of comedy of multiracial illness and the end for me, comedy is only interesting when it's undercut by rage and sadness. And you know, I love what you were saying they soon because it really feels like in kinship with what I'm thinking about, and I'm really in terms of this question of the non binary I'm, I'm not interested in neutrality, like non binary as neutral and I've always identified as a black woman have multiracial dissents a black woman with a white mother. Um, and so I came from a place of thinking of, of the non binary actually as a kind of more politicized and less just identity based thing but actually as you know, thinking of like Howard Zinn, and there's no you can't be neutral on a moving train and thinking about how not the non binary can be there to interrogate sort of systems of power and as a kind of lens to see the world that doesn't divide who's worthy of existing and who isn't. But I think this this book, for me is the most probably like bingeable comedic story, but I hope that like some of the the rage that's underneath it about bringing an identity into existence, would you
prefer the WORD I don't know? Intersectionality maybe or something?
No, I don't even mind the WORD I just, I just don't feel like identity politics are less interesting to me, maybe at this point in my life, then questions of, of money and power and embodies and what happens in people in the world when they're read a particular way.
I want to switch things up a little bit and talk to Miranda and Larian about things that we normally don't consider to be binary to begin with. So maybe like time in your life, or like where you are in your life or even your relationships. So Miranda, I think one of the calls we had you said something like marriage as a non binary thing. Oh, so I don't know if you want to maybe talk about how you would see like, oh, I continue continuum of like relationships and maybe a sexuality or identity.
Is this going to be my one shot? No, no, no, no, absolutely. Not I can talk about that but not if I'm not going to talk again. No, absolutely. Why don't you can talk? Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, I think there were a couple of things I mentioned. And one of them was I was sort of amusing because there is a non binary child in the book like my child, there's a bisexual men like mine, but those you know, kind of as you said, like we know about that understanding of it. And there were two other things that maybe are less thought of that way one was marriage. As something you usually think, well, you're you're married or you're not, right, you're married or you're divorced, and I guess I was like, well, since the whole invention of marriage is is you know, is based on things that don't really exist so much in our lives anymore. I mean, like the farm and a certain kind of shared labor and property and I mean, granted, that's all still there, every property, but I mean, the structure I think we're generally trying to undo those structures, but not marriage. I mean, marriage holds and I guess, in this book, I try and explore like, what if, what if we made it more like what we wanted? You know, and particularly for a woman like what if you, you actually, like it feels so illegal to actually just sit and think I mean, when I was first writing the book, I just, you know, I'd meet with my friend every week and we would just say like, if we could have things be how we really wanted them to me, and we felt like such criminals and sluts and you know, and it just seemed like Well, but wait, you know, we're, we're, it's accepted that we're radical and as thinkers as as writers as artists, you know, it's it's so strange that in this one area, we feel we need to conform just to do the thing, you know, just to have the thing at all, just to be a mother, you know. And so, this book, you know, is was part of a process of, of just letting something fall apart that maybe didn't need to be held together in that way to hold love well.
Well, then you have a high school student who is essentially also a college student. So how like how does writing this character sort of felt for you?
Yeah, um, you know, writing Malik, I, I'm thinking about the 17 year old libertarian, who, you know, from where I'm from a lot of times black kids just have their innocence stolen from them. A lot of times and it's and growing up and growing up the way I did, you know, I didn't get to be a kid, you know, sometimes and, and it felt like Like it felt criminal like to even, you know, think about kid things and not worrying about like finances like, you know, because I'm live with a single mother and in worrying about not having this or that and so, I wrote Malik because college is such a when you we I guess when you graduate high school is such a a moment where you know, you're used to going to school like for me, I was used to getting up at a certain time going, getting on the bus, going to class talking with friends, you know, joking and cracking jokes with them, and going home and having a job and then going to bed and then re doing it all over. Again. But I also don't think we talked about a lot where when you graduate that is stripped away from you. And we're like, what do you do now? Like, you know, they tell you like learn, learn, learn and then when high school goes away, real life problems that in you know, and I feel like sometimes High School, don't teach you about like real life problems. And Salomon league deals with, you know, grief, he deals with having his childhood stolen from him. He's been also being that being replaced with magic. He has this certain thing about himself that he doesn't know where it came from. Where, who he's connected to. And also just, you know, in my time in life, you know, just being a black man in America like I don't know where my ancestors came from, and I don't feel connected a lot of times to just my history and and seeing that my family like older people just kind of like dying off in and we're losing that history. Like we don't you know, we don't collect photos. We don't collect stories. And so it's important for me for Emily to kind of graduate from one part of his life which is high school and to go into college but also literally learning about his ancestry and to figure out that he doesn't have to be one thing, right. And yeah, and you know, and obviously, for me, like, when I see a lot of black boy characters being written, they're always either playing basketball or football and they have to choose that or, sometimes to be a drug dealer to get their mom out of, you know, poverty. And it's like, no, he's not, that's not what he's reduced. He's literally learning about his ancestry. And so, and with that, he's learning. You know about he when he goes to college, he's opened up to a whole new world of penitente like, you know, Aladdin. He's literally opened up to a whole new world about you know, he is introduced to a non binary character and also a bisexual character. His roommate is going to be a bisexual black man from Alabama, and he's telling him, Look, you know, that's a black man who Dibble and dabble in both. You don't have to be one thing too. And he's going to learn that over the course of Blood at the Root and book two and book three, and hopefully more. So yeah. He
has magic powers and magic powers.
Yeah. And
Tom, it's so interesting to be on a panel called Beyond binary and talking to booksellers. Because when they see boats, like our books, they do try to pigeonhole it. Not Not anyone in this room, you're all cutting edge, right? About like, you know, as I'm a public speaker, and I do stand up comedy. So like, when I market myself I'll be like, Oh, women, and as far as comedy in this, and what I saw with SHINee, Mrs. They were like, it's a disabled look. I'm like, but it's also about race. It's also about friendship, it's also about health. It's also about so it's interesting to be in this room. And what's the challenge of how do you showcase our books when it doesn't this very obvious that was
actually my next question. Oh, no, you're good. You're great. No, no, you were both. Yeah, yeah. This is actually a perfect segue because I did want to say we are in a room full roomful of booksellers. And we do sell books and sort of tried to, I wanted to ask you like what your thoughts were on, selling them identities or marketing your book. Like if you feel constrained or maybe you want something to change, or
do some, I mean, I just want to see if people actually consult the communities that they're representing, right. So like, if you're doing this great, like, disabled thing for Disability Awareness Month and bookstore that bookshelves and like a wheelchair can even pass through your stacks, you're probably not doing it right. And I know that there are challenges and I know that everything is financially challenging. And so I think it's really important to not be shy about reaching out to the communities that you're trying to represent. And saying, like how do we get in like kids who never thought of coming into this store? How do we reach out to a non verbal community that just eats up these boots that we don't know how to communicate in the traditional ways with? So I think it's really important when you're marking these things, to really look beyond like that box of like, Where can I put the book in two separate sections? Can it be here and there like we've seen that, but I think the key is, consult the community. You can't read every single book. I understand that. So then lean on the community and savvy, who can we consult to make this better? And if you can't find anyone else, reach out to the offers other than me, these people are bored. They're just pretending to have writer's block for hours on end. They will answer your call.
Yeah, you know, for me, I asked you know, I've been asking cuz Blood at the Root actually started off as a TV show. And you know, Hollywood is going to Hollywood, because but I was asking a lot of the tough questions because you know, when I was in high school, literally, like Twilight was taking on divergent Hunger Games like that was like the why a boom right? But being a black boy from Alabama with a country Twain like I didn't see, you know, myself and Percy Jackson or I love those books. Don't get me wrong, but I didn't see myself in them. And so now as I was writing blended the route, I was asking the tough questions. Where are the black boys that doesn't deal with police brutality and are getting literally murdered? Every and those stories are important, don't get me wrong, but we got to let we got to let Black Boys live in because I have a nephew and and I want him to grow up and say like, wow, look, that boy looks like me. And he gets to live and he gets to fall in love and he gets to have an adventure. You know, that's, that's, that's the mission that I'm on and in it, it's sometimes it feels lonely to talk about it. But you know, I'm gonna keep asking those questions and I want to ask booksellers and, and other you know, other people that you know, are interested in both the end and seeing now that people like I'm on social media, like tick tock and Twitter and like when I when I talk about that. They're like, I didn't I didn't think so. I didn't think about that. And it's like, that's some really cool privilege to have. You don't have to think about that. But I do I still I still think about I don't I don't want to see my black boy character. Go through that. And be in literally be killed to teach racism. No, that's not what his life is. That's not what his life is about. No, he's going to this black boy is going to learn his magic. He's going to fall in love. He's going to have adventures, he's going to mess up. He's going to make mistakes. But those mistakes are not going to cost him his life to teach readers about racism.
And we're not exaggerating at all about how much these like what are considered as a box are risky. Books are like people are terrified of these books. Schools are afraid to carry a book that has a Muslim character, or a non traditional character, or they'll hide behind the idea of like something complicated like danzi that discusses race. They're like, well, we can't put that book here. How are we? So we really are dealing with a time of censorship, like I don't think we've seen since like McCarthyism, with votes and the responsibility in this room to take the risks on the books that everyone tells you. Nobody's gonna buy this it's too niche. We're not nice. You know why we're not nice? Because it's good. The writing is good. Outside of our identities. These are top notch books, because we all have to work so much harder than the average Joe and by that I mean literally a guy named Joe. He's younger, and he gets everything that we have to struggle for.
Gen Z Do you have Yeah,
I mean, since you're six, so that's my sixth book. And you know, what I wrote Caucasian my first book it was like, literally, there was no representations of multiracial, black white characters that were not tragic and did not end up dying at the end. The tragic mulatto was what I was writing against and, and have continued to try to write sort of the full complexity and human experience of characters of mixed race that like you were saying, you know, we aren't just there as like a symbol for Martin Luther King Day like our life is more and we're gonna sorry, we're messed up and we're no
they have adult books. You can say
the being of the non binary like these, the woman in my book in the last many books I've written like they are, it's not clear, you know, whether they're on the right side all the time, and they're, they're kind of morally non binary. Like I'm really interested in characters. Who are making mistakes and who are often you know, it's not clear who's the victim who's the oppressor, who's exploiting who. And so I'm one of the, you know, best compliments I had as a writer and, you know, one of my other books came out and someone came to my reading a mixed race woman and said, I'm reading your work was the first time I realized being biracial was its was a race and that it was a thing in and of itself and thank you for like writing our, our, you know selves into existence and so I continued to do that in many different ways. But, as you talked about, so well, like, this isn't a character who's betwixt in between and whose life is like about am I black, or am I white? She's trying to like, figure out how to get rich in Hollywood. The different situation different set of problems. Yeah. Miranda,
I think if you want to follow this up, because your character, I think, is also a woman kind of, I don't know between two times in her life and she also is maybe making some mistakes or
no, she's perfect. Now, yeah, I mean, you know, I started writing this book when I was about 45. And I remember I was having conversations with other women really smart some of those smarter women, I think there are and we all were super dumb about what was happening with our bodies. And we were dumb because our doctors were dumb. They didn't they hadn't actually been trained. They had been taught about perimenopause, or menopause. But we were in we were well in perimenopause. I mean, frankly, in your late 30s, you know, you might not be thinking about that, but it's already started. And, and so and it's it's a huge, you know, hormones regulate, so they regulate your emotions and everything in your body. So if you're feeling, you know, a little funny, you maybe don't have to like maybe the way science has supported other aspects. It could also support women, this this, this little niche group. And so I initially just started researching, researching. Stuff that weirdly near the end of when I was writing my book, suddenly there was like a front cover New York Times Magazine article called Women had been misled about menopause. And I was kind of like, whoa, I'm really glad I took a left turn there and decided not to make my whole book about breaking that story that our real journalists could break. And at a certain point, when I was all filled up with all the facts, I thought, Oh, well, I'm a novelist, actually. And a fiction writer I can. I can have this woman get it kind of wrong, because usually you do like you look, you look at these things through your own lens. All she cares about is that her libido is dropping, and maybe there's some stuff she wants to do before that happens, you know? And is it really is that the facts you know, like, I'm not but but that wasn't my job. You know? What is libido? Like? How is it Isn't it okay? Anyways? And so it became really, really exciting when I realized like, oh, it's it's this funhouse mirror look at something that is biological but and that's the best way to look at it because not one of you will get it right and also not one of you will have the same experience as or has had the same experience as another woman. So in a way that's the hardest thing for medicine to deal with. You know, that's why man and they're, they're a little more I mean, they're all different, but they're a little more orderly with, you know, their their bodies and it's, it's that's how you can't test anything on women. So you just do it on men and then you give it to women, and if it doesn't work, you don't know why. It doesn't matter. So, anyway, so the novel takes you through that territory. And it is I think, perimenopause just is non binary because it's a transitional time. But it's it's like a decade, you know, so it'd be kind of a weird thing not to think about it to, to, you know, my mom said it was no big deal. But I guess I think maybe it should be a big deal. And in that kind of, almost like spiritual biblical, like it could be really significant for who you're trying to become.
I think it's so important to know that when you're dealing with books like these books, we can only tell one story, right? So you're telling one black man story I'm telling one disabled or Muslim or extraordinarily Kardashian looking Jersey girl's story, and I think that the pressure on us is to represent the whole community. So like, I read all my reviews, you're not supposed to read them. I read them I sit up i i talked to Esther in the reviews we chat and people are so disappointed that I refuse to explain the disability of the character. And they're like, We don't understand this cerebral palsy. Why won't you give us a medical definition? And I'm like, look it up. So like it's also not our job to represent every single aspect of the community, or to apologize about the fact that you don't understand every single inside joke. Some of the jokes are not for you. Like my book has 148 Easter eggs, 23 of them, only people who grew up with me on the Jersey Shore are gonna understand like, that's the reality. Not everything is for everybody, but I dislike when people would ask me, and this was never my extraordinary publisher Scholastic, because let me tell you, the patients imagine working with me, but when they would ask me, not my editors, but other people. Is this a book for disabled kids or for non disabled kids? And I was like, it's a book for everyone. Why do you think that we can only write for our culture? Why when we've defaulted to having like 98.999% of the characters be visibly able bodied? Do we not get the chance to tell stories to you, we listen to your stories. It's your turn to listen to ours. And that's and that's why we say it's got to be quality first, right? Because it's like, this is a book for everyone, not because everyone can find themselves in. But because the themes of like you said, parents who fail friendships, school, doughnuts on fire and a talking cat. These are all things that we can personally identify with. stalking you ever talking cat Absolutely. Talk to them, because nonverbal cat exist and they deserve respect.
Without actually, we have about seven minutes left. So what I wanted to sort of concluded with is sort of a wish list of sorts.
I wouldn't sell tickets.
I mean, yes. But in books or in publishing, do you have something you want to see more off?
I every time I see my book, and I share it and talk with people about it. I just remember me going I live in LA and I remember me going to the Burbank like a bourbon bookstore like Barnes and Noble in I was just trying to get back into reading because I stopped reading for years because I just got tired. And I asked the lady I was like, Hey, I'm just looking for books with black boys on the cover. And she took me to the white eight section. She looked up and down. I looked up and down. We found one but again, it was dealing with police brutality. I was like, and this was during the riots like this was during like the Civil War. So I was like, I can't do it. I can't do it. And she kept looking up and down. I kept looking up and down and I was just like, this is a problem. So imagine like a 17 year old kid now. A black boy from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida or New York wherever and they like they just want to see themselves you know represented in YA fantasy. Like, why can't they just be on the books I wish that I want to see a bookshelf full of black boys on them and they're in power and glory and they're doing cool stuff like that's that's my wish, you know, for the publishing industry.
I think, you know, I'm always interested in there but there are a lot of complex you know, funny, idiosyncratic black family dramas and black and biracial family dramas. That was one of the things I wanted to write about a family like the one in my book, where they're both black creative artists who don't have a lot of money and are trying to raise children in a very expensive city and be continued to make art. But I'm also interested in more comedy in fiction about race and identity. And, you know, I guess just like, putting out there that comic literature is some of the hardest things to write. I mean, I'm a professor and I teach Grade writing and it's, it's really hard to write a comic novel and it's very serious business. And like, it's very, to me like comedy is like, up here. It's one of the highest tones to reach and it hits every other emotional state and ironi being such an important non binary quality in work. So just to kind of see more of that and allowing for that and seeing that is very, very important as a kind of voice we need in these very serious times. They can speak to these times
around to do hover. Yeah,
we're talking about that. Yeah, it's funny. I I look out at this audience that I actually for once in my life feel like you guys are just gonna do a great job of this. This particular but I don't always feel that way. But I feel like
I feel like the power holders in this world are are just right. I don't I don't know. I just I just feel like these you guys are. I'm seeing a lot of women seeing women who are not young, they're not identified by their use in a way that I think is really exciting. You know, like women who know stuff and who run businesses and make it work and that's not easy with a with a bookstore. And so I guess I just I don't I'm second all the things you're saying but i i I also sometimes make movies and that's a very, I don't have that feeling. It is truly so male dominated and I'm always trying to come up with a thing to say that's gonna make them comfortable enough to sell me that so I'm not like icky or something. And and I guess I just I'm just noting that so if you're doing and that means a lot because actually the whole time I was writing I was like, pretty, this could go very badly. And like I could just do this whole transition. And people could think I'm young for quite a while and it could, that could be more graceful, but I wasn't sure what the what the huge reward was. of doing that. Like maybe I would get ignored less meanly. If I didn't make a big deal out of it. So I guess I felt like I'll take my chances and it's on you. You know that I did that. And I feel
hopeful. I know some of you have already read it so and and are excited to sell it so absolutely. may sue me when I finished.
I was just as long I have so much less faith in you all that Miranda does so I'll start with the wish list and having all the events that you do and the outreach that you do virtually be accessible. So like shiny misfits, our audio book is coming out the exact same day as our print book to make it thank you can make it accessible to blind students to kids who have intellectual disabilities, to people who just like having something read to them, and to people why here Dave Matthews be the cat's voice because he is. So that wish came true already in Hamdulillah. But what I would say is I'll just circle back my whistlers to the VNA. You have to amplify authentic voices, because with great power comes great responsibility. And the reality is this room isn't as diverse as it could be. So you have a lot of power to amplify voices that aren't your own. And I would start with saying this year, especially 2024. I want you to look for Palestinian voices to amplify. We are not just being censored in silence. We have entire families being wiped off the registry. Their stories will be gone forever if we don't tell those stories. So please get shine misfits. Of course, that's first get that book and then look around and amplify the voices who are being silenced. All the voices that are being silenced in this nation right now. It's a lot. It's a heavy lift, but the quality is there and is your job to rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light and amplify our voices. Thank you
for all children regardless of faith.
Thank you all so much for being here and for such a great conversation. Thank you booksellers I hope you enjoy the rest of your Winter Institute.
