Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Well we have made it to the final days of the calendar year which means that it's time for one of my favorite traditions our annual yearbook episode The team, and team in this case means me, my producer Mel Webb, and our script editor slash my high school bestie Josiah Lamberto Egan. Together we gathered some of our favorite moments and superlatives from this past year and this year it carries some special meaning to take a look back because this episode also serves as a proper send off before I take a little rest and the show goes on a bit of a hiatus for the winter don't worry though we've got some very exciting things cooking for when we return later in 2026 so for now settle in and let's revisit the year together my name is Jordan Lloyd Bookie and this is the reading culture a show where we speak with diverse authors about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities we dive deep into their personal experiences and inspirations. This show is made possible by Beanstack, the leading solution for motivating students to read more. Learn more at beanstack.com, and make sure to follow us on Instagram at the reading culture pod, and subscribe to our newsletter for bonus content at the readingculturepod.com forward slash newsletter.

Now, let's get to those awards. Outside of my studio here in Washington DC, 2025 has been a year defined by fierce political battles. So to open this yearbook episode, we've chosen a fighter. Zapatistas once wrote that artists are essential to building a, quote, culture of resistance, unquote, a revolutionary idea from an indigenous activist movement in Southern Mexico fighting for autonomy and human rights. Aida Salazar has lived up to every inch of that ideal.

And so to her, I present the most revolutionary award. Aida shared with us what it meant to grow up between Mexico and The United States, returning over the years, finding community, and discovering how art could become a form of activism.

Aida Salazar: Well, I was born in Mexico in a place called Zacatecas in a Pueblo. And my parents brought me and my three older siblings with them when I was about nine months old to The United States. I grew and I spent my entire childhood undocumented, surrounded by a community of many mixed status families, half documented, half undocumented like mine, and living in this kind of shadow and really could with this consciousness of being wrong and being illegal and being an alien. Those were all the different words that were used back then. And fearing the sweeps that sometimes came into our communities, knowing that we couldn't go back to see family.

Until closer to the moment when we actually gained residency, we got these provisional permissions to go across to visit family. And those experiences traveling back to Mexico were really, really fundamental and nourishing for me because I understood that I was bigger than this otherness. I was connected to people and and a culture and a language that was loved and celebrated in another part of the world where I came from, which was not in The United States. Although, I did grow up in a very predominantly Mexican community. I graduated in 1994, and at that year, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation came to the world's consciousness.

They they uproze in Mexico, and it was a revolution. Like, it was the first activist group that used the Internet, and they've gained so much so much support. And because we were Mexican in Los Angeles, there was a group of artists that I kind of banded together with, and we became an artist collective. And there was a band at the time called Rage Against the Machine, and the lead singer of Rage Against the Machine was Zach de la Rocha, a Chicano, who had this art space that he funded. And a bunch of us would go there, and we started organizing fundraisers.

And they were all these mixed media shows, so we would collaborate with visual artists or musicians. And we would just create we had a radio station. We had, like, all sorts of different projects that we did. That time period was so foundational for me and so formative because the Zapatistas, one of their many writings, they said that we needed to create a culture of resistance and that we needed the artists. We needed the creatives in the world to help us build this culture of resistance, and I took that to heart.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Now normally on the show, I'm asking our guests to share their stories, but this next award actually starts with me telling the guest an anecdote of my own about the time my family met him at a library conference. It was a small moment, but one that spoke volumes about this writer's kind, humble charm. I asked him if he remembered it and his answer shows exactly why this year's most gracious award goes to, drum roll please, Jerry Craft.

Jerry Craft: Going to ALA where there's, like, 3,000,000 screaming librarians, you know, all all wanting to take selfies and stuff, you know. So, like, you decompress and you go there and then it's boom boom boom boom and selfies and this and that. And I try to be accommodating, unless I'm really in a hurry to do something, I'm gonna miss a panel or something.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I will stop and engage and take selfies and, you know, sign autographs for kids and that kind of stuff. I met you a few years ago. I just said, oh, hey. Turned around like it's Jerry Craft. I think that's you know, you're Jerry Craft.

And you were like, yes. My kids love your work.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You said, oh, great. What are their names?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Then you just took out a little I didn't ask. You just took out these two little sheets of paper and made them each a little drawing, which we have hanging up now.

Jerry Craft: Right. Because it's it's like, you know, how long did that take out of my life?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Right.

Jerry Craft: You know, like, what could I have done that would have been better?

Aida Salazar: You know

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: what I mean? Yeah.

Jerry Craft: In that, like, five minutes that we engaged and for me to sign an autograph to your kids, how could I have used that time better? Then you go home and you take it to your kids. Like, oh, mom, and you get your mom cool points.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I get my cool points. Some readers love a book and some readers really love a book. And some readers grow up to become the kind of author they once fangirled over For transforming her readerly devotion into a career of her own, best fangirl turned author goes to Becky Albertalli.

Becky Albertalli: So one of my biggest influences, you know, as a writer, as a person, just to my core is the Babysitter's Club. I read every single one. I actually read the Babysitter's Little Sister, like the ones about Karen.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, that's the next level. Okay.

Becky Albertalli: I've been with the Babysitter's Club since I was seven or something. And I think that is fundamentally a very queer series. Those books were published during a particular cultural moment, but I think they have aged remarkably well. And I think, you know, there is a kind of queerness about them that I think a lot of, like, queer kids or kids who would you know, adults who would eventually come to realize that they were queer saw something in that series that felt safe.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. Now as most of you probably know, each guest on the show reads a passage that changed them, and Becky's choice was an easy one. Jacqueline Moriarty, a writer who's been a major literary influence throughout her life.

Becky Albertalli: One of the things that was such a revelation to me was the, specificity of the voice, that quality that people sometimes within publishing will talk about, like, voiciness. You know? That feeling that you kind of are hearing this character, like, speak to you directly. I just, like, really picked it off the shelf and gave it a shot out of nowhere as I was bravely walking toward the You section, section, like, willing to be seen there. You know?

I was, like, just old enough that I understood that, like, you could actually, like, read these books. You know? Reading her books, and this was the first of hers that I had read and I have since read. I have, like, a massive shelf just, like, full of her books. Like, I remain a super fan for life.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: This next author grew up in the long shadow of Argentina's military dictatorship, a time when writers were censored, exiled, or worse, disappeared. Listening to her describe that history and how easily it can echo forward into our own present, well, it's a powerful reminder that the past isn't as far away as we'd like to imagine, which is why we're giving best reminder of history repeated to Shamile Saeed Mendez.

Yamille Saied Mendez: So during the dictatorship, so many authors were banned, and a lot of authors, they were exiled Mhmm. From Argentina. Alma Maritano, Marie Elena Walsh were two authors who had to either stop writing or move to another country. Madeline and Walsh lived in France and in Europe for many, many years just to be safe. And so the books that we used to learn how to read and write were these primers that had abstracts or excerpts of stories.

And sometimes I would get so immersed in the story, and I didn't I never even knew how it ended or who had written it or what the title was of that piece. And then later on as an adult, I was able to put all this information together and know that a lot of the books that and stories that I love belong to Alma Maritano or Laura David Taj, who was the daughter of Russian immigrants. And they wrote about everyday things, but for the government, they were dangerous topics because they talked about freedom and the right to read and write, and those were all things that were threatening for the government.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: So they would take small parts excerpts of their Yes. Work so that you didn't get the full message, but you loved these little pieces of them.

Yamille Saied Mendez: Yes. And so a lot of the things that I wrote at that age were kind of, like, finishing the story that I got a glimpse of.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You know, it just occurs to me that during your own childhood and your own coming of age, and when you're kind of beginning to conceive of yourself maybe as a writer, you know, it was actually a dangerous time to be a writer in Argentina. You know? I mean, authors were physically exiled.

Yamille Saied Mendez: The unlucky ones were disappeared. Right. That is part of the cultural trauma that has affected me in my life even though nobody in my family was evicting directly. But in our society, it's such a big wound Yeah. That, of course, it affected how I think about story, how I think about writers and teachers and librarians who were so brave to still share these stories even if they had to photocopy them or tell them orally until they became part of the myth Yeah.

Of our country.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You must have a very like, a broader lens in a way for what's happening right now around book bans in this country.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Because it's like, I think you are descended from people who have really lived and experienced, and you have, like you said, this sort of, like, inherited trauma that you have seen at the real extreme of the extreme, I think, the extreme of what it could be. Right?

Yamille Saied Mendez: Yes. I feel like sometimes we feel like those stories are so foreign to us. Okay. It happens in another country. Yeah.

It happened half a century ago, but democracy is so fragile. And we do have to protect it in every generation because it's so easy to forget that those rights were very difficult to attain.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Few moments stopped me in my tracks this year while doing research for episodes. But listening to Vashti Harrison's twenty twenty four Caldecott acceptance speech did just that. In our conversation, Vashti explored how she used that spotlight to honor every artist who'd helped her rise, a generous, grounded, unforgettable tribute. For embodying that spirit, this year's most likely to pay homage goes to Vashti Harrison.

Vashti Harrison: I think people describe my, like, entry into the book world as the sort of, like, meteoric rise. I attribute that ease through which I entered this industry to all of the work that many people have been doing, all the groundwork that people have laid over, like, ten years prior. So the we need diverse books and the own voices movements in the publishing industry to make the runway for me to take off like that. The first thing they told me about winning this Caldecott medal is that I'm the first black woman to win this award, and that didn't make any sense to me. There are many people who have come before me, especially people who have been given the Caldecott honor, including friends of mine.

So Right. Before you give me all that praise, let's acknowledge that there's so many people here who absolutely could have and should have won that award, including, like, at the time, a living legend, Faith Ringgold. And it made a lot of sense that I entered publishing with this book, Little Leaders, that celebrated black women in history and that I wouldn't be where I am without the work of so many of those people that it was absolutely important to acknowledge all of the the seven black women that had been given a Caldecott honor before me. But, yeah, I think in terms of, like, my own personal influences, I think I'm still developing as a creator. I think my work has changed a lot over the last eight years because I'm still learning.

I'm still finding new ways to express myself. And I think I'll probably continue to do that, but I think it definitely is important for me to study the people who have come before me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Not everyone is lucky enough to have a grandmother who shows up in faux fur with care packages and a lifetime of stories, but Jewel Parker Rhodes did, which is why we're awarding her the grandma's hands award.

Jewell Parker Rhodes: She took basically became the mother, the head of the household for her two children who were single parents.

Aida Salazar: Mhmm.

Jewell Parker Rhodes: And if she had not made that sacrifice, it would have been terrible. I was at Carnegie Mellon and she would bring me care packages because I didn't have very much money at all. And so she would like get dressed up like she was going to church at this fake fur coat and fake fur hat because she was coming to the university.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. And Carnegie Mellon, if you've been to Pittsburgh, it's like it is its own Yes. You know? It it feels separated. You know?

I mean, it is like and you like, literally, you have to go up the hill to walk to the you know?

Jewell Parker Rhodes: That's it. Yes. And, actually, the thing that's interesting is I'm now a member of the board of trustees of Carnegie Mellon,

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: which Amazing.

Jasmine Warga: Wow. That. Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Probably your grandmother. But

Jewell Parker Rhodes: Maybe. She would bring me the canned goods so I wouldn't starve, you know. But grandma was part minister's wife, part hoodoo lady, and so she taught me a lot about spirituality. But I got to talk to her and say, you know, grandma, I'm gonna write stories. Like for real, I'm gonna try professionally.

But I had switched my major from drama to English. And she was just cackling because by then, you know, I wanted to write about, you know, the ancestors and Marie Laveau. I was uncovering my African American history. So I I got to tell her that. And then a week later, when she was walking in Shinley Park with some other little cousins of mine, I forget which degree, she either had a heart attack or a stroke.

And there were two hospitals, one Allegheny General, which probably had all the medical equipment that she needed in the ER, and then a Catholic hospital, which my grandmother said take me there because it was the first hospital to admit black doctors and allow them to practice there. And I was told they had to take her in the elevator and she died on her way up for the elevator. Now how much exactly this is all truth, I have no idea, but that's part of the mythos of what I was told. But I got to tell her that I was gonna tell stories. And given that she was an oral storyteller and she told me tons of stories, I think she recognized there was this connection then between us, that she was passing storytelling to me, And I was using storytelling to discover me as well as deepen my empathy and understanding of other people and of the world that I lived in.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: After 800 school visits, Soman Shanani has developed some pretty strong opinions about reading and about what's at stake when kids stop reading, and he does not sugarcoat it, which is why this year's best reading advice for kids award goes to Soman Chernani.

Soman Chainani: Everyone is so much more capable than what adults think they are. And so rather than have them progress too quickly into the adult world, which is what is happening to kids these days

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Right.

Soman Chainani: I think it's important for us to give them stuff at their level that actually satisfies the itches and urges and thoughts and secrets and fantasies and desires they have. But you have to be bold enough to do it and not pretend it doesn't exist. Otherwise, I guarantee you they're gonna be surfing the Internet for stuff that is actually damaging to them. I've done it over 800 school visits. And before, it used to like I said, it used to be more about trying to get them to read my book.

Now I really do go into an in-depth thing that I think kind of scares them sometimes, but they have to hear it, which is you have two choices in your life. You either can have your own brain and imagination. Like, you're gonna have to hold on to it and have it be something that works for you and that you're your own person. Or if you stop reading too early or at all, you lose it. And for the rest of your life, you're being programmed by other people's imagination.

Jerry Craft: Mhmm.

Soman Chainani: And you are now a consumer and sort of a slave to other people's visions. Right? So you'll never get your own version of Harry Potter. You'll never get your own version of Percy Jackson, whatever. You're just gonna watch the movie, and you're never gonna get the version that was yours because you can only get that by reading.

And it seems hard to pick up a book and read it. But if you only see it as educational Yeah. Then, of course, this could be boring, and no one wants to do it. But if you see it as the one and only way to, like, truly have a mirror into what you see, what is you, then you realize how you don't have a choice. You know?

And if you look at everybody you ever admire in your life, creator, athlete, entrepreneur, anybody that you admire, I guarantee you, they all read. The other thing I tell kids is books are not there to torment you. You go to the library. You give it 10 pages. That's it.

The author has to get you in the first 10 pages. If they do not, they failed. Don't read it. Mhmm. Find something else.

Because a book is like a lawnmower. Like, you pull it, and, like, either it starts or it doesn't start.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Right.

Soman Chainani: And so I tell them, I'm like, you don't wanna read my book? Try the first 10 pages. If you wanna keep going, keep going.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: When Erin Entrada Kelly came back for her second chapter conversation this year, I realized that I was sitting down with someone who had been through a lot since we last talked. Erin shared with me about her cancer diagnosis, the aggressive treatment, the aftermath, and the strange in between space that she's been living in as she figures out how to move through the world in this new version of herself. And so while the award we're giving her today isn't for all that change, we did want to give her an honorable mention for most changed. But the award she's taking home, that's for scariest story. And trust me, once you hear it, you'll understand why.

Erin Entrada Kelly: This is a 100% true story. Years ago, I was staying at the Montelion Hotel in New Orleans, and I was on the 14th Floor. So I was by myself. And in the middle of the night around 3AM, I was awakened by the fire alarm. It was blaring, blaring, blaring so loud.

I get out of bed. I open the door. I peek down the hall. There's no one in the hall, but the lights are flashing. The alarm's going off, and I think, great.

I'm gonna have to walk down to the you know, evacuate the building. I mean, that's what you do. So I start walking down 14 flights of stairs, and I have to plug my ears because that's how loud the fire alarm is. And I'm walking, but I'm the only person in the stairwell, which I think is odd because this is a hotel in the French Quarter. Okay?

So I get to the bottom, and my ears are ringing from the fire alarm. I open the door to the lobby, and I step into the lobby. And there are people in there, and they turn and look at me quizzically because I'm wearing my pajamas. Hair is looking crazy, and I'm covering my ears. And it's the middle of the night.

And this employee walks up to me, and he says, do you need help with something? And I said, I came down because of the fire alarm. And he said, what fire alarm? No way. And I said, the fire alarm that just went off.

My ears are still ringing from the alarm. And he says there was no fire alarm. And I say there was definitely a fire alarm because the lights were flashing. So he took me over to the manager. And he asked the manager, was there a fire alarm?

And the manager tells me there was no fire alarm. I find out later that there had been two fires on the 14th Floor of the Montelion Hotel. One of them was in the early nineteen hundreds, and the other one was in, I think, the nineteen sixties on that same floor. Shut up. No.

Yes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I don't like that. I don't like it at all. I don't like that story. I did not like that story. Oh.

Erin Entrada Kelly: It's 100% true.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That is why you're by yourself?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Were you like, I'm not going back to that room?

Erin Entrada Kelly: No. I went back and I went to sleep.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You're like, honey, it's 2AM. I'm going back to bed. That's a wild story. Love and loss are a package deal. If we live long enough, we're inevitably going to feel both.

And yet, knowing that doesn't make it any easier. Most of us still never quite know what to say when someone is grieving or what to tell ourselves when we are the ones suffering. This year, two authors offered a simple but striking guidance for those moments and we wanted to remember both. So our next superlative has two recipients. First up as co winner of the best advice for dealing with loss is Gail Foreman.

Gayle Forman: So now whenever anybody tells me about having lost somebody, whether it was a parent when they were younger or somebody recently, the first thing I do is I ask for a specific story. I ask, like, oh, tell me, like, what were they like? Tell me, like, a funny thing that happened. And it's amazing because without exception, people are so comforted by that. And I've heard from people how grateful they are because there's a reluctance in our culture to engage with death and the dying and and the dead like that.

People wanna steer clear. They they don't wanna pry they wanna give you space and privacy, and it doesn't invite opportunity to sort of reignite the memory of that person and reignite the love. So it was a real learning experience for me. It sort of changed how I go about dealing with other people's loss. And then when it came to afterlife, it was a very specific that was really the core of the book, which is how some people estrange themselves from the dead because it's too painful and what that does to them and how other people weave them into their lives just in a different way.

Like, they still exist and they still have a relationship. It's a different kind of relationship, but it's still a relationship.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: The second, and to be clear, a second, not second best, award for best advice for dealing with loss goes to Kate DiCamillo. Because in her second chapter conversation, Kate reminded us in that knowing wise way that she does that loving anyone or any dog means opening ourselves up to losing them. And still she argues, that's the whole point.

Kate DiCamillo: Loving a dog is the primer for how to be in the world because of, you know, the differences and it's like that joke, bought a dog. Congratulations. You've purchased a tragedy.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I've never heard that, but that is very accurate.

Kate DiCamillo: Because they're you know, the numbers don't add up our way. And so what you're confronted with that so starkly when you lose a dog, and the first response is always, I'm not gonna do that to myself again. I'm not gonna sign up for that. And then it only takes a minute for the other voice to say, well, what's the point in being here then if you're not gonna love? And it also so clearly shows you how to love means that you are going to lose.

Full stop. And so what does that mean? You're not gonna do it? You know, it's like, again, what's the point in being here? I always think about a guy that used to sit down by the coffee shop and I would walk by this was the dog before Ramona.

It was Henry. And he would always this guy would always want to show me the picture of his dog that he lost twenty years ago.

Jerry Craft: Mhmm.

Kate DiCamillo: And he was so brokenhearted and he couldn't get another dog. And I always wanted to say to him, but now you've been twenty years without a dog and it's just like it's that math. It's just like all those twenty years you could have been loving a dog, you know? You have to keep on loving. It hurts and it's everything that makes life worthwhile.

And dogs are just like the walking arithmetic of that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: On the other side of loss, there is life and Jasmine Warga has a gift for reminding us of that. So to her, we award most uplifting.

Jasmine Warga: It's pretty amazing to me that I'm pretty sure my earliest childhood memory is of me sitting on my grandma, my father's mother's lap, and she's telling me a story. And I only met her two times in my whole life. She came to visit us in Cincinnati. And she was telling me a story about mermaids that live in the Dead Sea. And I remember this feeling of, like, she's sharing something with me that's important about our family.

And then what I remember the most is that at the end of the story, she asked me to tell her a story about my home in Ohio, and I think that was her way of sort of teaching me that storytelling is sharing. Right? And it's the way that we can communicate about things that matter to us and things that we love. And definitely, like, my dad told my brother and I so many stories about his childhood, though in a similar way, I think, that to lots of people who have immigrant parents who have experienced pretty big traumas. It's also my dad is reticent to share certain things, and I've had to pull them out of him as an adult who understands more to be able to ask more, like, questions.

So, like, I was told a lot of, like, silly stories as a kid and good war and those are important. But then I as I became an adult, I had more, like, draft questions about childhood. And I really remember when I was about a teenager and we were visiting Jordan, and I was begging to see the old apartment where they used to live. It was in the, like, old side of Amman on the East side of the city. And my dad, he finally caved and drove us there, but he wouldn't get out of the car.

He wouldn't go in. And I remember thinking, like, oh my god. This is so weird. But the apartment itself, you know, was so small. It was, like, smaller than my bedroom back home, which also was something I'd understood, but it's a different thing to, like, see it and see what it looked like.

But getting him to actually, like, really talk about real concrete details of his childhood is much harder than some of these, like, family stories or Arabic proverbs or things that, like, those were the types of stories Mhmm. That are fun, right, that he would tell my brother and I like those kinda nighttime bedtime stories. But recently as an adult, I become really interested in wanting to know, like, real narrative stories from his childhood. But he's really firm about loving the country of

Jason Reynolds: Jordan

Jasmine Warga: and feeling like the country of Jordan gave him and his family this new life. It's funny. He's much, like, calmer than me when I'm, like, spitting out or feeling upset. Like, he really has this feeling of being, like, you know, our job is to live, which is something my grandma used to say to him all the time. And I think that's a really amazing thing.

And then also, think my brother and I can, like, feel differently because there's more like, we have more privilege and space to feel differently that, like, we are surviving. Like, we can ask for more of that and survive. And I think that that is obviously not unique to my family. I think in lots of ways that's the Mhmm. Kind of the immigrant straightaway that the first generation works, like, so hard just to have, like, stability and to live, and then it's the second generation that really gets to, like, dream.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: If we ever needed proof that Victoria Aveyard was destined to be, well, Victoria Aveyard, just listen to her talk about the stuff that fired up her imagination as a kid. The force was clearly strong with this one. So of course, she wins most defiant.

Victoria Aveyard: So I've always been into atlases and geography. I was the weirdo who would would go to the library and I'd go to the atlases. But something about the fantasy maps about this suddenly idea that you could create maps of your own of unreal places. That was the first time I really connected that. I think I was maybe six or seven.

And I started drawing fantasy maps of my own and the natural next step after you draw the map of, like, here's the castle, here's the mountain, here's the river. What's happening in this world? And that's when I started writing sort of stories of my own about what was going on in these fantasy worlds. So my first sort of approach to storytelling, at least telling my own stories, was as a way to build these worlds that I could control. And then naturally, okay, what's happening in them?

And I always gravitated towards stories even before I could read that were of these big immersive worlds. I was a big, you know, Star Wars kid that captured my imagination so early.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Can you speak a little bit more about Star Wars and like what was drawing you in at that time?

Victoria Aveyard: I actually I literally wrote a college essay about like the symbolism and visual element of Princess Leia and how foundational it was to me, and probably my personality is like a bossy little brunette girl. But one of the first images you see in A New Hope is Princess Leia, five foot two, staring up at the scariest looking person you've ever seen, Darth Vader, black helmet, black cape, black armor. And you're I'm, you know, four or five years old watching this tiny little girl square off on this guy and give him a what for and yell at him and argue with him and I'm like, hell yeah, girl. There's my personality. It's it just locked at five years old.

It's Princess Leia yelling at Darth Vader.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: As we shift gears into our next award, we'll leave you with that incredible visual courtesy of Victoria. Now it might not be possible to meet Darth Vader and Princess Leia in real life, but Tiffany d Jackson did get to meet one of her sheroes when she saw a sister soldier on the sister to sister tour back in her college days at Howard. We present Tiffany with the best meet your sheroes story.

Tiffany D. Jackson: She just blew my mind in terms of, like, how she, you know she was so prolific and profound, everything that she was saying. And I just was like, I stood online to get her book and have it signed. And keep in mind, I was a filmmaker at the time. I was a film major. I'm this is, like, second semester of my freshman year.

And I walk up to her, and I said, I wanna be a writer too. And I was like, where did that come from?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, it just came out

Tiffany D. Jackson: of you. I've never told anyone that. Their words just came out of me. And she was like, oh, okay. And she wrote a beautiful message in the book to basically, you

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: know What did say?

Tiffany D. Jackson: I think it says something along lines of like, you know, follow your dreams. You know, let me know when you're ready to talk. And she put her phone number in the book. And I think that's probably changed my perspective in terms of, like, how I wanna be an author, how I wanna author in life, how I wanna, like, present myself to kids.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Can you say a little more about that? Like, you mean more be more accessible? Is that sort of what you mean? Or be

Tiffany D. Jackson: Definitely be more accessible. Be more, you know, open to going to school visits because I do school visits all over the country. If I had known that there was authors like her in the world, I probably wouldn't have been so afraid to go after my own dream. But I think I go specifically and talk to kids and I especially in, you know, black communities because I want black kids to see that you can this is an achievable dream, that you don't have to completely change who you are to be what you want to be.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Our next award goes to an author famous for his illustrations who also writes gorgeous prose. He read aloud to us from the book he loved most as a kid, and it was remarkable how clearly this childhood favorite foreshadowed both his eventual skill for arresting visuals and his knack for musical poetic writing. Here's this year's poet and you didn't know it award winner Brian Selznick reading and discussing Ray Bradbury's the Martian Chronicles.

Brian Selznick: They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, And every morning, you could see missus k eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust, which taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons when the fossil sea was warm and motionless and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed and no one drifted out their doors, you could see mister k himself in his room reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphics over which he brushed his hand as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle. So like you read that as a 13, 14 year old and there's so much happening. Right?

There's this specific imagery of the science fiction of it. Right? This world that he's evoking on this planet, this foreign world that have things we know, crystals and spiders and books and oceans and fruit. But everything is combined in a way that you've never had it combined before. The spiders are electric and the books are crystal and and silver and like it just I could feel my mind shifting as I was falling into that language.

I felt like I could see and hear and taste what he was talking about. And he feels like he has a kind of rhythm to his language that feels musical. I'm not a musical person myself, but I think every single time I write any line of anything I'm working on, somewhere I'm thinking about Ray Bradbury. Or maybe I should say Ray Bradbury has offered me a space in which to work, in which to live. So I'm writing my rhythm.

I often know the rhythm before I know the words that go in the rhythm. So it's a little bit like writing lyrics to a tune. Can you say a little

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: more about that? I have

Brian Selznick: a sense that the that the sentence needs to be, but I don't know the words yet.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. I've never heard anybody say that. What do you mean?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Like, you have a sense of, like, you can see that you want it

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: to be, like, this long,

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: you mean? Or just, like, it's gonna kinda hit a cadence? I can feel the cadence.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay.

Brian Selznick: And it often happens at the end of a paragraph where I want to wrap something up for a moment, Then he looked out into the distance. Then he looked out into the distance. Right? So the so the out is the accent in that sentence in my mind.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Okay. I'm reading like the end of Run Away With Me, and it says, and the rose petals are falling, and miracles are real, and Rome is ours forever.

Brian Selznick: Right. And I knew that I was gonna have that last line. I knew that pretty early on, those words, and Rome was ours forever. But in terms of the rhythm of those last lines, because I knew and felt very strongly that and Rome was ours forever were gonna be the last five syllables, it became about finding the rhythm that leads up to it. But that, again, that's something that came from my reading and love of Ray Bradbury.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: As it turned out, Ray Bradbury was a fan of Brian's as well, and they met just once. Definitely check out our Brian Selznick episode if you want to hear him describe the magical afternoon that he spent communing with his writing hero. Sat ears y'all. It's time for the last award and that award goes to the person most likely to convince you to call your best friend immediately. Jason Reynolds has opinions about how we say I love you without the awkward mumbling at the end.

So the best friend advice award goes to Jason Reynolds.

Jason Reynolds: I say I love you to all my friends. Everybody. And to be very clear, I I wanna be clear about the way that we say I love you because I also make it a point there's no hedging or couching. Right? Because what happens with men's we will find a way to take whatever sting we feel is in it out of it.

Right? Some of my friends just say love, love, man. When they get the phone, love, bro. Hang up the phone.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yes.

Jason Reynolds: Right? And it's like, nah. I want it to be clear and direct. I love you Yeah. Aaron.

Right? And then let's just sit in it for a second. Right? And that's how it is. Right?

It's like, love you, man. I I love you. And he's like, I love you, man. I love you too. Yeah.

That's it. All the time. Every time I see him or talk to him. And that's all my guys, though. Right?

It's like, yo, love you. Love you too. Talk to you later. Yeah. Because I do.

Like, this is the thing I I've yet to sort of figure out. Right? The greatest doozy ever pulled on men has to be homophobia.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Jason Reynolds: It's like I don't want anyone to assume that when I say I love this man that I'm saying I'm attracted to this man. And the wild part is is that you are attracted to him because attraction is not about just a physical thing. All of my friends, I have been magnetized to. They're in my life because there is something attractive

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Jason Reynolds: About who they are, about their personalities, their spirits, constitutions, the way that they lead their lives, the way that they hold me down, the way that they care for their parents and their wives and children. Like, no. No. No. I am attracted to these people.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That's right.

Jason Reynolds: Right?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Attraction. Right. Exactly. Have you called your friends to tell them that you love them today? I mean, Jason Reynolds would want that for you.

As for me, it's time to sign off on the back page of the 2025 yearbook. Here we go. Thank you for an incredible year and for supporting our show. XOXO, Jordan. This was just a tiny snapshot of the inspiring generous authors we've talked to this year and there are so many more stories worth revisiting please visit the readingculturepod.com forward slash all to see all of the authors who visited the show over the past three years.

As you heard at the top of the show, we'll be taking a break over the next few months and gearing up for some exciting changes on the horizon.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: So from all of us

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: at The Reading Culture, we wish you a safe and happy holiday season, a happy New Year, and a year that is filled with lots of time for reading. That's right. Keep reading.