But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that … - Jesmyn Ward

I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children’s literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance — I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.

(What’s the last great book you read?) “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of America Capitalism,” by Edward E. Baptist. It taught me so much about slavery and how slavery enabled America to become America. Every time I left my house after reading it, I saw the world differently. I saw the legacy of human misery underpinning it all...(If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?) “The Half Has Never Been Told.” It’s an essential book for anyone who seeks to understand the America we live in now.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?) This is when I became a reading glutton. I loitered in the library and picked books off the shelf by random. I read a lot of British children’s literature by accident — “The Secret Garden”; “A Little Princess”; “Five Children and It”; the Narnia series, etc. — so much so that I confused American spellings and British spellings until I was in high school. I also read a ton of books about witches. If the word “witch” or the name of a witch was in the title, I read it: “The Witch Family”; “Little Witch”; “The Witch of Blackbird Pond”; and “Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.” And finally, I found myself drawn to books about independent girls: “Harriet the Spy”; “Island of the Blue Dolphins”; “Julie of the Wolves”; “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”; “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”; the “Pippi Longstocking” books; and the “Anne of Green Gables” series are a few. I still think about those heroines all the time. Reading about them helped me to discover the kind of person I wanted to be.