Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.
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Be Your Own Library Advocate (2024)
“Public libraries are not play places. They are not cooling centers or warming centers or mental health clinics. Public libraries are not bars, nor are they essential services. Public libraries are places of information and access to information. They are places that ardently defend the rights of every person to seek out that information. This is fundamental and yet not highlighted or underlined enough. Public libraries are cornerstones of democratic and civic engagement, not safety nets for broken systems elsewhere. They might take on those roles, but that’s not their purpose.
No one else can raise your social value for you. You have to do it yourself. You have the data here to support it.”
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Trauma, Book Bans, and Libraries: A Resource Guide for Library Workers, Library Supporters, and Beyond (2024)
“While library workers have watched the last several years of censorship play out, the belief that they could be next has played a role in increasing stress and activating the fight-flight-freeze response. No longer is trauma seen as a result of an incident; this cycle acknowledges how possibility can activate a trauma response, even if that possibility is not necessary for the cycle to unravel.”
Book Banning Will Not Stop at Schools (2024)
“In the current book banning climate, there is a pattern worth paying attention to: what begins in public schools seeps into the public library. This begins at the ground level in board meetings and then emerges in higher-level offices. Proposed legislation at the public school level has seen success — look at the Texas READER Act, the expansion of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Iowa’s S.F. 496 (currently partially enjoined), Indiana’s HB 1147, Kentucky’s SB 5 — in part because it is an easy sell to legislators. They want to protect kids or at least be on record, looking as though they want to protect kids. What better way to do just that than through laws that put parents front and center in the schools? To the average person not paying attention to what’s actually happening, it sounds good.
That is the same mentality behind the emphasis that book banners aren’t banning books because the kids can get them at the public library.”
American Intolerance and Book Bans (2024)
“Until we acknowledge implicit and explicit intolerance of others running through the narratives of “parental rights” and “protecting the children,” we cannot make meaningful or lasting change.