This month. Three or four books that i think particularly good. I wish i could take credit. And the Brilliant Communications director came up with this. No one is going to be interested in what i am reading. Surprisingly has become quite a bit. They like it. Interestingly, the kind of like to know what your thinking about. It is kind of refreshing. It actually reads a little class action. Thank you. It was fun. What are you reading this summer . Tell us what is on your Summer Reading list. Postage your Facebook Page or send us a name of. Her. You can watch panels and multicultural Book Publishing, the black Arts Movement, and more first, founder Max Rodriguez kicks off the festival the talk of the state of africanamerican literature. There is always that conversation of home for us. And we have an answer from. The theme of this years book fair is global. As we all are. And the book fair from this point forward will reflect that. We started with an event yesterday that Columbia University, our first annual fiction possible. The book fair will look like all of us from our every male from the global and we are. I would like to introduce howard partner, khalil mahmood, director of the Schomburg Center. [applause] thank you. Putting together another harlem book fair. We certainly want to applaud you for continuing to bring them here i also want to thank cspan, book tv in particular for continuing to support this event as emir. It certainly helps to share the good news that happens here around the country. In my travels i meet many people know about the harlem book fair even though theyve never been here because they have seen it on television. We are grateful to cspan for being here and for our cspan audience for turning in. I am also grateful for those of you are new. I wanted just to acknowledge that we have lost some literary greatness in the past few weeks. Dr. Maya angelou. [applause] although she was not known so much for putting pen to paper them bringing words on paper alive, the incomparable actress ruby dee. [applause] for dr. Angelo and ruby dee they all the special place in the heart of this institution which gives me a chance to tell you a little bit about us. So this center is approaching its 90th year. It is the leading repository for the preservation, interpretation , and collection of materials related to the global black experience. It begins with a very headstrong and ambitious. [inaudible] it is early for me. He arrives here in the 1890s commend it to documenting the contributions that black people around the world that made. It was that collection beginning in the 1890s that arrived here as part of the new York Library Systems the core of the collection named. To this day we continue the legacy he laid before us by buying books from all of the world. Theyre also part of the infrastructure that makes up africanamerican studies. There are very few scholars who produce knowledge, literary analysis, even for artists who are writers and poets who did not consult the collection once famously wrote every single book. Close friends with the early curators. More first editions as well as no hearse. Spend four decades using the library and remains with us in perpetuity. For those who dont know, his remains are buried in the floor of the atrium. We were not just a place a literary engagement of but a place of engagement. And so back in the early 1940s something called the American Negro theater was born as a place that would incubate black hair. In that moment i young sydney party, Harry Belafonte made their way to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and so began history making. So our connection to her is from the very beginning. Many years later, dr. Angelo moved here to harlem in the 1950s before she went off to gonna be in that moment she was part of a Harlem Writers Guild including john kelly in, many others who depend upon this so that they could produce works of literature. For that reason our connection lasted many decades, and she became our National Chair in the early 2000s. Spoke many times, one of the most profound things she said is that libraries were like rambos, rambos that showed up in a cloud as a sign that whatever storms and troubles one was in the midst of a new that there was a way out, hope and optimism just at that simple brand of we have her papers. Please take a moment see them. So that is just the tip of the iceberg. We continue to be a pillar of the harlem community. Black america, the global black experience. So please, if this is your first, dont make it your last. Make sure that young people have a coming of age experience. This is a place of calls or renaissance and engagement, a place to engage our collective cultural heritage. We are truly there for everyone. [applause] with that said i move of the way and bring back Max Rodriguez it will be part of an introduce our next panel. Thank you for being here. [applause] so you see we are deep in history. And it that is important. Also we project what is possible given that which we have been given what is it that we are charged to do, what is our responsibility . Our conversation is books meeting culture. Yes, there are books, but what does that no more look like a conversation . What does that look on hiphop culture look like . What is the book on fashion look like on a runway outside with the other exhibitors. We not only want to talk about books, we know that we live and survive because we know who we are. We know our core, and this is the conversation that happens. Thank you for coming. The honor and privilege of introducing a different, colleague, a professional, someone who has intellect and intuition. She is a Vice President and senior editor. She is a renaissance woman. She is a dancer. She is an artist. In her current efforts she has a new magazine, home size magazine. So she knows the space of words. She will talk to us today about the state of black publishing. Not an easy conversation the half. It challenged and presented with the opportunity of digital publishing. Beneath all of that this time the right story and still bringing it to market. What is in all of that . Please. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. It is great to see everybody here the book fair is one of my Favorite Book events. One because it is in a neighborhood that i levin, so its easy for me get here. The other, as you heard from doctor muhammed and Max Rodriquez is this setting here. Dr. Muhammed talked about sean burke who laid the foundation here as a black bibliophile for this collection, this center, this depository. Its so important for us in this community and the world to be built. His, the beacon for the legacy. A recent literary giants who recently passed on. My and zillow, also Barack Beckham mccourts says. There have been too many, you know, who are passed on recently, but they left us a legacy and left us in charge and left us a body of work and the lessons and the instructions. It is just for us to Pay Attention to that now and carryon. I was flattered by maxs invitation to make this. He calls me up and just says so casually, i would like for you to talk about the state of black literature and 15 minutes. What . First of all, what are we talking about . Black literature. I am an editor. Language is important to me. Before i could even first of all, i ask for a couple of days to think about it. How was i going to talk about this thing we call black literature. This thing we call publishing, particularly at this time when it is so complicated, so many issues, so many breakthroughs. Theres so much extraordinary work. So many problems. So what exactly will i be talking about . That will be talking about black people, meaning people of african descent, here, writing and publishing primarily in america, and in that race the rest of the world. Is more like the world of storytelling because that is what it is about. I want to try to do a few things in this introductory talk. There will be more people speaking after me who can continue the conversation but i want to talk a bit about the conditions in which storytellers work. I want to raise questions and issues concerning readers and reading in general. I would like to point out some important things, how books and reading products are published and distributed and how you can learn more, and keep up with what is too often the Hidden Treasures right in our midst. The network that is available to us if we dont know anything about. Max asks me to speak from my perspective as a person who worked in the literature world and publishing decades. I will forgive him for reminding me how old i am in this business. For the last dozen years i have signed up authors and edited and manage the book products at simon and schuster, that is my wage earning job. Producing programs that bring storytellers to audiences and readers, and published independence on my corporate ties. I have done this all of my working life. I love hearing stories and telling stories not only in book form but lyrics and rhythm and melody and acted out on stage and danced and painted and told other front porch on thest, on television, this is the most profoundly and uniquely cumin thing we do, tells stories, hear stories, it is how we define ourselves, how we process and make sense of life. I make a living doing it. I had many people help me along the way, figuring out how to make a living at it, but it was my family who got that started, my family who taught me in many ways that are important and fundamental, my great grandmother told me stories to settle me down at night before bed, characters called tar baby and grand rapids. I thought she may be stories herself. I didnt hear about folklore and jolts until many years later. My great grandmother was born in the late 1800ss and passed away in the 70s. She told me reallife stories and other made up stories. She told me how her community and her family and how she lived and survived, i heard stories about places in east tennessee and earlier in the 21st century called guntown and browntown. I know more about slaughtering a hog than i need to know because my greatgrandmother, my uncle joe, my High School Homework assignment, he was an actor, made no money at it he is an adjunct teacher at Knoxville College and worked as an xray technician for his day job. It was he who introduced me to the work of James Baldwin and was James Baldwin who impressed on my mind harlem and new york, a place that decades later i would migrate to. Writing and reading were valued in my family and in my community. Books are valuable and necessary in our home, not just the bible but encyclopedias, histories and biographies and ebony magazine. My family knew the importance of us understanding the world around us, to see the world even if we never left our home in knoxville, tennessee. Books makes that possible. To truly understand black america and what is at the core of our literary tradition and culture you have to know and remember that we were denied the right to read and write for so long, that was the way enslavement was enforced, to deny us that pool. We figured that out quick and those of us, many of us rather, risk our lives, our physical lives to learn how to read because we knew it would save our lives and to be the key to freedom. Very grateful and inspired by the phenomenon we saw last year with 12 years a slave and how that book published in 1841 reappeared and came back to us in the form of a film and renewed peoples attention to a beautifully written work, 1840 one, we were publishing. We had a literary tradition before him and we had one since him so we had many reasons to celebrate. I am reminded of a famous quote of Toni Morrison that goes Something Like the genius of black people is what we do with language. I believe that. Whether we are manipulating language and telling stories for play or Serious Business we demonstrated time and time again we spin language into large, how Daniel Harrison line on front porches of homes and shops in her town of veganville. The stories you hear again in the streets of new york and in the suburbs and playgrounds and your dining room table, think of new york citys 20 and 21st century wordsmiths, telling stories out of bronx and harlem and his metaphorical 51st dream state. And the most enlightened and inspired people have read them deliberately and often. With reading now being so much at our fingertips even with advances in technology and computers and all we still dont have access to great work particularly contemporary work that we should. That is because this black world of literature expert. Still larger ecosystem. Exists in an ecosystem, an environment of mainstream education, publishing as big business. The marketplace, the retail market. We are represented there but not well served. We dont show up in the matrix as some people say the way we should. We have got to do that. We have got to do something about that. Even with expert researchers no link and concluding that we in fact do read, there was a Pure Research study in the media not too long ago that stated or concluded the most likely person in america to be reading a book at any given time is a black female. You dont necessarily get that from how publishers choose to use your promotion dollars and publicity resources. Wheat to read. I have a good job, publishing since the 80s, i am lucky, i work hard, i make a living. The side effects of that havent always been good. It can be stressful, the culture of work places often clash with a culture that defines me personally. And in Corporate America, too often the best to offer intellectually and creatively goes untapped in the places that work, who think they want to get everything out of me but sometimes they dont even know what it is that i have to bring to the table, the same thing with you as readers. To that degree we have got to push for more diversity. We have got to push for more diversity in the ranks of people working in publishing, working in media. We have got to encourage our schools to teach the skills that we need to learn how to better read, how to better thing, how to express ourselves. I learned working with independent presses and the 70s, i worked at a place called the institute of the black world in atlanta, georgia, first as a work study student and then a fulltime employee. It was there that i learned the fundamentals skills of production and editing. I even was toss to run and offset printing press. Iman edge a direct mail campaign. In 1980 i attended the inaugural class of Howard UniversityBook Publishing. That program only last halfdozen years, that any college and university administrators, historically black colleges listening to this broadcast i encourage you and even feed to you to consider that the skills of publishing need to be solidly inc. In all of our schools. One of the best things that happened in that time that i was in school in the 70s, where the sounding of independent Radio Stations. We have a generation of people who found careers in me as a consequence and we served the community and it was a way for students in the community to interact. We need to revive that, extend that to publishing, Howard University press i understand is not active any more. We need to bring that back in every school we controlled, needs to have a press, is fundamental. We can learn to publish and develop independent business and the entrepreneurial more easily than ever. The technology does allow that these days, desktop publishing, self publishing, distribution is a problem but we need to come up with our own systems of distribution, our own systems of reaching our own people, Online Shopping is convened an efficient when you know what you want but it is no where to find out what is new out there and you cant depend on an algorithm to tell you if you should be interested. You have to inform the algorithm, create it for yourself. Our great booksellers have been leaders, cultural leaders in our communities, and Cultural Centers for us, and liberation bookstore down the road on lenox avenue, has passed on but is remembered for bringing character to this community, that was educational and spiritual, and black robe books and things, i had one of my first jobs. They need to be remembered as models for what we make happen in the 21st century. There may be a bookstore in atlanta that is still in business. He man bookstore is in business operating online and doing special events. As troy johnson, founder of africanamerican literary book club, can tell you we lost most of the bookstores we had six years ago. In this vacuum nothing has replaced that. We have to do better than that. Fantastic work is being written and published and going unnoticed. It is not only the work of self published people, were published by Big Companies like my own. Publishing people have to stop thinking that diversity, achieving diversity is Like Aerospace silence. We have gone to mars. There are ways in which we can effectively include and bring everybody, marginal communities included, to the center of the businesses that lead to they need to form alliancess with black organization, other black professionals to hear us, to respect us. Black literature live, black writers and authors as i said before and other people have said here are doing extraordinary work. I am going to name some of the names and i will be scratching the surface but i have to name some of these names just in case you are thinking of who you should buy and consider next time. Emily roberto. Tina mcelroy, martha from monica cham