NEW YORK – Nearly a year since she was abruptly fired by President Donald Trump as librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden stood before hundreds of cheering members of the literary community as she received a Champion of Writers Award from the Authors Guild on Monday.
Hayden, 73, who headed the Library of Congress from 2016-2025 and worked in libraries for much of her adult life, cited her profession as a vital bridge between writers and the general public.
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“Libraries are where storytelling meets opportunity,” she told the audience gathered for the Guild's annual dinner-gala, held at Cipriani Wall Street. “They are where a child discovers a first favorite book, where a new American finds language and belonging and where research uncovers hidden history, and where communities see themselves in the pages of literature. Libraries do more than house books. You know that. They connect people to ideas, to knowledge, and to one another. They ensure that storytelling is not reserved for the few, but shared by all.”
Hayden, was among three honorees, along with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Percival Everett and “The Joy Luck Club” author Amy Tan. Hayden, the first woman and first Black person to be appointed Librarian of Congress, didn’t refer to Trump or her ouster during her brief remarks. But her speech was an implicit rebuttal to Trump's attacks against what he calls “woke" culture that have been directed at her and at such cultural institutions as the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution.
She praised libraries as “engines of accessibility and inclusion” and as havens for free expression at a time of record-high book bans.
“In many places today, librarians are under attack for believing in the power of the written word and in the principle that free people should be able to read freedom,” she said. “Yet librarians remain steady and hopeful.”
The gala was a forum for opposing bans and for other causes crucial to the Guild and to the thousands of published writers its represents. Author David Baldacci was among those who denounced AI, which has been the subject of various lawsuits filed by writers against Microsoft,OpenAI and other companies that alleges their work had been used without their permission for AI generative programs. Baldacci was among several writers present who have been plaintiffs in legal action, and his name was invoked later in the evening: It was attached to the prize given to Everett, the Baldacci Award for Literary Activism.
Everett, 69, whose “James” won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, is a prolific author and longtime academic who joked that receiving an honor for activism was like being called an athletic chess player. His books are known for their cutting and provocative takes on racism and other subjects, and he referred indirectly to Hayden's departure by picturing a future — one he finds all too plausible — in which the only kinds of works available at the Library of Congress are the writings of Ayn Rand and other conservative favorites.
“That is where we are, and I can't tell you how sad I am about this,” Everett said.
Tan, 74, was cited for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community. Besides writing “The Joy Luck Club” and such novels as “The Kitchen God's Wife” and “The Bonesetter's Daughter,” she also has a long history of supporting emerging writers and for helping young people pay for treatment for Lyme disease, which she has suffered from for decades.
Tan offered a deeply personal account of the importance of writing, thinking and how she came to think of herself, and other writers, as “political.” As a girl, she was chastised by a minister for reading the allegedly immoral “The Catcher in the Rye.” The minister then assaulted her, an attack that left her devastated, an “unwanted life lesson" that made her question everything and set her on a path to storytelling that was compassionate and intrinsically “political” because of its power to change minds.
“Books, by their nature, have far reaching consequences regardless of our conscious intentions. Books have readers, readers have reactions and what they do with those reactions is of consequence,” said Tan, a daughter of Chinese immigrants who summarized herself as a “writer, an American writer, an American who uses her freedom of expression."