Maya McFadden photo

At the newly opened Possible Futures bookstore in September ...

Brian Slattery Photo

... at a BAMN books event at Bloom in February.

Words flew off the pages of landmark new New Haven books, brought readers together in bustling new Dixwell and Edgewood community spaces, and sparked City Hall protests and public-education debates around how to create a better city — making 2022 a year even more than most in which books made a difference.

Those were some of the many ways that the written word captured New Haveners’ attentions in a year defined by books.

By those who write them. By those who read them. By those who sell and lend and build tighter-knit communities around them. And, of course, by the stories they tell.

Maya McFadden file photo

Shelley Smith tutors second grader Maite as part of New Haven Reads afterschool in November.

New Haven is no stranger to being the main character in works of fiction and nonfiction.

It’s a city brimming with academics and artists, home to a national award-winning public library system, built on a “model” history of urban renewal and unrest just ripe for writerly dissection. And so, for people who love to read and write and talk about and think about and work with books, most years are good years for New Haven bibliophiles.

But 2022 was different.

Melissa Bailey file photo

The late Winfred Rembert at his Newhall St. home.

This was a year when a memoir by the late, great Newhallville leather artist Winfred Rembert won the Pulitzer Prize, focusing public attention on one man’s experiences of the vicious racism of the Jim Crow South and the economic hardship of the post-industrial North. Rembert’s memoir, as told to philosophy professor Erin Kelly, has also helped raise anew the reputation of one of the late 20th century’s towering American creative figures who happened to call New Haven home. This city has a deeper understanding of Rembert’s remarkable art and perseverance thanks to the Pulitzer-winning memoir, Chasing Me To My Grave.

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Dawidoff reads from *The Other Side of Prospect* at the downtown library in October.

This was also a year when New Yorker writer and Pulitzer finalist Nicholas Dawidoff capped nearly a decade’s worth of research and reporting to publish his deep dive on the criminal justice system and urban violence as viewed through his exploration of the 2006 murder of Pete Fields and the wrongful conviction of 16-year-old Bobby Johnson. This city has a more nuanced understanding of the history of Newhallville, the Great Migration, and the workings and failures of cops and the courts thanks to his book, The Other Side of Prospect.

Maya McFadden file photo

Career High School teacher Karen Robinson leads a junior class book talk about *Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You* in November.

This was a year when a nationwide reckoning with students reading well below grade level, school-district intransigence, and the scientific consensus around the importance of sounding out words when teaching kids to read dominated public debate at Board of Education meetings and protest press conferences and City Hall workshops and expert-led panels and New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) “reading fairs.” One of the mayor’s last legislative pushes of the year was a $3 million federal spending proposal designed to build out a citywide math and literacy tutoring program for up to 1,500 young students who fell behind during the pandemic. This city has a richer understanding of teaching and learning how to read the right way thanks to that debate, and thanks to the literacy advocacy of NHPS teachers like Ashley Stockton and Sarah Levine, the local reporting of Independent education Maya McFadden, and the nationwide coverage of former Independent education reporter and current American Public Media reporter Chris Peak on the investigative podcast series, “Sold A Story.”

But that’s not all. Not even close.

Noel Sims photo

Editor Rachel Kauder Nalebuff with contributor Sofiya Moore read from *Our Red Book* at the Institute Library in November.

This year saw the death of a decades-long dedicated public servant and the head of New Haven’s public library system, John Jessen, who passed away from cancer at the age of 56 and who left behind a legacy of making the city’s libraries hubs for reading, neighborhood engagement, and a wide array of social services.

This year saw everyday New Haveners tell their stories about periods, growing, and changing in a newly published anthology all about menstruation.

Thomas Breen photo

City librarians Samantha Bailey, Diane Brown, and Jennifer Gargiulo at a City Hall protest in November.

This year saw the Elicker Administration try — so far, in vain — to open up all public library branches on Sundays, and it saw city librarians push back and speak out during long and fraught union contract negotiations about bad pay and unsustainable working conditions at an underfunded treasure of city government.

This year saw a towering New Haven-born federal government trailblazer, the late Judge Constance Baker Motley, get her first new biography in decades. It also saw Yale historian and New Havener Beverly Gage deliver her own new landmark biography of the much more controversial and century-defining federal government figure, J. Edgar Hoover.

Laura Glesby Photo

Erycka recites poetry on the LitFest stage in October ...

Lucy Gellman / Arts Paper photo

Composer Joel Thompson with Nyzae at LitFest.

Maya McFadden photo

Lit Fest's IfeMichelle Gardin and Possible Futures' Lauren Anderson.

This year saw bibliophile entrepreneur Lauren Anderson open and grow her new bookstore, Possible Futures, into a community-building staple of the Edgewood neighborhood.

It saw longtime city librarian Diane Brown open and grow the Stetson Library’s status as a Dixwell-anchoring cultural institution in its new home across the street at the rebuilt Q House, which also played home this year to the Afrofuturism-celebrating edition of IfeMichelle Gardin’s ever-growing Elm City Litfest.

It saw fellow book business builder Nyzae open and grow BAMN Books, a mobile venture focused on Black history and literature.

It saw East Rock observer par excellence Lary Bloom publish his collection of mostly New Haven Independent-original essays, I’ll Take New Haven.

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Author Tochi Onyebuchi at WNHH FM in March.

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Historian Beverly Gage at WNHH FM in December.

It saw science fiction and fantasy author Tochi Onyebuchi make New Haven the setting of his story of a dystopian future with gentrifiers invading the city from outer space.

And it saw the historic downtown private library, the Institute Library, land over $1 million in state aid to help make long-needed repairs to its building on Chapel Street.

Let that be a table of contents of sorts for New Haven’s “Year of the Book.”

Check out the “bibliography” of Independent and Arts Paper articles and WNHH author interviews at the end of this story for more on reading and writing in New Haven’s 2022.

And, to get a taste of the actual writing in some of these remarkable New Haven books, here are two reading-focused excerpts, one from Rembert’s Chasing Me To My Grave, the other from Dawidoff’s The Other Side of Prospect.

Appendix A: "It Opens Your Mind"

The below excerpt comes from page 152 of Chasing Me To My Grave, as Rembert recalls learning how to read while incarcerated in Georgia and after surviving a lynching.

I met a couple of schoolteachers from Sumter County who were locked up for crimes related to civil rights demonstrations. I was in the library, messing around, and I told them I couldn’t read. They said I might be a good candidate for them to teach me something because I could carry a conversation. I had “gab,” that’s what they called it. They approached me with the syllable method. You separate the syllables and put them back together. I realized reading wasn’t hard. I also discovered that reading makes you smarter. It opens your mind.

I think your mind is just waiting to learn. Your mind wants you to pick up a book and read it. Once I learned how, I began to read all the time. There was nothing else to do and I was happy to do it. I wanted to read more. I didn’t have any idea that it would be like that. I knew I wanted to learn, but I didn’t know my mind would open up to wanting to read more and more.

Appendix B: "Let Me Get The Book!"

Thomas Breen photo

Attorney Michael Jefferson with author Nicholas Dawidoff at Stetson Library-hosted book talk in October.

The below excerpt comes from page 238 of The Other Side of Prospect, where Dawidoff describes Bobby Johnson’s participation in a prison reading group while incarcerated in Cheshire.

The seven reading-discussion men were envied by others in the block for being such a close community. They were sometimes referred to as the group, and were proud, Bobby said, of giving “our intellect to each other. We call it building.” Sharing books brought the closest approximation of what members of the group had lacked in childhood: the supported growth of emotional and intellectual maturity. Reading in prison was intense because you were redrawing your picture of the world while surrounded by people who’d had such destabilizing experiences. Books for the reading group were a way into aspects of their inner lives they didn’t otherwise bring up, and the group took such discoveries very seriously. When someone wasn’t prepared for a discussion or was lazy in his thinking, there was censure. “If you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bobby said, “they’d square up and press you all day. So, everybody used to make sure they wasn’t that person. We were awake until four in the morning getting ready. Everybody’s eyes is bleeding, ready to sleep. Then, when we got together, we were so tired, talking slow.”

They were eager to test all the vocabulary they were absorbing, but employing a prized new word was perilous. “If you saw a word and none of us knew exactly what it was,” Bobby said, “everybody would run to their cell and go grab their dictionary.” And if it turned out a man had used language in error, they’d “clown” him. Vocabulary meant so much because it was aspirational, the premise that a new way of talking makes for a new you. Bobby noticed that “you start to get a new taste for learning. Now you’re looking at everything differently. Now you’re dying to hear each other’s perspectives.”

Of all the books read at Big Cheshire by people Bobby knew, Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son had the most profound effect. Native Son was the story of Bigger Thomas coming of age poor and Black in Chicago’s South Side ghetto, circumstances he realizes have damned him to failure. Thomas’s spirit-crushed response is crime. Bobby said it was a revelation for young Black men at Big Cheshire to read a passage about young Black men that said, “They had always robbed negroes. They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people.” To find pieces of yourself on the pages of a book was to see yourself anew. “Native Son touch so many people in Cheshire,” Bobby said. “Everybody’d go read it and say, ‘That’s my story.’ Everybody was reading it and going through their own identity. Everybody. When I had it, they’re all, ‘Let me get the book!’ ”

Bibliography

Lucy Gellman / New Haven Arts Paper photo

Fatima Hassan and Madeleine LeStrange at Read To Grow's bookmobile in December.

Winfred Rembert’s Chasing Me To My Grave

• Bass, Paul. “Winfred Rembert Wins Posthumous Pulitzer.” New Haven Independent, May 11, 2022
• Appel, Allan. “Rembert’s Rep Rises At NXTHVN Celebration.” New Haven Independent, Oct. 31, 2022
• Bass, Paul. “How Winfred Rembert Made It Home.” New Haven Independent, Oct. 1, 2021

Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Other Side of Prospect

• Bass, Paul. “New Blockbuster Book Explores Backstory Of Newhallville Murder Case.” New Haven Independent, Oct. 14, 2022
• Breen, Thomas. “Book Talk Uncovers Newhallville’s Voices.” New Haven Independent, Oct. 20, 2022
• Breen, Thomas. “City’s“Other Sides” Revealed.” New Haven Independent, Oct. 27, 2022
• Appel, Allan. “On the“Other Side of Prospect,” Hope.” New Haven Independent, Dec. 12, 2022

More 2022 books by or about New Haveners

Building community through books

Literacy, public schools, and how to teach reading

New Haven’s public library system

• Breen, Thomas. “City Librarian John Jessen Dies.” New Haven Independent, May 27, 2022
• Gellman, Lucy. ““A Light That Cannot Be Extinguished:” City Librarian John Jessen Dies At 56.” New Haven Arts Paper, May 30, 2022
• Glesby, Laura. “City Starts Search For Next Top Librarian.” New Haven Independent, Oct. 27, 2022
• Breen, Thomas. “Librarian Rally Slams Sunday Plan.” New Haven Independent, Nov. 7, 2022
• Breen, Thomas. “Despite Budget Vow, Libraries Closed On Sundays.” New Haven Independent, Sept. 13, 2022
• Gellman, Lucy. “Library Backers Boost Expanded Sunday Hours In City’s Proposed Budge.” New Haven Arts Paper, March 31, 2022

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