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Dear Madame Chair and Members of the Board of Library Trustees:

I am a Berkeley-based writer. My work has won major American awards: the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal, the Sue Kaufman Prize awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters, and a National Endowment Fiction Fellowship; it has been nominated for a National Book Award, and for the 2014 Neustadt Prize. It has received a Notable Book of the Year Designation by the New York Times. Translations of my work have appeared in other languages. I have been published by Viking-Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, UK, Little Brown, and more recently by independent publisher, Wings Press. I was the first Latina writer to break into mainstream U.S. publishing. My books are available in most Public Libraries throughout the United States, and form part of the English Department curricula of a large number of American Colleges and Universities. Critical citations of my work number in the hundreds, quite a few of them written in languages other than English. My archive is held by the Green Library Special Collections Library of Stanford University.

Yesterday I paid a visit to the Main Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. I was looking specifically for an Encyclopedia of Women Travelers of the 19th Century. Not only had it disappeared from the reference section, but nearly one-third of the reference shelves gaped empty. 

At today’s demonstration held outside the Berkeley Public Library, it was revealed that although Director Scott kept assuring the public and the Board of Supervisors that only some 2,200 volumes or so had been removed from the shelves, in truth a database has now been made public that shows that in fact some 39,140 volumes have been removed. 

Is this vacuum part of the effort by the Director to save space, time, and make the library stripped down, ready for action, and much more efficient? Some of those removals would seem to indicate that this program of eradication is driven by an anti-labor, anti minority cultures, anti-progressive politics, and anti-woman agenda. Because of false statements Mr. Scott made, he is guilty of having violated the laws of the State of California. and can legally be charged with fraud. 

Reading, literacy is based on wasting time. It is not efficient. The value of literature is that it has nourished people from the time literacy overtook cultures whose transmissions were oral. 

Literature has very little to do with popular appeal. It has nothing to do with bestseller/celebrity culture, or with received truths. It is meant rather to provide people who read with maps of how to negotiate their lives living in a deeply dystopian world. That is what my fiction and non-fiction is about.  

I intend to copy this letter to Mr. Jeff Scott, and to all other parties of concern. 

I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest opportunity.