 I always like to start with just please introduce yourself. What do you and what do you do? Okay, I am Michelle Martin. I am the Beverly Cleary Professor for Children and Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington. And I teach primarily students who are going to be youth services librarians. So those who are going to work with children and young adult in libraries and other library and information science spaces. Has your parenting influenced your work or vice versa? Oh, they're very much tied together. My parenting and my my teaching are very much tied together. We started reading to Amelia in utero with one of those, you know, sort of utero phones and just sort of saturating her in a literacy-rich environment. So we'd have a rolled-all book that she'd be going to sleep to while her daddy was reading one book to her and I was reading another book to her and she eats books now. I mean she's like, you know, reads a lot faster than I do and really loves story. How would you stress the importance of libraries in a day where, you know, someone might say we have computers and we have, you know, all these other things and we can read books, you know, right away? Why do we need physical libraries in our communities? What would be your argument or that? One, I think libraries are a great equalizer because it doesn't matter who you are, how much money you have, where you're from, if you walk into a library, you can get everything there for free. Everybody can get a library card, right? Everybody can get a library card, a lot of libraries have gotten rid of fines, have gotten rid of the requirement of you're having to have, you know, a physical address, trying to accommodate so that people who are immigrants, people who are refugees, people who are homeless, who are unhoused, will also be able to access the career services that libraries offer. I know libraries that have a machine shop so you can go and like, you know, build stuff, you can make music. And so I think the beauty of libraries is that, you know, there are lots of things that you can access if you have the money to buy a computer or if your school provides a computer for you. But libraries, everything there is designed to appeal to and be accessible to everyone who walks in the door. I want to take advantage of your expertise and knowledge here and have you recommend a couple books for my 10-year-old daughter, Amelia? All right. This is The Arrival by Sean Tan, who is an Australian illustrator. And I think it's a perfect example of a book that puts readers in the position of alienation for understanding the immigrant experience. So this man has had to leave home and he goes to a place that is very unfamiliar to him. He can't even read the language. And it's about the way that he navigates that whole situation. Little Monarchs is a graphic novel and this one isn't colored all the way through because this is an early version of it. But this is by Jonathan Case and it's a book about a little girl who ends up, you're not sure why she isn't with her family until toward the end. But there's something that has happened that has made everyone allergic to the sun. So everybody has to go underground. And the way that you are able to survive is there's a serum that she and an older woman that takes care of her have created to be able to make you tolerant of sunlight. But it's a fascinating sort of pick-arrest because it's a journey. They go a lot of different places and to try to reunite her with her family. And then pet by a quickly amazey is about a trans girl who lives in a town that had monsters, no longer has monsters, but some creature comes out of a painting that her mother has created that tells her that there's a monster that's living in the house of redemption, which is redemption is her best friend. So pet is a fantastic read, really interesting. And Jam, the girl, the protagonist's name is fascinating. She's great. And yeah, I really love the setting there. Well, I'm gonna look it up for you. And once you read one or two, I might correspond with you and let you know what she thinks. I would love that. I would love that. Yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you for reaching out.