{"id":825,"date":"2018-12-31T14:11:17","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=825"},"modified":"2018-12-31T14:11:17","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:11:17","slug":"lone-star-listensauthor-interviews-by-kay-ellington-lsll-publisher-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=825","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star ListensAuthor interviews by Kay Ellington, LSLL Publisher"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>Kay Ellington has worked in management for a variety of media companies, including Gannett, Cox Communications, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Regional Group, from Texas to New York to California to the Southeast and back again to Texas. She is the coauthor, with Barbara Brannon, of the Texas novels The Paragraph Ranch<\/span>A Wedding at the Paragraph Ranch.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ivy R. Taylor <\/span>was elected Mayor of San Antonio on June 13, 2015. Prior to her election, she earned an appointment to the seat from her city council colleagues in July 2014, making her the first African American woman to serve as mayor of a city with more than one million people and only the second female mayor of San Antonio. Before becoming mayor, she served on city council for five years.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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2.12.2017\u00a0 San Antonio\u2019s Mayor Ivy Taylor shares her love of literature and literacy<\/h1>\n

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As we commemorate Black History Month this February, <\/span>an occasion that honors leaders and achievements in the African American community, consider this. San Antonio\u2019s mayor <\/span>Ivy R. Taylor<\/span> is the first African American female in U.S. history to ever serve as mayor of city of more than 1 million. Mayor has enthusiastically supported reading in her leadership role, and the city of San Antonio is one of the nation\u2019s leading cities in encouraging literary arts\u2014with the Mayor\u2019s Book Club, the San Antonio Book Festival, the Poets Laureate program, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: <\/span>How did you come to settle in San Antonio, Mayor Taylor, and what attracted you to the city?<\/span><\/p>\n

IVY R. TAYLOR: <\/span>The official answer is: a job. I was recruited by the San Antonio Affordable Housing Association to fill a summer position developing a collaborative outreach plan. The real answer is: A man! I was working on my master\u2019s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when I had the opportunity to come to San Antonio for a summer internship. At church one Sunday, I met Rodney, and after I finished graduate school, I moved to San Antonio to be with him. We\u2019ve been married eighteen years now.<\/p>\n

You were the first mayor of San Antonio to launch a mayor\u2019s book club, in 2014. At the time you said that San Antonio had literacy problems and you wanted to launch the club to create a culture of reading in the city. In the three years since the club\u2019s launch, what successes can you share about the program?<\/p>\n

I actually started the book club when I was a City Council member representing District 2, and as mayor, I\u2019ve been able to expand it citywide. I love reading, and I want everyone in the community to love it too. Reading encourages literacy and helps create a community dialogue where we can explore universal topics, create a greater understanding of what binds us together and grow the compassion among us all. It\u2019s so rewarding to listen to the family stories and individual discoveries that have resulted from San Antonio readers\u2019 engaging with the books I\u2019ve chosen, which have tended to be memoirs and personal histories.<\/p>\n

It appears that your book club has a spring selection and a fall selection. So you\u2019re on your sixth book, I think, what\u2019s the process like for the book selection?<\/p>\n

The selection process varies, although it has to be a book I haven\u2019t read yet. I want to discover it along with our readers. A few times I\u2019ve chosen books that I\u2019m interested in reading, and other times I\u2019ve asked for recommendations from our San Antonio Public Library staff.<\/p>\n

The book club is just one area where the city of San Antonio helps advance literacy and the literary arts. I\u2019ve noticed that the San Antonio Book Festival is becoming one of the fastest growing book events in the state\u2014and the country. How does the city assist with that initiative?<\/p>\n

The City of San Antonio is proud to partner with the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and the San Antonio Book Festival on this fantastic celebration of learning and literature. We assist by contributing funding as well as providing promotional support, and we are very happy with how it has grown in the last few years. With more than ninety authors as featured speakers and other activities, it has quickly become a key event for our City.<\/p>\n

I have enjoyed hosting Mayor\u2019s Book Club programs in conjunction with the Festival. Last year I hosted a discussion the day of the Book Festival in one of the program tents to talk about my 2016 spring book club pick, The Book Thief.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most metro cities in Texas now have an office of cultural affairs\u2014the arts are such a huge economic engine\u2014but I\u2019ve noticed that San Antonio specifically gives literary arts a place at the table. Oftentimes, visual arts and performing arts dominate a city\u2019s developmental focus, but your website\u2014I love the name,<\/span> www.getcreativesanantonio.com<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u2014showcases literary events in the city as well. What can you tell our readers about the focus of your Department of Arts & Culture?<\/span><\/p>\n

San Antonio honors and celebrates our cultural heritage through the arts, and the literary arts are absolutely an important part of how we tell those stories. San Antonio continues to be a city that celebrates the written word and is a leader, in many cases, in doing so. In 2012, for example, San Antonio was the first major city in Texas to appoint a Poet Laureate. Our San Antonio Poet Laureate Program is managed by the Department of Arts and Culture, which advocates for the growth of and supports our local creative industry.<\/p>\n

We recognize the arts are vital to enriching the quality of life in our community, and the department works diligently to develop and market a wide range of programs and events for the residents and visitors of San Antonio. These programs and events showcase the immense artistic talent we have in our city.<\/p>\n

In addition to the Poet Laureate program, the Department of Arts & Culture also oversees several programs and divisions including arts funding, public art, cultural events and exhibits, filmmaking and music. Through these efforts, the department helps the City of San Antonio enhance our community by leading and investing in local arts and culture.<\/p>\n

In 2012, as you\u2019ve pointed out, San Antonio became the first major Texas city to name a poet laureate. Last year, the city named their third poet to take that role. What do you see as the benefits of the city\u2019s poet laureate program?<\/p>\n

San Antonio designates a Poet Laureate every two years to utilize the power of poetry and literature and to encourage literacy and learning in our city. The position is an important one as the individual selected also helps generate public interest in the arts, preserve the art of poetry and promote creative expression from our community.<\/p>\n

What role did reading play in your life when you were growing up? Who were some of your favorite authors then and who are some of your favorite authors now?<\/p>\n

I was a quiet teenager whose parents\u2019 involvement in a Pentecostal Holiness Church kept me from social norms. I couldn\u2019t wear pants, makeup or jewelry; I couldn\u2019t listen to secular music; and I couldn\u2019t go to the movies. Instead, I escaped into the world of books.<\/p>\n

Mr. Pine\u2019s Purple House<\/span> by Leonard Kessler<\/span> was one of my favorite books when I began reading in about 1975. As I grew older, two books in particular had a lasting impact on me\u2014Gone with the Wind<\/span> and Roots.<\/span> I sometimes say that they are in my DNA. It\u2019s an odd combination, I know, but I was captivated by the drama and history in Gone with the Wind,<\/span> and Roots<\/span> perfectly balanced out the shame of those slavery days which are the focus of Gone with the Wind.<\/span> I have also read Pride and Prejudice<\/span> at least ten times; some of Jane Austen\u2019s<\/span> characters feel like old friends to me.<\/p>\n

Nowadays I don\u2019t read as much as I\u2019d like because being the mayor, a mom and a wife keeps me pretty busy, but I find myself drawn to books about urban planning, revitalization, cities and public policy. One of the most memorable was Triumph of the City<\/span> by Edward Glaeser.<\/span> I loved reading his observations about the physical and social characteristics that make cities vibrant and vital and why cities continue to be important in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

You are the first female African-American mayor of a city with such a large population, making you the mayor of the largest city in the United States to have a black female mayor. Since February is Black History Month, what leadership roles would recommend to young African Americans?<\/p>\n

When I was a girl I read to explore the world, and recently I gave a talk in which I focused on how reading helps us create our own identities. How do we know who we are? As we grow, we experience new things, learn more about ourselves and meet people who help shape us. But how are we able to envision what\u2019s possible? What does it mean to be a woman, a black woman, or an American? Young people who have access to other people\u2019s stories through novels and memoirs can learn about and identify with great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/span> and Eleanor Roosevelt,<\/span> but just as importantly they can understand other people\u2019s struggles. I may not have been twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas, a negro living in poverty on Chicago\u2019s south side in the 1930s, but his story, his struggle\u2014shared in the book Native Son<\/span> by Richard Wright<\/span>\u2014opened my eyes to race relations and the criminal justice system.<\/p>\n

San Antonio has such a wealth of authors. What do you think it is about the city that inspires writing?<\/p>\n

San Antonio is a welcoming and diverse city where anyone can find a niche, and it\u2019s a relatively affordable place to live. Sometimes when I hear discussions about \u201cthe creative economy\u201d I want to remind folks that all of us are creative, especially in San Antonio, from kids submitting poems to the SAPL\u2019s Young Pegasus contest to all the San Antonians who make their own Fiesta hats and medals. Our city was founded as a confluence of cultures, to use an old line from the 1968 World\u2019s Fair, and that kind of cross-fertilization allows us to tell unique stories that have a global resonance, which was recognized through our UNESCO designation last year. And we\u2019re celebrating our Tricentennial in 2018, so that\u2019s three hundred years of stories.<\/p>\n

The current mayor\u2019s book club selection is San Antonioan Jan Jarboe Russell\u2019s The Train to Crystal City. <\/span>What made you choose this book?<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t featured a book written by a San Antonio author, so I thought this was a great opportunity to choose a local author and a story about South Texas. The Train to Crystal City<\/span> fits so well with other works I\u2019d selected because it offers each of us an opportunity to see history through the eyes of \u201cthe other,\u201d just as Twelve Years A Slave<\/span> and Rocket Boys<\/span> did, and ultimately to recognize that we\u2019re not so different after all. As Americans, it\u2019s important for us to understand rather than just gloss over painful chapters in our history. We need the knowledge to make better choices in the future so that we can continue to work toward reaching the ideals this country was founded upon.<\/p>\n

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Clockwise from upper left:<\/span> Summer reading event, with (left to right) Ashley Robinson, Amazon.com; Mayor Taylor; Ramiro Salazar, director, San Antonio Public Library; Melanie French, Amazon.com.\u00a0 With Ronald McDonald: Mayor Taylor reads to students at Pre-K for SA\u2019s South Education Center. San Antonio Book Festival 2016 tent: Mayor Taylor with students. Mayor\u2019s Book Club, (left to right): Ramiro Salazar, Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers. Kay Ellington has worked in management for a variety of media companies, including Gannett, Cox Communications, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Regional Group, from Texas to New York to California to the Southeast and back again to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}