Jenny chats with Justice Shorter about the Top 5 books that inform her personal and professional life as a Disability Justice advocate, Black Disabled Lives Matter amplifier, and national expert on disability inclusive disaster protections, emergency management and humanitarian crises/conflicts. You can see more of her recommended reads at JusticeShorter.com Reading List discussed: https://www.dclibrary.org/node/67983
See Justice Shorter's recommended reads at JusticeShorter.com.
JENNY
You're listening to the DC Public Library Podcast recorded from the Labs Recording Studio in the historic, modernized Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington, DC. This is "Access This." Hi, I'm your host Jenny from the Center for Accessibility, your hub for Accessible Library Services at DCPL.
My guest today on the show is Justice Shorter, a Disability Justice advocate and Black Disabled Lives Matter amplifier. She is a national expert on disability inclusive disaster protections, Emergency Management and humanitarian crises and conflicts. She has a BA in Journalism with minors in Justice and Peace Studies from Marquette University and an MA in Sustainable Development, International Policy and Management.
In recent years, Justice served as a disability integration advisor with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). And she is also the co-creator of a celebrated framework for applying Disability Justice approaches to disaster assistance and Emergency Management method that acknowledges histories of harm, centers intersectionality, and prioritizes leadership by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color with disabilities. Justice is currently the National Disaster Protection Advisor for the National Disability Rights Network, where she advises the 57 federally mandated Protection and Advocacy agencies on any issues related to pandemics, fires, disasters and other emergencies.
So Justice, first, I want to welcome you to the show. Thanks so much for chatting with me today.
JUSTICE
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited about the conversation.
JENNY
Yeah, me too. And when we met to discuss, you know, what we might want to talk about on the podcast, obviously, your work with Emergency Management and your disability advocacy work came up. But one of the big things we talked about was you are, I think probably you read more than any librarian that I know, you're a big reader. That's right. Um, so we thought that it woulld be fun to talk about, some of the books that have informed um, your work as an advocate, as a disaster protection adviser, the kind of things that have informed your life that you find meaningful. Um, and I'm sure we could talk about this all day, but we thought we would stick to-
JUSTICE
Oh yes.
JENNY
(Laughs) Yeah. We thought we would stick to your five kind of recommended reads.
JUSTICE
Okay, so first off, let me just tell you, this is torture for someone like me (JENNY laughs) to pick only five it is, it is not okay, it is difficult. It was, it was very traumatic, no, no it wasn't, it was um this, these were things that I, this is something that I rather enjoy. But one thing that I will say before I even get started with my top five list is that what really kind of put me on this trajectory of falling so deeply in love with books and reading is kind of my journey throughout that and how that relates to my blindness. So I had, I've always been a kid who loved to read, right, I was always curled up with my, in my bed with books at night, the little flashlight, you could always kind of catch me in corners of the house, little nooks and crannies reading. But when my vision began to decline even more, my freshman year in high school, it was one of the darkest times for me both literally and metaphorically, in the sense that I no longer had direct access to something that freed me in so many ways, right? That really allowed me to see myself in different parts of the world, in different lives than the current life I was living at that time.
And not to say that my life was terrible by any means I had a lovely childhood. But it allowed me- books allowed me to dream. That's the first way I learned how to dream aloud, was through books. And losing my capacity to physically read, and not being surrounded by a blindness community or, you know, being deeply immersed in the blindness community or disability community more broadly, I really lost um that tether. And my sister was working at the library at the time. And would brings me home all of these books on tape. And I would listen to just, have your collection occupied, Dr. Angelou's books of poetry, books from so many different Civil Rights leaders because that was the era that I absolutely was fascinated with both then and now.
And, but that kind of rekindled my connections to book, books. I say that though because I- fast forward to my time in college where I was walking around with multiple volumes of books in my backpack in these large print, big clunky books. And now I have literally hundreds of books in my pocket. Because they are, there's there's really no fewer than like five or six different apps on my iPhone, all devoted to books. And so I mention that though in acknowledgement of the journey that so many like myself have taken in order to remain connected to books and have access to these worlds, right. So, I just wanted to acknowledge that because I know so many young people may have similar experiences or so many people, perhaps my age um have similar stories as it relates to their capacity to remain connected to literature.
Alright, so, in terms of my my, the one that I will mention first, though, as it relates to the work that I do, I would, I always say this book first, and it is called "Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice" by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. And I adore this book, it was my introduction, really to Disability Justice work, which has really served as the foundation for me, for all of the other work that I do, whether it be advocacy work, or whether it be related to community-based work or or disaster protections, or even international work. I always base everything that I do, at this point, in this in Disability Justice. So I try to say that I want to make sure that it is steeped, that it is deeply rooted in a Disability Justice frame, which differs from disability rights. And I want to be clear about that. So Disability Justice really picks up where Disability Rights leaves off, whereas Disability Rights talks about dismantling systems of discrimination for people with disabilities, Disability Justice, focuses on building, and bridging, and dreaming, and branching beyond those oppressive systems, right.
And so um, that book was kind of the, my entry into that world and it, that is the point where I really developed a serious and a genuine and a sincere pride in disability. Right like I had always had that you know, though not always, don't let don't let me misspeak there, wasn't always. But I had had it for several years, it was something that I had slowly cultivated, this pride in being who I am, and, and everything that comes with that. But then that there was this understanding of the nuances related to my narrative, as a Black blind lesbian woman. And the fact that I did not have to disentangle myself from any of those attributes, that I did not have to silence them, that I did not have to push them into the shadows. That I could be all of that simultaneously, and then I could work from bed, you know. I could work from my couch (JENNY laughs).
And that was okay. There was no shame in that. That was revolutionary for me. And I had never heard it explained in such a comprehensive way. It completely changed my life. And we use Disability Justice now for the disaster work we do. I literally just did a workshop on Disability Justice approaches to disaster assistance, which is something we do quite often talking about the 10 principles of Disability Justice, and what that means in terms of people who are dealing with all types of disasters, fires, humanitarian crises, or other emergencies, which now includes pandemics. So that's the first. Yeah,
JENNY
Yeah, and how has that applied as far as the pandemic goes? Because that's obviously a very, an ongoing issue that has affected the disability community at a larger scale than the general population, how has that affected your work?
JUSTICE
Yeah, so Disability Justice teaches us to prioritize 10 primary principles. And so we look at this through intersectionality. Right. So if we're talking about the different compounded forms of marginalization, or discrimination, or implicit bias that people with disabilities are dealing with, throughout the pandemic, then this is, this is really the start of that conversation, right? So we're talking about Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, People of Color with disabilities, we're talking about this in terms of not just race, but also class and gender, and age. So what does that look like in terms of access, not only to testing and treatment, but then also to the vaccine. So this has, has played across every stretch of this process that we've been undergoing thus far with the pandemic, for the last year or so.
It also helps us to remember that there should be leadership by the most impacted, right? So Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian folks with disabilities should not just be casual contributors to these conversations, but we should be the ones leading these conversations, because we are the ones who are the most impacted by this, by this virus. Right? You think about this in terms of people who live in institutional settings or congregate settings. Well, one of the principles of Disability Justice is also about collective liberation. So how can we help people who are in jails and in prisons, how can we help individuals who are in nursing homes or group homes, not only to have access to the vaccine, but then also to be served in the most integrated settings possible, right? And let's look at these institutional settings as the, as the default setting, or the only place where people with disabilities can or should reside, right. But how can we create greater access and additional freedoms for these individuals because we know that living in such conditions only makes individuals that, or puts individuals at an even higher risk of contracting things like the Coronavirus, right?
So this also, you know, kind of moves through these conversations as we talk about access to care. And then that kind of weaves into another principle, which is inter-, uh interdependence, right? So how do we care for one another and what that means in terms of mutual aid when, when government systems fail, so all of these things (laughing). I can walk you through all 10 principles, but I don't believe we have the time (JENNY laughs). All of them can be directly related. We literally do workshops on this where we, we spend about an hour and a half and we still end with, with so much more left.
JENNY
I bet.
JUSTICE
Like, we don't have enough time to get through all of these.
JENNY
I bet, well. Well, now, now our listeners know a good place to start to be informed on these issues is with "Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice." And we'll post the link to that. Okay, what is our book two?
JUSTICE
Book Two is um "Sister Outsider" by Audre Lorde. Oh, so good, so good.
JENNY
I love her.
JUSTICE
So as a lesbian, very proud lesbian, as a Black woman, as a blind woman, I love me some Audre Lorde. And this book was, there are certain books that move you and I only gave you, I'm only giving you titles today that like really move you, that cause a seismic shift in your life. And "Sister Outsider" did that for me in a sense that almost every essay that you pick up, or you read in that book, your reaction is 'Oh, my freaking goodness.' (JUSTICE and JENNY both laugh)
This touches me in a way that have never been touched before, in terms of how you see yourself, how you see others around you, how you see your place in this world, and what your capacity is to do something to bring about substantive and sustained change in this world. This book really helped me to start posing those internal questions for myself, and then to connect that to my external capacity to actually do something about it.
Audre Lorde, as we all know, had low vision, also had cancer. And this was a Black lesbian, which she described herself as "warrior poet" as well. And so this, this book, just really changed something within me. But again, it also helps me in terms of the work that I do in terms of the advocacy work or the community work that I do when having conversations with, with young people and other advocates or activists in these spaces. So many people quote from Audre Lord all the time and have no clue that they're quoting from her. And I am you know, I'm a person with a, my memory is fairly okay, but I'm not the most quotable person in terms of like me being able to quote things verbatim a lot. But I try to internalize the knowledge and the teachings as much as possible. When you go through and read um "Sister Outsider," you you catch wind of some phrases you're like, my goodness, almost this entire book is, were on placards and posts and posters at protests, almost every word people have been quoting. And it's because she got she, you know, she got bars, as the folks will say, as the young folks and she has the bars in terms of just some amazing, amazing quotes and passages that come from that book. So a lot of activists really kind of anchor themselves, excuse me anchor themselves in the work of Audre Lorde and that, that commitment to Black feminist thought, as well.
JENNY
Yeah, and I will give a little plug that we do, I just looked it up, we do have this in our catalog at the library. And we have it in both print and audio formats, and also ebook formats. So those who aren't able to get out right now, or in general, can access these wonderful essays and speeches that are all collected in one wonderful volume. That's great. That's a great pick. Okay, what is book number three?
JUSTICE
Book number three is "The Politics of Trauma" by Staci Haines and I read this book to help me with the advocacy, activism work, things that I do external from my nine to five job, but it has really transformed something in me, both personally and professionally. And one of the things that I love the most about this book is the definition of trauma, and the definition of trauma- I'm going to do this by memory, so hopefully I don't botch it- but they describe the definition of trauma as an experience, experiences or social conditions that break or betray our inherent need for safety, dignity, and belonging, those three pillars. And so when I think about that from a disaster context, I think about the types of experiences that people with disabilities have throughout all phases of the Emergency Management cycle and how trauma inducing or traumatizing those experiences can be.
For example, if you are left out of the preparedness process, if your local officials or community leaders are doing work around drills or exercises, but you are never included, then that has betrayed your sense of belonging, right? So that they can say all day that we, this is about whole community preparedness and disaster resilience. But yet people with disabilities are not an integral part of that process, then you you have lost your sense of belonging there. When you have been evacuated, and you're trying to tell people how to touch you, and how to best assist you, and how to treat or handle your equipment, and you're dismissed and you're ignored, or people are speaking down to you, that breaks and that betrays your sense of dignity, right? When you are trying to figure out what your your plan is going to be, how you're going to respond in a disaster, and you perhaps don't have the resources that you need, you may not have the money that you need, you may not be able to mitigate in ways that other people might be able to because you don't have the funds, or you don't have the capacity to do so in whatever measure, that could break or betray your sense of safety, right?
So all of these things helped me to understand the mental toll, a mental, emotional, social toll, physical toll, that disasters have on individuals. And this is important, because you can't just understand disasters from an abstract perspective. You have to understand the individuals, you have to understand the communities, if you are actually trying to do this work in a way that is going to bring about a real impact, right? In a way that's going to actually be effective, right? So we don't want to just do things for the heck of doing them. But we actually want to do things in a way that's going to be effective for the communities that are most impacted. And understanding them, understanding their histories, understanding harm that they've dealt with, understanding what they want for the future, understand what they're dealing with today. All of that helps me to do my job a heck of a lot better.
JENNY
Yeah. And it, and it really ties into the you know, the idea of this trauma is coming from places of, you know, multiple intersectionalities too, it's not just one thing that is affecting people, it's like, many people are affected by racism and, and poverty and, you know, dealing with the traumas of whatever's happening in the world around them, and you have to heal those systems before you can like help those individuals too. Would that be correct?
JUSTICE
Absolutely. So someone said recently, you know, we can't talk about healing, we can't talk about reparations or healing, they were talking about this in that frame. And they said, Look, we can't have those conversations if we don't stop the harm, right, the the harm can't just be left to continue. And there was oh, we're going to heal from it. And then we're still reopening those wounds every, every time there's a flood, every time there is any sort of emergency event that happens or a hurricane or even a human caused disasters, such as polluted water or acts of domestic terror, right? So all of these are things that we have to think about when we're talking about how can we actually help people to be in the very best position to react and response and recover from a disaster? All of those things are imperative.
JENNY
Yeah, absolutely. We do have this book in our catalog as well. Okay, great. What is our book number four?
JUSTICE
Book number four is "All We Can Save," by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. And this is great, because we've just, you know, kind of it dovetails very nicely with what we were just talking about, around you know, kind of environmental issues but this book is really about Environmental Justice. And you can't talk about Environmental Justice without also talking about Racial Justice and Disability Justice, Transformative Justice, kind of all of these different justice frames are really inextricably linked to one another. But I have, this book is written I believe, nearly entirely by People of Color. And predominantly Women of Color if my memory serves me correctly, and it is exquisite. It is exquisite.
I have never read a book about Environmental Justice issues that was this diverse, that was this eclectic, that was this beautifully done, that was this comprehensive. And it shifted so much for me because it helped me to understand that I have to be having far more in depth and interlocking conversations around the Environmental Justice and what I'm doing in terms of Emergency Management and Disaster Assistance. We know that those two things have a natural, you know, synergy, they're they're, they work together, they are connected. But in terms of the work that I was doing, I wasn't necessarily weaving those different components together until I read this book. Until I understood what type of impact these environmental issues have on communities of color, and how that really relates to slow onset crises and also sudden onset crises.
So let me just explain fairly quickly. So slow onset crises, these are things that really happen over time, gradually, right? So these are things like if we, if we expand our view a bit, it's typically you think about it in terms of things like drought, or migration. But we can also think about this in a more expansive way as it relates to poverty or healthcare inequities. But if individuals are dealing with the crisis and the chronic conditions that are caused by these slow onset events in their lives, and perpetually being in a position of having to deal with these problems, then it makes them far less capable of dealing with sudden onset events like a hurricane, or a flash flood, or a wildfire, right?
So it's difficult to plan for something that may or may not happen that you may or may not be impacted by that may happen in the future, when every single day, you're trying to deal with how you're going to feed your children. Every single day, you're trying to determine how you're going to get back and forth to work in terms of transportation, and maybe your physical health needs, but having to go back and forth to work and get enough money in hopes of making ends meet so that you can keep your house and not fall behind on your rent, or all of the other expenses that you have. And then on top of that dealing with the stresses and strains that come with a, with a sudden onset event like a tornado, or fire or house fire, right? So it just puts people in a far more difficult position.
And I think right now is also a good time to talk about, you know, the concept that that has been floating around Emergency Management circles for a while, which is, you know, the purchasing of preparedness, right? So that the idea that you have to, you know, buy the things to go into your Go Kit, you know, buy excess water, or buy additional medications, have additional things like a flashlight, and food and other resources. But if you don't have the money to purchase those items, then it puts you in a place where you can't, you feel like you cannot prepare, right? So can we have more expansive, more deeper conversations around what community preparedness could look like with these considerations in mind, if we know that 20% of our community, or 30, or 40, or whatever the percentage is can't afford to purchase preparedness in this way? What as a collective can we do? Right? How can we consider ways that we can come together in a Mutual Aid kind of capacity to make sure that people have what they need in order to survive. Not just not just survive, but then also thrive before, during and after disasters.
But understanding this from an Environmental Justice frame and looking at this in terms of polluted water and looking at this in terms of air pollution and chemical toxins being dumped in communities of color, respiratory issues that people have developed when living near factories where the emissions are causing significant harm to the lungs of children and older adults and people with disabilities. But understanding how those, those slow events, those things that happen over time, also very much determines how a community is able to respond to a disaster. So that book was central for me as well.
JENNY
Yeah, that sounds, that sounds fascinating. Okay, so I know this was hard for you to pick just five books. So what is our, what is our fifth book pick from Justice Shorter today?
JUSTICE
Oh, my gosh, our fifth and final would be "We Do This Til We Free Us," by Mariame Kaba. And it is all about Transformative Justice and abolition, prison abolition. And let me tell you, I have read plenty books about Transformative Justice. And I have never been able to connect from a heart space, right? Like I couldn't, I couldn't fully, it's like I knew intellectually that this was, you know, something that was important, but there was something inside me that was pulling because I just, I didn't, I couldn't understand how the person who was harmed was actually going to be able to get what they needed. I didn't feel like there was going to be any real consequences. And it just, it didn't really connect with me. And I always felt like there was too much of a choice in terms of the individuals who perpetrated acts of harm and their capacity, you know, the choice and choosing whether or not to participate in a Transformative Justice process and how that just did not sit well with me because I know so many individuals who had done harm to myself and others. And I, just giving them the choice as to whether or not they would participate voluntarily in a process to bring about healing. I know that they would not respond in a way that was affirming of such a process. And that just, it just hit me hard because I just didn't feel like that, that was going to be a valuable way for me to pursue justice or for me to think about justice until I read this book, until I read this book.
And it shifted something so significantly inside of me because she talks about the differences between consequences and punishment, and the punitive nature of punishment in terms of just continuing to perpetuate harm. And how that is just such a cyclical process of just wanting to engender or bring about the same levels or the same degrees of harm over and over and over and how that doesn't necessarily make people more safe. How it doesn't heal, how it doesn't necessarily help, how there is no real rehabilitation, quote, unquote, involved in that process. And but then she talked about consequences as an alternative. And the idea that consequences are related to being able to strip people of power, and privilege, and positions that allow them to hurt people in the first place, right? And the consequence may make you uncomfortable, it may tick you off, it may annoy you, it may be very difficult for you. But the idea behind a consequence is not necessarily to hurt or harm you, in a, in a physical way or, or mental way as well. So it's when she broke that down in that way, it really shifted some things for me, in terms of how I viewed this process.
And then it also broke things down in terms of policing, prisons and surveillance, bringing that back to one Emergency Management context, right? So going from the personal to the professional here. Bringing it back to an Emergency Management context, "professional" in the sense that I do this work professionally. And the other piece I was talking about was more of my personal understanding. But this professional piece here in terms of the work that I do every day around disasters and emergencies. I started to think about this in terms of who gets surveilled after an emergency event. I think about 9/11, right, and the Muslim and Sikh communities who were surveilled heavily after 9/11, right? And we know the people with disabilities, that we know that disability cuts across every single category, right? So obviously, there's Muslim and Sikh folks with disabilities. So this is an issue we should care about. And think about who gets policed throughout disasters, especially in the response, or recovery phase, who is considered a "looter" versus who is considered someone who's "just looking for supplies?" Right? Well, who is is is, you know, in prison, what acts are criminalized as a result of that, right?
And then what are we doing in terms of people with disabilities who are already imprisoned, and jailed, and in detention centers? What does Emergency Management look like for them? What does preparedness? What does response? What does recovery look like for them? We know that the pandemic ran rampant in jails, and prisons, and detention centers across this country, right? So we'll have to understand crises within all of these different contexts. And this book truly helped me to do that, and unpack this and in a lot of ways. So I had, I didn't necessarily see a place for myself or my work before reading this book in terms of Transformative Justice, I just didn't, I couldn't, I couldn't put it together for myself. I just knew that there were so many complex ideas, what seemed to be complex, because some of the people writing about it are simply brilliant, I was like, I can't wrap my head around this. I cannot understand it, I'm trying, I'm trying, but I can't understand.
JENNY
That's when you know, it's really good when you can't quite- it takes you a few tries.
JUSTICE
It does, but for comprehension purposes, right, the ability to truly process this information in a way that was tangible, in a way that was real for me, this book was the first book to really connect those dots for me. So that is, I kind of end there, We Do This Til We Free Us," because most of us are trying to get free, in one way or another.
JENNY
I love that. And this is a new book, too. It just came out this year. So that is, it's very timely. And it sounds like very, a very accessible way of addressing these issues for people.
JUSTICE
It is, it's like a bunch of interviews, and you know, podcast interviews that she's done, and, you know, TV interviews, and then also essays and blogs that she's written. So it's very just accessible. It's very comprehensive. I mean, it's it's written in a way that you can clearly understand kind of one concept to the next. And that's the thing that I appreciate the most again, I know a lot of these frames and ideas have been echoed in previous books that I've read. But it was just the, the pairing of it the way that it was put together that truly made the puzzle, you know, click for me in ways that they just had, it just hadn't before. It just did not.
Do you think it would be a book that would be good for teens too who were interested in this issue?
Absolutely, yeah, all of the books that I'm mentioning actually like all of them, I think teens, young people, you know, young adults will probably get a kick out of. And I unfortunately, I did not include any novels on this. And that's, that's unfortunate. Like, for me, I read tons of novels folks (JENNY laughs), I am not just stuck in reading like nonfiction all day, I do not. I literally have read, like three novels over the weekend alone. And don't think that I don't have a life (JENNY laughs). It's just that I listen to my books and I can listen to them while eating and while washing dishes, and while washing clothes, and cleaning up my place and like working out so I can listen to books anywhere. So it's, that's how I get through books as quickly, and these books are like three hour listens. So if you're like cleaning up and spending a Saturday morning, you know, you can get through a whole book.
JENNY
Yeah, yeah. It's like how people listen to podcasts while they're cooking (JUSTICE: Yes!) or driving or anything, like maybe this podcast, who knows? (JUSTICE and JENNY laugh)
JUSTICE
Or just have he TV on, you know (JENNY: Exactly), you can go through a couple of shows, just by having the TV running in the background. That's what I do with books.
JENNY
Yeah, that's just how you want to spend your time. And that's great. I mean, as a library podcast, and as a Librarian, we support it. And the good news for our listeners is that you have a much longer list of recommended reads on your website, which does include more nonfiction, but also novels, books that you've enjoyed, books that have informed your work, personal essays, all kinds of things, and you can access those as well as hear some of Justice's speeches, and other work. And that's at JusticeShorter.com, that's j-u-s-t-i-c-e-s-h-o-r-t-e-r dot c-o-m, and we'll post a link to that. And we'll post the links to all of these great recommended books, which are all available to our in our library catalog. I checked, and I can't wait to add them to my reading list. So Justice, any final thoughts for us today?
JUSTICE
Goodness. To any young people out there or any readers in general, and I presume you're a reader, because you're listening to this podcast (JUSTICE and JENNY laugh). But, books, I always say, or I used to say were my weapons and my window, but I'm trying to get out of that violence frame. Like I'm trying to get out of connecting things in a- but I say that in the sense that, that books, you know, and words were the things that helped me to gain a window to the world, even when visually speaking, the world was kind of fading in front of my eyes. And that was a very difficult thing for me to go through. I think sometimes we view disability in this, this inspirational you know ideology of "Well, yes, but you overcame," and so many of us with disabilities completely reject that out of hand. Because it's dehumanizing, right? It's dehumanizing, like things are legit difficult in some cases, and and things are legit, beautiful and amazing in some cases, right? But it's understanding the expanses, understanding the wholeness of that that's important.
But I acknowledge that in the sense that books have been my window, they've also been the things that have helped me defend myself against things that have tried to tear me apart in one way or another. And what I mean by that is that reading is a part of my resilience rituals, what I call resilience rituals. And so when I am going through it, when I feel like I cannot get back up, when I feel like there is just too much for me, and it's too heavy for me to stand, it's too heavy for me to keep moving, I turn to books. And I keep a list of just books at the ready. And I bookmark things as I go, different passages for me to go back to, for me to remember, not just who I am, but then also what is possible, and then also remind myself that I'm not the only one going through things, or that there are others who have also been through this before. And it just helps me to paint pictures that are more vibrant, and that are more colorful, and that are more detailed than I could have ever dreamed up as a kid.
But that, that is what helps me kind of move on. I was having a difficult time this weekend, which is why I read three books, like three different novels because I was kind of going through some things emotionally. But it helped to keep me above water when it feels like you're adrift. Books are, are and have been the things that helped keep me afloat. And if that is also true for you, then that is something to be celebrated because you have found something that, that is unbelievably rich, and robust, and beautiful to keep you rooted. And please send me any recommendations that you may have. I'm always down for it. And if there's any additional questions, or conversations that you would like to have, please feel free to let me know you can also find me on Twitter under @JusticeShorter1. And that's the number one so @JusticeShorter1 on Twitter. But I look forward to remaining connected with all of you and thanks so much for having me.
JENNY
Thank you so much. What a, what a beautiful way to end the podcast episode. I thank you so much. And you can visit those recommended reads and learn more about Justice's work at JusticeShorter.com
You just listened to "Access This" on DC Public Library Podcast recorded from the Labs Recording Studio in the historic modernized Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington, DC. You can reach out to us at the Center for Accessibility at DCPL by emailing DCPLaccess@dc.gov. I'm Jenny, stay safe and stay accessible.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai