By Joan Baldwin P’03

All-School Read programming launched on Oct. 10 with a student panel and a guest speaker.

This year’s All-School Read book is Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts. Written during the pandemic, Ng’s novel is speculative fiction that follows the story of a family: Ethan, a librarian, Margaret, a poet, and Bird, their 12-year-old son. They live in Cambridge, MA, and are impacted by PACT—Preserving American Culture and Traditions—which has decimated library collections. Bird, with the help of friends and his local librarians, searches for his mother, whose poetry has put her on the wrong side of PACT.

Hotchkiss’s All-School Read Committee is chaired by Dr. Katie Fleishman, head of the English Department and instructor in English, and Joan Baldwin P’03, curator of special collections. Students, faculty, and staff on the committee support programming around the chosen book and select possible titles for the upcoming school year.

Watch this short video featuring students who helped pick Our Missing Hearts as the All-School Read.

It’s become a tradition for a student panel to engage in an All-School read discussion in front of the Hotchkiss community. On Oct. 10, committee members Maadhavan Prasanna ’25, Emerson Murdoch ’27, and Aaliyah Wang ’25 were joined on the Walker Auditorium stage by Albert Chen ’26, Jeffrey Lin ’25, Jet Chusacultanachai ’28, and Isabella Deng '27, along with Kim Gnerre, associate director of the Edsel Ford Memorial Library, Cooper Puls, access services librarian, and Fleishman. The students highlighted symbols and quotes from the book that stood out to them, while the two librarians talked about how their work intersects with the novel’s themes. The panel ended with Gnerre reading the names of librarians who lost their jobs over book-banning controversies.

Emily Drabinski, past president of the American Library Association and teacher at Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, spent the day at Hotchkiss and attended the panel. She spoke to a group of students, faculty, and staff members in the Faculty Room that evening. Her tenure at the American Library Association was marked by a 50-state road trip, visiting libraries large and tiny, and collecting stories about librarians and the work they do. 

All-School Read programming will continue in February with a visit by novelist Lauren Groff, who recently opened The Lynx, a bookstore in Gainesville, FL, that specializes in banned or challenged books. Groff is the author of The Matrix, an upper-mid summer read.

In May, Ada Limón, the United States poet laureate, will visit Hotchkiss. She and Ross Gay, who spoke at Hotchkiss last year as the Lambert Lecturer, are two poets mentioned by Celeste Ng in Our Missing Hearts.