Jacksonville Public Library

06/15/2026

Happy Birthday Ms. Pickles! Today at 2pm

06/13/2026

This Pride Month, we're honoring Terri Lesley -- a Wyoming librarian who was fired for celebrating Pride Month at her library, and who won a $700,000 settlement in October vindicating her stand for intellectual freedom. A 27-year veteran librarian, Lesley endured two years of harassment, threats to her safety and that of library staff, and false criminal accusations for defending intellectual freedom. Her response when asked if she regretted her stand? "I will never regret standing up for the First Amendment."

After nearly three decades of dedicated service to the Campbell County Public Library System in Gillette, Wyoming -- 11 of them as executive director -- Lesley was terminated in July 2023 following a relentless campaign by a small group of far-right activists demanding the removal of books with LGBTQ+ themes and content. In her federal lawsuit, Lesley alleged that "a small fraction of the community espoused openly homophobic, transphobic, and other hateful ideologies," and that county officials and library board members aligned themselves with this vocal minority's "book-ban campaign" rather than rejecting it.

Despite repeated pressure from this group and sympathetic county commissioners, Lesley maintained that removing books would be unconstitutional censorship and violate the library's obligation to provide open access to information. "I don't regret standing up for the First Amendment in any way," Lesley told The New York Times in a recent interview, "but it was kind of a brutal process to experience it, to have it be such a contentious issue, and for it to be across the country and be called things like a 'pe*****le' or a 'child groomer.' Those things were all very hard to experience."

The controversy began in June 2021 when the library posted about Pride Month and Rainbow Book Month on Facebook to celebrate the library's LGBTQ collection in the teen section. What followed was unprecedented: "We just weren't prepared for the volume and ferocity of it," Lesley said. Lesley and her staff processed 57 challenges on 29 unique titles submitted by just 17 different people -- an extraordinary concentration of complaints from a tiny fraction of the community.

Lesley firmly defended her position on keeping the books, most of which had been on library shelves for years without complaint, accessible to teens: "If you segregate these books, say, in the adult section, and you're teenager, and you go to try to find something on a topic and that book isn't there, you won't discover it. That is a form of censorship."

The campaign escalated alarmingly when two residents filed a complaint with the Campbell County Sheriff's Office demanding that library staff, including Lesley, be prosecuted for distributing obscene materials. A special prosecutor investigated and concluded that the books were not obscene.

Over the next two years, four of the five library board positions became vacant and were filled with new appointees sympathetic to the book ban activists; after attempting to pressure Lesley into resigning and failing, the reconstituted board fired her in July 2023. Despite being in one of the most conservative areas of one of the most conservative states, hundreds of people showed up at the special library board meeting when Lesley was fired -- most of them in support of her, with only a few dozen residents backing the board's decision.

Lesley's case reflects a troubling nationwide trend documented in a recent American Library Association report, which found that 72 percent of book challenges were initiated by organizations or government entities; only 16 percent came from parents and 5 percent from regular library patrons. This data starkly contradicts the narrative that school book challenges primarily represent parental concerns.

Book challenges and removals soared around 2021, fanned by a network of conservative groups that spread lists of book titles they considered objectionable on social media. The ALA documented 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in 2023 -- a 65% increase over 2022 and the highest level ever documented.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, explained: "We're not seeing an individual read a book and raise a concern about a book. We're seeing organized groups go to school boards, go to library boards, demanding the removal of dozens, if not hundreds, of books at a time, they are simply downloading lists from advocacy groups and demanding removal of those books... The movement to ban books is not a movement of parents, but a movement of partisans who seek to limit our freedom to read and make different choices about things that matter." PEN America has documented nearly 23,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, affecting the work of 2,308 authors, 243 illustrators, and 38 translators during the 2024-2025 school year alone.

While the settlement with Campbell County resolves Lesley's employment discrimination claims, her legal battle is far from over. A separate lawsuit filed by Lesley charges three members of the Bennett family with defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress and will continue, with a jury trial that was scheduled to take place earlier this year. Court documents reveal the extent of the campaign against her: according to the complaint, the Bennetts publicly alleged criminal conduct, reported her to law enforcement seeking her arrest, and even admitted "they would not have accused Ms. Lesley of having committed crimes had she complied with their demands" -- conduct that Lesley characterizes as extortion and blackmail under Wyoming law.

After the settlement was announced, Lesley's attorney Iris Halpern emphasized the constitutional stakes: "We care fundamentally about our constitutional rights and we fundamentally care about our neighbors, even if they're different than us, and want them to have equal access to our public institutions." Despite living in one of the most conservative states, Lesley is convinced these campaigns represent only a vocal minority attempting to impose their views on everyone else.

"I think they are representing a minority," Lesley observed. "It's a live-and-let live kind of state, and I just don't see the people I know signing on to this." Far from backing down, she sees her legal victories as a warning to would-be censors: "My hope is that this will be a deterrent, that we can shut down all these censorship efforts in Wyoming and beyond."

Kudos to Terri Lesley for her courage in standing firm when it mattered most -- and for inspiring librarians everywhere to defend the freedom to read!

For two inspiring books about girls fighting against censorship in schools - both for ages 9 to 12 - we highly recommend "Ban This Book" (https://www.amightygirl.com/ban-this-book) and "Property of the Rebel Librarian" (https://www.amightygirl.com/property-of-the-rebel-librarian)

For a thought-provoking young adult novel exploring censorship, we recommend "Suggested Reading" for ages 14 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/suggested-reading

For two excellent books about Mighty Girls who find hope by reading forbidden books - both for ages 12 and up - we recommend "Voices" (https://www.amightygirl.com/voices) and "The Book Thief" (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-book-thief)

For books for tweens and teens about girls living in real-life oppressive societies with little respect for freedom of expression, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426

06/11/2026

06/06/2026

Her name meant desert flower.
Waris was born in 1965 into a nomadic family in the Somali desert — twelve children, camels and goats, a life that moved with the seasons. Her earliest memories were of running barefoot through sand, of the particular freedom of a child who doesn't yet know what the world has planned for her.
She was five years old when she learned what the world had planned.
What happened to her that day, done in the name of tradition, nearly killed her. Her sister did not survive. Waris did. But she carried it the way girls in that world learned to carry everything — without a word for it, without permission to speak it, stitched shut in more ways than one.
At thirteen, her father announced the arrangement. She would marry a sixty-year-old man. The price: five camels.
She ran.
No shoes. No map. No plan beyond the absolute refusal to become what had been decided for her. She crossed a stretch of Somali desert on foot — a lion tracked her at one point, circling — and she kept moving. She reached Mogadishu. A sister took her in. Then a relative offered a different door: London, where her uncle was serving as the Somali ambassador.
She arrived as part of a diplomat's household. She cleaned and cooked and made herself invisible. When her uncle's term ended and his family returned to Somalia, Waris stayed. No papers. No fluent English. She found a job at a McDonald's on Oxford Street and held on.
She was eighteen when photographer Terence Donovan looked at her across a room.
He saw something.
Within a year, the girl who had crossed the desert barefoot was on the covers of the world's most prestigious magazines. Runways in New York, Milan, Paris. A Revlon contract. A James Bond film. Everything that had been decided against her — made irrelevant.
The world knew her face before it knew a single true thing about her.
For fourteen years, she let it stay that way.
She was not hiding, exactly. She was calculating. She knew that once she said it, she could not unsay it — that the truth she was carrying would cost her the version of herself the world had agreed to celebrate. She had survived one desert. She wasn't ready to walk into another.
But silence has its own weight.
In 1997, at thirty-two, she sat down with Marie Claire magazine. The journalist expected to talk about modeling. About being discovered. About cameras and clothes.
Waris Dirie told a different story.
She described what had been done to her at five years old. She named it — female ge***al mutilation — at a time when the Western world barely had a public conversation about the practice, let alone an understanding of its scale. She said her sister had died. She said she had nearly died. She said more than two million girls a year were still at risk.
The fashion world didn't know what to do with her.
The world did.
The United Nations called that same year. She became Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Ge***al Mutilation. She served six years. She stood before presidents, parliaments, and television cameras on every continent and told the story she had held silent for nearly three decades.
In 1998, she published Desert Flower. It sold more than eleven million copies. It was translated into dozens of languages, adapted into a film, taught in schools, and cited in legislative chambers where new protections were being written.
She did not stop.
In 2002, she founded the Desert Flower Foundation in Vienna. Medical centers opened in Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Paris — built to repair, surgically and psychologically, what had been taken from women's bodies. She did not frame this as charity. She framed it as a debt the world owed to every girl it had failed to protect.
She thought about her sister.
She thought about her sister every time she gave a speech.
Waris means desert flower. She was born in a desert, survived it, crossed it barefoot, and spent the rest of her life making sure that what happened to her in that desert could not happen to the next girl quietly and without consequence.
The cameras wanted her face. She gave them the truth behind it.
She had lived inside one silence her whole childhood.
She was not going to live inside another one.

06/03/2026

"On our street, everyone is welcome. Together, let’s build a world where every person and family feels loved and respected for who they are. Happy !" - via Sesame Street

05/19/2026

For 16 years, Mariska Hargitay has been fighting to make sure the evidence collected from survivors of sexual assault doesn't end up forgotten on a shelf. This month, her End the Backlog campaign hit a landmark milestone: all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico now have at least one r**e kit reform law on the books.

Hargitay's devotion to this cause began with fan mail. When she started playing Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 1999, survivors of sexual assault began writing to her by the thousands -- disclosing assaults they had never told anyone else about. "I was r**ed when I was fifteen. I'm forty now and I've never told anyone." Letter after letter, story after story, people revealing something that intimate to someone they knew only as a character on television.

Hargitay understood what that meant -- how desperate survivors were to be heard, believed, supported and healed. Her response was to found the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004. Five years later, she learned about the r**e kit backlog, and everything sharpened into focus. Since 2010, End the Backlog has been the foundation's central fight -- building a six-pillar framework for reform, funding training, driving policy changes state by state, and partnering with Michigan prosecutor Kym Worthy to produce the Emmy-winning 2018 HBO documentary "I Am Evidence."

For Hargitay, this work has always been personal. In 2024, she disclosed publicly for the first time that she had been r**ed by a friend in her thirties -- a fact she had suppressed for decades, processing it slowly, privately, while building one of the most effective survivor advocacy organizations in the country. "I was building Joyful Heart on the outside," she said, "so I could do the work on the inside."

She knew, in other words, exactly what was at stake -- and the backlog she was fighting to end was staggering. In 2009, a Detroit deputy police chief walked into an abandoned warehouse and found black garbage bags and emptied oil drums stuffed with 11,341 r**e kits -- some dating back to assaults from the 1980s. All of them untested. All of them forgotten. Detroit was not an aberration.

A 2021 study estimated between 300,000 and 400,000 unsubmitted kits nationally. The federal government spent over $1.3 billion trying to address the problem since 2011. The kits kept piling up anyway -- the result of misguided priorities, resource failures, and a systemic indifference to crimes against women that allowed perpetrators to walk free and reoffend while evidence sat on shelves. In one Detroit case alone, a perpetrator r**ed at least ten more women while his DNA waited untested in that warehouse.

Over 16 years, End the Backlog built a movement -- identifying tens of thousands of untested kits, funding lab training, lobbying legislators, and driving policy changes in state after state. The campaign developed six pillars of reform as a national framework: mandatory testing of both backlogged and newly collected kits, statewide tracking systems, survivor notification rights, and dedicated funding to make it all work.

Maine became the final piece of the puzzle this month, when Governor Janet Mills committed $267,000 in annual funding to establish a statewide r**e kit inventory and tracking system -- becoming the 50th state to enact at least one pillar of reform.

The 50-state milestone is historic -- and it is a floor, not a ceiling. Not every state has enacted all six pillars of reform. The Joyful Heart Foundation estimates that roughly 100,000 untested kits are still out there waiting to be discovered. Every 68 seconds, someone in the United States is sexually assaulted -- meaning new kits are continuously being added alongside the effort to clear the old ones. Hargitay knows this. "We are far from done," she said.

But she also knows what this moment means. "Today marks a watershed moment not only for the State of Maine, but for every survivor who has asked if their r**e kit was forgotten, if their truth was abandoned on a shelf, if they have hope of finding justice," Hargitay said. "This did not happen overnight. It happened because survivors spoke their truth. It happened because advocates refused to let urgency become complacency."

To the survivors who have carried this cause, she had these words: "This milestone belongs to you."

To view the status of each state in enacting r**e kit reform laws and the number of untested kits still remaining in each state, visit https://www.endthebacklog.org/

To learn more and support the work of the Joyful Heart Foundation, visit http://www.joyfulheartfoundation.org

For fictional stories that address r**e and sexual violence and offer a helpful way to spark conversations with young adult readers around sexual assault, we recommend "Speak" for ages 14 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/speak), "Girl Made of Stars" for ages 14 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/girl-made-of-stars), and "The Way I Used To Be" for ages 15 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-way-i-used-to-be)

For several powerful memoirs by young women who survived and spoke out after sexual assault, we highly recommend "Know My Name: A Memoir" (https://www.amightygirl.com/know-my-name), "Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir" (https://www.amightygirl.com/notes-on-a-silencing), and "I Have The Right To" (https://www.amightygirl.com/i-have-the-right-to), recommended for older teens and adults

To teach younger children -- girls and boys alike -- about asserting their own boundaries and respecting the boundaries of others, we highly recommend "Let's Talk About Body Boundaries, Consent, and Respect" for ages 4 to 7 (https://www.amightygirl.com/body-boundaries) and "Consent (for Kids!)" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/consent-for-kids)

There is also a helpful guide for teens on topics such as consent and coercion, "Real Talk About S*x and Consent: What Every Teen Needs to Know," for ages 13 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/real-talk-about-sex-and-consent

And if you know a teen girl struggling after sexual abuse or trauma, “The S*xual Trauma Workbook for Teen Girls: A Guide to Recovery from S*xual Assault and Abuse” may help at https://www.amightygirl.com/sexual-trauma-workbook-girls

05/19/2026

When 15-year-old Laurel decided to come out to her parents, she did it the only way that felt right: she baked them a cake. She left it on the kitchen counter with a pun-filled letter that read:

"I'm gay. I've wanted to tell you for a long time. I thought doing it this way would be a piece of cake. I hope you still love me. I mean, it's hard not to love someone who baked you a cake. All my friends know and still love me. Your acceptance would be the icing on the cake. I hope you, much like this cake, are not in tiers. I hope we can look back on this and say 'boy, this one really takes the cake.' It gets batter."

Laurel posted the photo to Tumblr and went to her room to wait. Her dad came in, hugged her, and laughed. Her mom, she later wrote, "saw it and cried of happiness. We hugged and cried together. Then, we all ate the cake and talked. I am very lucky to have such supporting parents."

On this International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, Laurel's story is a reminder of what parental love and acceptance can mean -- and why it matters so much. The Trevor Project's 2024 national survey of more than 18,000 LGBTQ+ young people found that 39% had seriously considered su***de in the past year -- including 46% of transgender and nonbinary youth. But the same research consistently shows that acceptance is one of the most powerful protective factors there is: LGBTQ+ young people who reported living in very accepting communities attempted su***de at less than half the rate of those in unaccepting ones.

A supportive family, a safe school, and the simple knowledge that you are loved for who you are can make a life-saving difference. Laurel was lucky enough to have that. Not every LGBTQ+ young person does. And that is exactly what we all have the power to change.

--> For parents of LGBTQ+ children looking to offer the kind of support Laurel's parents showed, PFLAG offers resources, support groups, and community: https://pflag.org

--> If you or someone you know needs support, The Trevor Project provides free, confidential crisis intervention for LGBTQ+ young people 24/7 at 1-866-488-7386 or https://www.thetrevorproject.org

For uplifting middle grade books about Mighty Girls navigating coming out and finding themselves, we recommend "Candidly Cline" (https://www.amightygirl.com/candidly-cline), "The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James" (https://www.amightygirl.com/mighty-heart-sunny-st-james), and "Drum Roll, Please" (https://www.amightygirl.com/drum-roll-please), all for ages 10 and up

For more books for children, teens, and their parents that foster acceptance and understanding of LGBTQ people, visit our blog post, "True Colors: Mighty Girl Books for Pride Month," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12258

For books about Mighty Girls who stand together for acceptance of all people, check out our blog post "60 Mighty Girl Books About Standing Up for Others” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13481

05/18/2026

Tween Time at the Jacksonville Public Library is a great opportunity for tweens to spend time with friends, participate in activities, and enjoy an afternoon at the library. 📚 Join us every Tuesday at 4:45 PM for games, crafts, and more!