In response to the LA Public Library’s decision to cancel an event during Read Palestine Week (the original LA Reporter article can be read here), we at Women Who Submit (WWS) have worked together to write the following statement in solidarity with the Palestinian and Jewish authors whose author talks were redacted from the program without explanation.
Women Who Submit, our members, authors, and affiliates, support and uplift diversity and equity in our storytelling, programming, and actions. Our organization was founded with the intention to promote women and non-binary people to tell their truths in writing. In a society that too often amplifies white Christian heteronormative stories to promote a homogenous American lie, WWS especially aims to uplift underrepresented voices to promote complex and compassionate visions of humanity.
We do not agree with the LA Public Library’s decision to cancel the Read Palestine Week event featuring Jenan Matari, author of Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden and Nora Lester Murad, author of Ida in the Middle. The silencing of these Palestinian authors, especially when the Palestinian people are actively experiencing a genocide by the Israeli government is wrong. From “Women Who Submit joins the Palestinian-led Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel”published in June 2025: “For over 600 days, the Israeli Occupation Forces have decimated Gaza’s schools, universities, and libraries, attacking the nerve centers of Palestinian knowledge and culture. They have assassinated over 200 journalists, 115 civil defense workers, and over 1,200 healthcare workers…Along with the crime of genocide, the IOF have committed domicide (the destruction of homes), scholasticide (the destruction of schools) and epistemicide (the destruction of archives, libraries and other sites of knowledge production).”
In a world where the Palestinian people are actively being murdered in their homeland, we consider this an act of racism, anti-Palestinian sentiment, and censorship.
In Los Angeles, we demand the freedom of libraries to remain public spaces where individuals may access institutional resources, knowledge hubs, and programs from a variety of sources, including those that contend with and center the voices and perspectives of communities the Trump Administration continues to target. As Supreme Court of the United States attacks libraries and creates an uncertain environment for federal funding sources for libraries as centers of knowledge, it becomes all the more important for public institutions not to concede to ostentatious displays of power.
As the Los Angeles Central Library celebrates its centennial in 2026, “Dedicated in July 1926, the Los Angeles Central Library became an instant architectural icon and guiding light of learning for the city,” we remind the Central Library that to remove this event is not only contradictory to its mission to be a “guiding light of learning,” but is an act of cowardice.
Women Who Submit stands by those who need assistance in uplifting their narrative. We do not tolerate censorship of any kind. We stand by the Palestinian and Jewish authors who were denied the opportunity to tell their narratives at the Los Angeles Library as literary advocates and as a literary organization whose members encompass women and nonbinary people of the global majority. We will not allow for these voices to be silenced.
