About The Day

The main thing people knew about my sister Anna growing up was her love of books. My brother Brian and I often had to yell her name louder and louder up the stairs to get her attention when she was buried in a good story.

Trips to the library were nonstop—thankfully we only lived two blocks away. Anna would check out a stack of books, tear through them, and we'd be right back for more. Our dad eventually built floor-to-ceiling shelves in her room because there was nowhere else to put her always-growing collection.

But I knew my sister as so much more than the "bookworm" people described her as. Outside of reading, Anna was fierce and stubborn, unflinching in what she believed was right. She championed social justice, human rights, and the freedom of information. She refused to bend her integrity to make others comfortable. At five years old, she rewrote the lines to Away in a Manger, insisting Joseph would have rocked baby Jesus to sleep because no good father would put a newborn back in a manger in the dead of winter. She sang her version at home and in church choir. When I was four, a babysitter decided I was too little to climb the treehouse ladder, so Anna locked her in the house and let me go up anyway. 

I wasn’t like that. I was a sensitive kid who worried about making people uncomfortable, often dreading the reactions I saw when Anna was doing things her way. When I hit middle school (famously not a confidence-boosting era in any girl’s life), my top priority was fitting in rather than figuring myself out. Instead of offering up words of wisdom I’d have likely brushed aside, Anna was right there handing me books filled with girls who drove their own stories, fought for what mattered, and didn’t need other people to define them. 

Anna died on January 30, 2023, after two years of cancer treatment at age 41. She stayed true to who she was her whole life. She earned degrees in history, feminism, and library science—eventually becoming a reference librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Library. She fought for intellectual freedom and human rights with the same intensity she brought to everything. When she died, the stories people shared about her poured in—stories of how she had touched their lives, fought for them, or stood by them. It was these stories that stood out to me when I woke up on the first anniversary of her death. I wondered what happens to all that energy and force when someone like Anna is suddenly gone.

That morning, I decided to do one small thing to keep Anna’s energy alive. I started a fundraiser for the Deschutes Public Library. Anna believed in investing in her community, and Bend had recently become mine.

I launched the fundraiser with a short Instagram video explaining why I was doing it. I asked my community to visit the library and pick out an empowering book to read to their kids or themselves in Anna's honor. Donations came in almost immediately, but what surprised me most was the flood of messages and photos. People sent stories about the books they’d chosen for their children, their students, and themselves.

My friend Elizabeth messaged to tell me she'd taken her kids to the library to pick out books together. When they got home, they’d marked the day on their calendar as a recurring reminder to celebrate “Anna’s Radical Library Day.” It’s the perfect name for a day to celebrate bold stories and, for me, to honor the people who hand them to you when you need them most.